It has always been a matter of profound thankfulness with me that my evil genius never led me on board a cattle-boat. For I do think that to a man who has any feeling for the lower animals these vessels present scenes of suffering enough to turn his brain. And it does not in the least matter what provision is made for the safe conveyance of cattle in such numbers across the ocean. As long as the weather is fairly reasonable, the boxed-up animals have only to endure ten days or so of close confinement, with inability to lie down, and the nausea that attacks animals as well as human beings. The better the ship and the greater care bestowed upon the cattle-fittings the less will be the sufferings of the poor beasts; but the irreducible minimum is soon reached, and that means much more cruelty to animals than any merciful man would like to witness. But when a gale is encountered and the huge steamer wallows heavily in the mountainous irregularities of the Atlantic, flooding herself fore and aft at every roll, and making the cattlemen’s task of attending to their miserable charges one surcharged with peril to life or limbs, then the condition of a cattle-ship is such as to require the coinage of special adjectives for its description. Of course it will be said that human beings used to be carried across the ocean for sale in much the same way, and men calling themselves humane were not ashamed to grow rich on the receipts from such traffic; but surely that will never be advanced as an excuse for, or a palliative of, the horrors of the live cattle trade. I have passed through an area of sea bestrewn with the bodies of cattle that have been washed overboard in a gale—hurled out of the pens wherein they have been battered to death—when the return of fine weather has made it possible, and I have wished with all my heart that it could be made an offence against the laws to carry live cattle across the ocean at all.
No, the nearest approach that ever I had to being shipmates with a cargo of live stock was on one never-to-be-forgotten occasion, when, after bringing a 24-ton schooner from a little village up the Bay of Fundy to Antigua in the West Indies, I found myself, as you may say, stranded in St. John, the principal port in that island. The dry rot which seems to have unfortunately overtaken our West Indian possessions was even then very marked in Antigua, for there was no vessel there larger than a 100-ton schooner, and only two or three of them, all Yankees with one exception, a Barbadian craft with the queerest name imaginable, the Migumoo-weesoo. The shipping officer, seeing that I was a certificated mate, very kindly interested himself in me, going so far as to say that if I would take his advice and assistance I would immediately leave St. John in the Migum, as he called her, for that the skipper, being a friend of his, would gladly give me a passage to Barbadoes. I hope good advice was never wasted on me. At any rate this wasn’t, for I immediately went down to the beach, jumped into a boat, and ordered the darky in charge to put me on board the Migum. When we got alongside I was mightily interested to see quite a little mob of horses calmly floating alongside with their heads just sticking out of the water. The first thing that suggested itself to me was that if those horses got on board with their full complement of legs it would be little less than a miracle, the harbour being notoriously infested with sharks. But presently I reflected that there was really no danger, the darkies who were busy with preparations for the embarkation of the poor beasts kicking up such a deafening row that no shark would have dared venture within a cable’s length of the spot. Everybody engaged in the business seemed to be excited beyond measure, shouting, screeching with laughter, and yelling orders at the top of their voices, so that I could not see how anything was going to be done at all. The skipper was confined to his cabin with an attack of dysentery, and lay fretting himself into a fever at the riot going on overhead for want of his supervision. As soon as I introduced myself he begged me to go and take charge, but, although I humoured him to the extent of seeming to comply with his request, I knew enough of the insubordinate ’Badian darkies to make me very careful how I interfered with them. But going forward, I found to my delight that they had made a start at last, and that two of the trembling horses were already on deck. Four or five darkies[142] were in the water alongside, diving beneath the horses with slings which were very carefully placed round their bodies, then hooked to a tackle, by means of which they were hoisted on board, so subdued by fear that they suffered themselves to be pushed and hauled about the decks with the quiet submissiveness of sheep. There were twenty of them altogether, and when they had all been landed on deck there was not very much room left for working the schooner. However, as our passage lay through the heart of the trade winds, and nothing was less probable than bad weather, nobody minded that, not even when the remaining deck space was lumbered up with some very queer-looking forage.
As soon as the horses were on board we weighed, and stood out of harbour with a gentle, leading wind that, freshening as we got farther off the land, coaxed the smart craft along at a fairly good rate. This lasted until midnight, when, to the darkies’ dismay, the wind suddenly failed us, leaving us lazily rocking to the gently-gliding swell upon the wine-dark bosom of the glassy sea. Overhead, the sky, being moonless, was hardly distinguishable from the sea, and as every brilliant star was faithfully duplicated beneath, it needed no great stretch of imagination to fancy that we were suspended in the centre of a vast globe utterly cut off from the rest of the world. But the poor skipper, enfeebled by his sad ailment and anxious about his freight, had no transcendental fancies. Vainly I tried to comfort him with the assurance that we should certainly find a breeze at daybreak, and it would as certainly be fair for us. He refused consolation, insisting that we were in for a long spell of calm, and against his long experience of those waters I felt I could not argue. So I ceased my efforts and went on deck to enjoy the solemn beauty of the night once more, and listen to the quaint gabble of the three darkies forming the watch on deck.
Sure enough the skipper was right. Calms and baffling airs, persisting for three days, kept us almost motionless until every morsel of horse provender was eaten, and—what was still more serious—very little water was left. All of us wore long faces now, and the first return of steady wind was hailed by us with extravagant delight. Continuing on our original course was out of the question under the circumstances, so we headed directly for the nearest port, which happened to be Prince Rupert, in the beautiful island of Dominica. A few hours’ sail brought us into the picturesque harbour, with its ruined fortresses, once grimly guarding the entrance, now overgrown with dense tropical vegetation, huge trees growing out of yawning gaps in the masonry, and cable-like vines enwreathing the crumbling walls. Within the harbour there was a profound silence; the lake-like expanse was unburdened by a single vessel, and although the roofs of a few scattered houses could be seen embosomed among the verdure, there was no other sign of human occupation. We lowered the little boat hanging astern and hastened ashore. Hurrying toward the houses, we found ourselves in a wide street which from lack of traffic was all overgrown with weeds. Here we found a few listless negroes, none of whom could speak a word of English, a barbarous French patois being their only medium of communication. But by signs we made them comprehend our needs—fodder for the horses, and water. After some little palaver we found that for a few shillings we might go into the nearest thicket of neglected sugar-cane and cut down as many of the feathery blades that crowned the canes as we wanted, but none of those sleepy-looking darkies volunteered their assistance—they seemed to be utterly independent of work. Our energy amazed them, and I don’t think I ever saw such utter contempt as was expressed by our lively crew—true ’Badians born—towards those lotus-eating Dominicans. We had a heavy morning’s work before us, but by dint of vigorous pushing we managed to collect a couple of boatloads of cane-tops, carry them on board, and return for two casks of water which we had left one of our number ashore to fill. Some deliberate fishermen were hauling a seine as we were about to depart, and we lingered awhile until they had finished their unusual industry, being rewarded by about a bushel of “bill-fish,” a sort of garfish, but with the beak an extension of the lower jaw instead of the upper. I offered to buy a few of the fish, but the fishermen seemed mightily careless whether they sold any or not. After much expenditure of energy in sign language, I managed to purchase three dozen (about the size of herrings) for the equivalent of twopence, and, very well satisfied, pushed off for the schooner, leaving the fishermen standing on the beach contemplating their newly-acquired wealth, as if quite unable to decide what to do with it.
It was worth all the labour we had expended to see the delight with which those patient horses munched the juicy green tops of the cane, and drank, plunging their muzzles deep into the buckets, of the clear water we had brought. And I felt quite pleased when, upon our arrival in Barbadoes two days after, I watched the twenty of them walk sedately up a broad gangway of planks on to the wharf, and indulge in a playful prance and shake when they found their hoofs firmly planted upon the unrocking earth once more.
I hope I shall not be suspected of drawing a longue beau when I say that I was once in a big ship whose skipper was an ardent agriculturist. On my first visit to the poop I saw with much surprise a couple of cucumber frames lashed in secure positions, one on either side of the rail at the break of the poop. When I fancied myself unobserved, I lifted the top of one, and looked within, seeing that they contained a full allowance of rich black mould. And presently, peeping down the saloon skylight, I saw that carefully arranged along its sides, on brackets, were many large pots of flowering plants, all in first-rate condition and bloom. It was quite a novel experience for me, but withal a most pleasant one, for although it did appear somewhat strange and incongruous to find plant-life flourishing upon the sea, it gave more of a familiar domestic atmosphere to ’board-ship life than anything I have ever known; much the same feeling that strikes one when looking upon the round sterns of the Dutch galliots, with their square windows embellished by snowy beribboned muslin curtains. When we got to sea, and well clear of the land, so that the skipper’s undivided attention could be given to his beloved hobby, there were great developments of it. For not content with growing lettuces, radishes, endive, and such “garden-sass,” as the Yankees term it, in his cucumber frames, he enlarged his borders and tried experiments in raising all sorts of queer seeds of tropical fruits and vegetables. His garden took up so much room on the poop that the officers fretted a good deal at the circumscribed area of their domain, besides being considerably annoyed at having to cover up the frames, boxes, &c., when bad weather caused salt spray to break over them. But this was ungrateful of them, because there never was a skipper who interfered less with his officers, or a more peaceable, good-natured man. Nor was the frequent mess of salad that graced the table in the saloon to be despised. In that humid atmosphere and equable temperature everything grew apace; so that for a couple of months at a time green crisp leaves were scarcely absent from the table for a day. Mustard and cress were, of course, his main crop, but lettuce, radishes, and spring onions did remarkably well. That was on the utilitarian side. On the experimental side he raised date-palms, coco-palms, banana-palms, mango trees, and orange trees, dwarfing them after a fashion he had learned in China, so that in the saloon he had quite a conservatory. But there were many others of which none of us knew the names. And all around in the skylight,[147] beneath the brackets whereon the pots of geranium, fuchsia, &c., stood, hung orchids collected by the skipper on previous voyages, and most carefully tended, so that some lovely spikes of bloom were always to be seen. That saloon was a perfect bower of beauty, and although the ship herself was somewhat dwarfed by comparison with the magnificent clippers we forgathered with in Calcutta, few vessels had so many visitors. Her fame spread far, and nearly every day the delighted skipper would be busy showing a string of wondering shorefolk over his pleasaunce.
We went thence to Hong-Kong, and there, as if in emulation of the “old man’s” hobby for flowers, all hands went in for birds, mostly canaries, which can be obtained in China more cheaply, I believe, than in any part of the world. Sampans, loaded with cages so that nothing can be seen of the hull, and making the whole harbour melodious with the singing of their pretty freight, are always in evidence. For the equivalent of 3s., if the purchaser be smart of eye, he can always buy a fine cock canary in full song, although the wily Chinee never fails to attempt the substitution of a hen, no matter what price is paid. There arose a perfect mania on board of us for canaries, and when we departed for New Zealand there were at least 400 of the songsters on board. Truly for us the time of singing of birds had come. All day long that chorus went on, almost deafeningly, until we got used to it, for of course if one bird piped up after a short spell of quiet all hands joined in at the full pitch of their wonderful little lungs; so that, what with birds and flowers and good feeling, life on board the Lady Clare was as nearly idyllic as any seafaring I have ever heard of.
It might readily be supposed that in such leisurely ships as the Southern-going whalers, calling, as they did, at so many out-of-the-way islands in the South Pacific, there would have been more inducement than usual to cultivate the bucolics, if only from sheer desire for something to break the long monotony of the voyage. And so, indeed, there was, but not to anything like the extent that I should have expected. On board the Cachalot we were handicapped considerably in this direction by reason of several of the officers having an unconquerable dislike to fresh pork, which was the more remarkable because they never manifested the same aversion to the rancid, foul-smelling article supplied to us every other day out of the ship’s salt-meat stores. Whence, by the by, is ship salt pork obtained? Under what conditions do they rear the animals that produce those massy blocks of “scrunchy” fat, just tinged at one side with a pale pink substance that was once undoubtedly flesh, but when it reaches the sailor bears no resemblance to anything eatable? And how does it acquire that peculiarly vile flavour all its own, which is unlike the taste of any other provision known to caterers? I give it up; I have long ago done so, in fact. Men do eat it, although I never could, except by chopping it[149] up fine with broken biscuit and mixing it with pea-soup, so that I could swallow it without tasting it. But the only other creatures able to do so are pigs and sharks. Sailors have all kinds of theories respecting its origin, of which I am restricted to saying that they are nearly all unprintable. But I do wish most fervently that those who supply it for human food, both dealers and ship-owners, were, as their victims are, compelled to eat it three times a week or starve. Just for a month or two. Methinks it would do them much good. But this is a digression.
Most of us had our suspicions that our officers’ dislike was not so much to fresh pork as to live pigs, and truly, with our limited deck space, the objection was most reasonable. Moreover, the South Sea Island pig is a questionable-looking beast at the best, not by any means tempting to look at, and of uncertain dietary. They affect startling colours, such as tortoise-shell and tabby, are woolly of coat, lengthy of snout, and almost as speedy as dogs. When fed, which is seldom, ripe cocoa-nut is given them, as it is to all live stock in the islands. But they make many a hearty meal of fish as they wander around the beaches and reef-borders, and this gives a flavour to their produce which is, to say the least of it, unexpected. But as if to make up for our lack of pigs we had the most elaborate fowlery fitted up that I ever was shipmates with. Its dimensions were about 8 ft. long, 6 ft. wide, and 5 ft. high. It was built of wood entirely, and exactly on the principle of an oblong canary-cage that is unenclosed on any side. Plenty of roosts and nests, plenty of pounded coral and cocoa-nut, and—as the result—plenty of eggs.[150] But such queer eggs. The yolk was hardly distinguishable from the white, and they had scarcely any taste at all. Occasionally we got a brood hatched, but for some reason I don’t pretend to understand our fowls didn’t “go much on feathers,” as the skipper said. Not to put too fine a point on it, they never missed an opportunity of plucking one another’s feathers out and eating them with much relish. So that they all stalked about in native majesty unclad, doubtless rejoicing in the coolth, and occasionally scanning their own bodies solicitously for any sign of a sprouting feather, of which they themselves might have the first taste. This operated queerly among the young broods, who never got any chance of being fledged, and whose mothers were always fighting about them; but I believe as much that they (the mothers) might eat all the feathers themselves as to protect them from any fancied danger. These naked birds certainly looked funny; but the cook, who was an ingenious South Carolina negro, used to gaze at them earnestly and say, “Foh de good Lawd, sah; ef I aint agwine ter bring hout er plan ter raise chicken ’thout fedders altogedder. W’y, jess look at it. All de strenf dat goes ter fedders ’ll go ter meat—an’ aigs—kase dem chickens ez fatter den ever I see ’bord ship befo’; an den only tink ob de weary trubble save in pluckin’ ob ’em. Golly, sah, et’s a great skeem, ’n I’se right on de top ob it.” And, really, there did seem to be something in it.
Fowls were plentiful in Vau-Vau—fairly good ones, too; but it was entirely a mystery to me how any individual property in them was at all possible. For[151] no native had any enclosure for them, or seemed to take any care of them. They just ran wild in the jungly vegetation around the villages and roosted on the trees; but as a result, I suppose, of the persistence through their many generations of their original fellowship with mankind, they never strayed far away from the houses. Our friends brought them on board at our first arrival in such numbers that no man was without a pair of fowls, and in sore straits where to keep them. The difficulty was soon solved by the skipper, who said that in his opinion it would soon be inconvenient for the fore-mast hands to see any difference between their fowls and his. Yes, and it was even possible that having eaten their own fowls they might forget that trifling fact, and absent-mindedly mistake some of the skipper’s poultry for their own. In order to prevent such mistakes he issued an edict that no more fowls were to be entertained by the crew or cooked for them by the “Doctor.” And although this was undoubtedly the wisest solution of our puzzle, there was thereat great discontent for a time, until the ingenious Kanakas took to cooking the fowls for us ashore, and bringing them on board ready for eating. Being plentiful, as I said, poultry was cheap, the standard price being a fathom of calico of the value of 6d. for two, for ship’s stock, while our private friends furnished them to us for nothing. And there are also in the South Pacific many small islands unpeopled upon which that most sensible and practical of navigators, James Cook, had left both fowls and pigs to breed at their own sweet will. These islets[152] have always many cocoa-nut trees, the fruit from which affords plentiful food for the pigs, who show great ingenuity in getting at the contents of the fallen nuts, while the fowls apparently find no difficulty in picking up a comfortable livelihood. By tacit agreement these lonely ocean store-houses of good food are allowed to remain undisturbed by both the natives of adjacent islands and passing ships, except in cases of necessity. We once broke this unwritten law, for although we had not long left Fiji, we landed upon one of these oases in the blue waste, and had a day’s frolic there. It was a veritable paradise, although not more than three acres in area. Its only need seemed to be fresh water, for as it had grown to be an island by the deposit of sand upon the summit of a coral reef, there were of course no springs. And yet it was completely clothed with vegetation, the cocoa-palms especially growing right down to the edge of the sea, so that at high water the wavelets washed one side of their spreading roots quite bare. Being no botanist, I cannot describe the various kinds of plants that luxuriated there, having, I suppose, become accustomed to the privation of fresh water, as the fowls and pigs had also done. But I did notice that the undergrowth seemed to consist principally of spreading bushes, rising to a height of about 5 feet, and bearing, in the greatest abundance, those tiny crimson and green cones known to most people as bird’s-eye chillies. We all had cause to remember this, for thrusting our way through these bushes under the burning rays of the sun, we got in some mysterious way some of their pungent juices upon our faces and arms. And the effect was much the same as the application of a strong mustard plaster would have been.
We did not commit any great depredations. The second mate shot (with a bomb-gun) a couple of pigs, and we managed to catch half-a-dozen fowls, but they were so wild and cunning here, that except at night it was by no means easy to lay hands upon them. As so often happened to us, we found our best catch upon the beach, where just after sunset we waylaid two splendid turtle that had just crawled ashore to deposit their eggs. The advantage of such a catch as this was in the fact that turtle may be kept alive on board ship for several weeks, if necessary, by putting them in a cask of sea-water, and though unfed, they do not seem to be perceptibly impoverished. We also collected a goodly store of fresh unripe cocoa-nuts, which are one of the most delicious and refreshing of all tropical fruits. I do not suppose it would be possible to bring them to England without their essential freshness being entirely dissipated, for in order to enjoy them thoroughly they should be eaten new from the tree. They would be a revelation to people whose acquaintance with cocoa-nut is limited to the fully ripe and desperately indigestible article beloved of the Bank Holiday caterer, and disposed of at the favourite game of “three shies a penny.” In that form no native of cocoa-nut-producing countries ever dreams of eating them. For they are really only fit for “copra,” the universal term applied throughout the tropics to cocoa-nut prepared for conversion into oil. When the nuts are fully ripe, a native will seat[154] himself by a heap of them, a small block of wood before him with a hollow in its centre, and an old axe in his hand. Placing a nut on the block, unhusked, of course, he splits it open by one blow of the axe and lays the two halves in the sun. By the time he has split open the last of the heap, he may begin at the first opened nuts and shake their contents into bags, for they will be dried sufficiently for the meat to fall readily from the shells. That is “copra.” But before the husk has hardened into fibre, even before the shells have become brittle, when it is possible to slice off the top of the nut as easily as you would that of a turnip, the contents almost wholly consist of a bland liquor, not cloyingly sweet, cool even under the most fervent blaze of the sun, and refreshing to the last degree. Around the sides of the immature shell there is, varying in thickness according to the age of the nut, a jelly-like deposit, almost tasteless, but wonderfully sustaining. I have heard it vaunted as a cure for all diseases of malnutrition, and I should really be inclined to believe that there was some basis for the claim. The juice or milk, if allowed to ferment, makes excellent vinegar.
A long spell of cruising without touching at any land having exhausted all our stock of fowls, to say nothing of fruit and vegetables, of which we had almost forgotten the taste, it was with no ordinary delight that we sighted the Kermadec group of islands right ahead one morning, and guessed, by the course remaining unaltered, that our skipper was inclined to have a close look at them, if not to land. As[155] we drew nearer and nearer our hopes rose, until, at the welcome order to “back the mainyard,” we were like a school full of youngsters about to break up. Few preparations were needed, for a whaler’s crew are always ready to leave the ship at any hour of the day or night for an indefinite period. And in ten minutes from the time of giving the first orders, two boats were pulling in for the small semi-circular bay with general instructions to forage for anything eatable. A less promising place at first sight for a successful raid could hardly be imagined, for the whole island seemed composed of one stupendous mountain whose precipitous sides rose sheer from the sea excepting just before us. And even there the level land only appeared like a ledge jutting out from the mountain-side, and of very small extent. As we drew nearer, however, we saw that even to our well-accustomed vision the distance had proved deceitful, and that the threshold of the mountain was of far greater area than we had supposed, being, indeed, of sufficient extent to have afforded shelter and sustenance to quite a respectable village of colonists had any chosen to set up their homes in such a lonely spot. But to the instructed eye the steep beach, wholly composed of lava fragments, gave a sufficient reason why such a sheltered nook might be a far from secure abiding-place, even had not a steadfast stain of dusty cloud poised above the island in the midst of the clear blue sky added its witness to the volcanic conditions still ready to burst forth. But these considerations did not trouble us. With boisterous mirth we dodged the incoming[156] rollers, and, leaping out of the boats as their keels grated on the shore, we ran them rapidly up out of the reach of the eager surf, delighted with the drenching because of its coolness. Dividing into parties of three, we plunged gaily into the jungly undergrowth, chasing, as boys do butterflies, the brown birds, like overgrown partridges, that darted away before us in all directions. We succeeded in catching a few, finding them to be what we afterwards knew in New Zealand as “Maori hens,” something between a domestic fowl and a partridge, but a dismal failure in the eatable way, being tough and flavourless as any fowl that had died of old age. Of swine, the great object of our quest, we saw not a hoof-print; in fact, we assured ourselves that whatever number of these useful animals the family that once resided in this desolate spot had reared, they had left no descendants. It was a grievous disappointment, for it threw us back upon the goats, and goat as food is anathema to all sailors. But it was a fine day; we had come out to kill something, and, as no other game appeared available, we started after the goats. It was a big contract. We were all barefooted, and, although on board the ship we had grown accustomed to regard the soles of our feet as quite impervious to feeling as any leather, we soon found that shore travelling over lava and through the many tormenting plants of a tropical scrub was quite another pair of shoes. We did capture a couple of goats, one a patriarch of unguessable longevity with a beard as long as my arm, and the other a Nanny heavy with kid. These we safely conveyed[157] on board with us at the close of the day. But the result of our day’s foraging, overshadowing even the boat-load of magnificent fish we caught out in the little bay, was the discovery of a plant known in New Zealand as “Maori cabbage.” It looks something like a lettuce run to seed, and has a flavour like turnip-tops. I do not suppose any one on shore can realise what those vegetables meant to us, that is, the white portion of the crew. For it was well-nigh two years since we had tasted a bit of anything resembling cabbage, and our craving for green vegetables and potatoes was really terrible. It is one of the most serious hardships the sailor has to endure, the more serious because quite avoidable. Potatoes and Swede turnips are not dear food, and, if taken up with plenty of mould adhering to them and left so, will keep for six months in all climates. They make all the difference between a good and a bad ship. I am sure no banquet that I have ever sat down to since could possibly have given me a tithe of the epicurean delight I felt over a plentiful plate of this nameless vegetable and a bit of hard salt beef that evening.
Although the addition to our stock of provisions, excepting the fish, was but small, we had an ideal day’s enjoyment, and the fun we got out of Ancient William, the patriarch, was great. We had him tame in two days, and trying butting matches with the Kanakas; in spite of his age I don’t know what we didn’t teach him that a goat could learn. Nanny presented us with a charming little pet in the shape of a kid two days after her arrival on board, but to the grief of all hands her milk dried up almost immediately afterwards, so that to save the little creature from starvation, as there was not even a drop of condensed milk on board, we were compelled to kill it. The Kanakas ate it, and pronounced it very good. Then William the Ripe, in charging a Kanaka, who dodged him by leaping over the fo’c’s’le scuttle, hurled himself headlong below, breaking both his fore legs. We could have mended him up all right, but he seemed to resent getting better, refused tobacco and all such little luxuries that we tried to tempt him with, and died. I think he was broken-hearted at the idea that a mountaineer like himself, who for goodness knows how many generations had scaled in safety the precipitous cliffs of Sunday Island, should fall down a stuffy hole on board ship, only about eight feet deep, and break himself all up.
Some delightfully interesting articles on the ancient sport of “hawking,” or falconry, whichever is the correct term to use, in Country Life have vividly recalled to me a quaint and unusual experience in that line, which fell to my lot while the vessel of whose crew I was a very minor portion was slowly making her way homewards from a port at the extreme western limit of the Gulf of Mexico. We were absolutely without live stock of any kind on board the Investigator, unless such small deer as rats and cockroaches might be classed under that head. And, as so often happens at sea when that is the case, the men were very discontented at the absence of any dumb animals to make pets of, and often lamented what they considered to be the lonely condition of a ship without even a cat. But we had not been out of port many days when, to our delight as well as amazement, we saw one sunny morning hopping contentedly about the fo’c’s’le a sweet little blue and yellow bird about the bigness (or littleness) of a robin. Being well out of sight of land, no one could imagine whence he came, neither did anybody see him arrive. He just materialised as it were in our midst, and made himself at home forthwith, as though he had been born and bred among men and fear of them was unknown to him. We had hardly got over the feeling of almost childish delight this pretty, fearless wanderer gave us when another appeared, much the same size, but totally different in colour. It was quite as tame as the first arrival, and did not quarrel with the first-comer. Together they explored most amicably the recesses of the fo’c’s’le, apparently much delighted with the cockroaches, which swarmed everywhere. And before long many others came and joined them, all much about the same size, but of all the hues imaginable. They were all alike in their tameness, and it really was one of the most pleasant sights I ever witnessed to see those tiny, brilliant birds fluttering about our dingy fo’c’s’le, or, tired out, roosting on such queer perches as the edge of the bread-barge or the shelves in our bunks. Their presence had a most elevating influence upon the roughest of us—we went softly and spoke gently, for fear of startling these delicate little visitors who were so unafraid of the giants among whom they had voluntarily taken up their abode. At meal-times they hopped about the fo’c’s’le deck picking up crumbs and behaving generally as if they were in the beautiful glades and aromatic forests whence they had undoubtedly come. For it is hardly necessary to say that they were all land birds; and when during a calm one day one of them, stooping too near the sea, got wet, and was unable to rise again, August McManus, as tough a citizen as ever painted the Highway red, leapt overboard after it, and, with a touch as gentle as the enwrapping of lint, rescued it from its imminent peril.
This strange development of sea-life went on for a week, the weather being exceedingly fine, with light winds and calms. And then we became suddenly aware that some large birds had arrived and taken up positions upon the upper yards, where they sat motionless, occasionally giving vent to a shrill cry. What they were none of us knew, until shortly after we had first noticed them one of our little messmates flew out from the ship’s side into the sunshine. There was a sudden swish of wings, like the lash of a cane through the air, and downward like a brown shadow came one of the watchers from aloft, snatching in a pair of cruel-looking talons the tiny truant from our midst. Then the dullest of us realised that in some mysterious way these rapacious birds, a species of falcon, had become aware that around our ship might be found some of their natural food. Now we were not less than 200 miles from the coast[161] at the time, and to my mind it was one of the strangest things conceivable how those hawks should have known that around a solitary ship far out at sea would be found a number of little birds suitable to their needs. The presence of the small birds might easily be explained by their having been blown off the land, as high winds had prevailed for some little time previous to their appearance, but as the hawks did not come till a week afterwards, during the whole of which time we had never experienced even a four-knot breeze, I am convinced that the same theory would not account for their arrival. It may have been a coincidence, but if so it was a very remarkable one; and in any case what were these essentially land birds of powerful flight doing of their own free will so far from land? Unless, of course, they were a little band migrating, and even then the coincidence of their meeting our ship was a most strange one.
We, however, troubled ourselves but little with these speculations. The one thing patent to us was that our little pets were exposed to the most deadly peril, that these ravenous birds were carrying them off one by one, and we were apparently powerless to protect them. We could not cage them, although the absence of cages would have been no obstacle, as we should soon have manufactured efficient substitutes; but they were so happy in their freedom that we felt we could not deprive them of it. But we organised a raid among those bloodthirsty pirates, as we called them, forgetting that they were merely obeying the[162] law of their being, and the first dark hour saw us silently creeping aloft to where they had taken their roost. Two were caught, but in both cases the captors had something to remember their encounter by. Grasping at the shadowy birds in the darkness with only one free hand, they were unable to prevent the fierce creatures defending themselves with beak and talons, and one man came down with his prize’s claws driven so far into his hand that the wounds took many days to heal. When we had secured them we couldn’t bring ourselves to kill them, they were such handsome, graceful birds, but had they been given a choice in the matter I make no doubt they would have preferred a speedy death rather than the lingering pain of starvation which befell them. For they refused all food, and sat moping on their perches, only rousing when any one came near, and glaring unsubdued with their bold, fierce eyes, bright and fearless until they glazed in death. We were never able to catch any more of them, although they remained with us until our captain managed to allow the vessel to run ashore upon one of the enormous coral reefs that crop up here and there in the Gulf of Mexico. The tiny spot of dry land that appeared at the summit of this great mountain of coral was barren of all vegetation except a little creeping plant, a kind of arenaria, so that it would have afforded no satisfactory abiding-place for our little shipmates, even if any of them could escape the watchful eyes of their enemies aloft. So that I suppose after we abandoned the ship[163] they remained on board until she broke up altogether, and then fell an easy prey to the falcons.
This was the only occasion upon which I have known a vessel at sea to be visited by so varied a collection of small birds, and certainly the only case I have ever heard of where land birds have flown on board and made themselves at home. When I say at sea, of course I do not mean in a narrow strait like the Channel, where passing vessels must often be visited by migrants crossing to or from the Continent. But when well out in the North Atlantic, certainly to the westward of the Azores, and out of sight of them, I have several times known a number of swallows to fly on board and cling almost like bats to whatever projections they first happened to reach. Exhausted with their long battle against the overmastering winds, faint with hunger and thirst, they had at last reached a resting-place, only to find it so unsuited to all their needs that nothing remained for them to do but die. Earnest attempts were made to induce them to live, but unsuccessfully; and as they never regained strength sufficient to resume their weary journey, they provided a sumptuous meal for the ship’s cat. Even had they been able to make a fresh start, it is hard to imagine that the sense of direction which guides them in their long flight from or to their winter haunts would have enabled them to shape a course from such an utterly unknown base as a ship at sea must necessarily be to them.
While making a passage up the China Sea vessels are often boarded by strange bird visitors, and some of them may be induced to live upon such scanty fare as can be found for them on shipboard. I once witnessed with intense interest a gallant attempt made by a crane to find a rest for her weary wings on board of an old barque in which I was an able seaman. We were two days out from Hong-Kong, bound to Manila, through a strong south-west monsoon. The direction of the wind almost enabled us to lay our course, and therefore the “old man” was cracking on, all the sail being set that she would stagger under close-hauled. Being in ballast, she lay over at an angle that would have alarmed anybody but a yachtsman; but she was a staunch, weatherly old ship, and hung well to windward. It was my wheel from six to eight in the evening, and as I wrestled with it in the attempt to keep the old barky up to her work, I suddenly caught sight of the gaunt form of a crane flapping her heavy wings in dogged fashion to come up with us from to leeward, we making at the time about eight knots an hour. After a long fight the brave bird succeeded in reaching us, and coasted along the lee side, turning her long neck anxiously from side to side as if searching for a favourable spot whereon to alight. Just as she seemed to have made up her mind to come inboard abaft the foresail, a gust of back-draught caught her wide pinions and whirled her away to leeward, about a hundred fathoms at one sweep, while it was evident that she had the utmost difficulty in maintaining her balance. Another long struggle ensued as the gloom of the coming night deepened, and the steady, strenuous wind pressed us onward through the turbulent[165] sea. The weary pilgrim at last succeeded in fetching up to us again, and with a feeling of the keenest satisfaction I saw her work her way to windward, as if instinct warned her that in that way alone she would succeed in reaching a place of rest. Backward and forward along our weather side she sailed twice, searching with anxious eye the whole of our decks, but fearing to trust herself thereon, where so many men were apparently awaiting to entrap her. No, she would not venture, and quite a pang of disappointment and sympathy shot through me as I saw her drift away astern and renew her hopeless efforts to board us on the lee side. At last she came up so closely that I could see the laboured heaving of her breast muscles, and I declare that the expression in her full, dark eyes was almost human in its pathos of despair. She poised herself almost above the rail, the vessel gave a great lee lurch, and down the slopes of the mizen came pouring an eddy of baffled wind. It caught the doomed bird, whirled her over and over as she fought vainly to regain her balance, and at last bore her down so closely to the seething tumult beneath her that a breaking wave lapped her up and she disappeared. All hands had witnessed her brave battle with fate, and quite a buzz of sympathy went up for her in her sad defeat.
That same evening one of the lads found a strange bird nestling under one of the boats. None of us knew what it was, for none of us ever remembered seeing so queer a creature before. Nor will this be wondered at when I say that it was a goat-sucker, as I learned long afterwards by seeing a plate of one in a Natural History I was reading. But the curious speculations that its appearance gave rise to in the fo’c’s’le were most amusing. The wide gape of its mouth, so unexpected when it was shut, was a source of the greatest wonder, while the downy fluff of its feathers made one man say it reminded him of a “nowl” that a skipper of a ship he was in once caught and kept alive for a long time as a pet.
Of the few visitors that board a ship in mid-ocean none are more difficult to account for than butterflies. I have seen the common white butterfly fluttering about a ship in the North Atlantic when she was certainly over 500 miles from the nearest land. And in various parts of the world butterflies and moths will suddenly appear as if out of space, although the nearest land be several hundreds of miles distant. I have heard the theory advanced that their chrysalides must have been on board the ship, and they have just been hatched out when seen. It may be so, although I think unlikely; but yet it is hard to imagine that so fragile a creature, associated only in the mind with sunny gardens or scented hillsides, could brave successfully the stern rigour of a flight extending over several hundred miles of sea. All that is certain about the matter is that they do visit the ships at such distances from land, and disappear as if disheartened at the unsuitability of their environment. Lying in Sant’ Ana, Mexico, once, loading mahogany, I witnessed the labours of an unbidden guest that made me incline[167] somewhat to the chrysalis theory about the butterflies. Our anchorage was some three miles off shore in the open roadstead, where the rafts of great mahogany logs tossed and tumbled about ceaselessly alongside. They had all been a long time in the water before they reached us, and were consequently well coated with slime, which made them an exceedingly precarious footing for the unfortunate slingsman, who was as often in the water as he was on the raft. One evening as I lay in my bunk reading by the light of a smuggled candle, I was much worried by a persistent buzz that sounded very near, and far too loud to be the voice of any mosquito that I had ever been unfortunate enough to be attended by. Several times I looked for this noisy insect without success, and at last gave up the task and went on deck, feeling sure there wasn’t room in the bunk for the possessor of that voice and myself. Next day after dinner I was again lying in my bunk, resting during the remainder of the dinner hour, when to my amazement I saw what I took to be an overgrown wasp or hornet suddenly alight upon a beam overhead, walk into a corner, and begin the music that had so worried me overnight. I watched him keenly, but could hardly make out his little game, until he suddenly flew away. Then getting a light, for the corner was rather dark, I discovered a row of snug apartments much like acorn-cups, only deeper, all neatly cemented together, and as smooth inside as a thimble. Presently along came Mr. Wasp, or Hornet, or whatever he was, again, and set to work, while I watched him as closely as I dared without giving him offence, noticing that he carried his material in a little blob on his chest between his fore legs. It looked like mud; but where could he get mud from? I could swear there was none on board under that fierce sun, and I couldn’t imagine him going six miles in five minutes, which he must needs have done had he gone ashore for it. So I watched his flight as well as I could, but it was two days before I discovered my gentleman on one of the logs alongside, scraping up a supply of slime, and skipping nimbly into the air each time the sea washed over his alighting-place. That mystery was solved at any rate. I kept careful watch over that row of dwellings thereafter, determined to suppress the whole block at the first sign of a brood of wasps making their appearance. None ever did, and at last I took down the cells with the greatest care, finding them perfectly empty. So I came to the conclusion that my ingenious and industrious guest had been building for the love of the thing, or for amusement, or to keep his hand in, or perhaps something warned him in time that the site he had selected for his eligible row of residences was liable to sudden serious vicissitudes of climate. At any rate, he abandoned them, much to my comfort.
Solomon had, among the many mighty qualities of mind which have secured his high eminence as the wisest man of the world, an attribute which does not always accompany abundant knowledge. He was prompt to admit his limitations, as far as he knew them, frankly and fully. And among them he confesses an inability to understand “the way of a ship in the midst of the sea.” It may be urged that there was little to wonder at in this, since the exigencies of his position must have precluded his gaining more than the slightest actual experience of seafaring. Yet it is marvellous that he should have mentioned this thing, seemingly simple to a shore-dweller, which is to all mariners a mystery past finding out. No matter how long a sailor may have sailed the seas in one ship, or how deeply he may have studied the ways of that ship under apparently all combinations of wind and sea, he will never be found to assert thoughtfully that he knows her altogether. Much more, then, are the myriad idiosyncrasies of all ships unknowable. Kipling has done more, perhaps, than any other living writer to point out how certain fabrics of man’s construction become invested with individuality of an unmistakable kind, and of course so acute an observer could not fail to notice how pre-eminently is this the case with ships.
Now, in what follows I seek as best I may to show, by a niggardly handful of instances in my own experience, how the “personality” of ships expresses itself, and how incomprehensible these manifestations are to the men whose business it is to study them. Even before the ship has quitted the place of her birth, yea, while she is yet a-building, something of this may be noted. One man will study deepest mathematical problems, will perfectly apply his formulæ, and see them accurately embodied in steel or timber, so that by all ordinary laws of cause and effect the resultant vessel should be a marvel of speed, stability, and strength. And yet she is a failure. She has all the vices that the sailor knows and dreads: crank, slow, leewardly, hanging in stays, impossible to steer satisfactorily. Every man who ever sails in her carries in his tenacious sea-memory, to the day of his death, vengeful recollections of her perversities, and often in the dog-watch holds forth to his shipmates in eloquent denunciation of her manifold iniquities long after one would have thought her very name would be forgotten. Another shipbuilder, innocent of a scintilla of mathematics, impatient of diagrams, will begin apparently without preparation, adding timber to timber, and breast-hook to stem, until out of the dumb cavern of his mind a ship is evolved, his inexpressible idea manifested in graceful yet massive shape. And that ship will be all that the other is not. As if the spirit of her builder had somehow been wrought into her frame, she behaves with intelligence, and becomes the delight, the pride, of those fortunate enough to sail in her.
Such a vessel it was once my good fortune to join in London for a winter passage across to Nova Scotia. Up to that time my experience had been confined to large vessels and long voyages, and it was not without the stern compulsion of want that I shipped in the Wanderer. She was a brigantine of two hundred and forty tons register, built in some little out-of-the-way harbour in Nova Scotia by one of the amphibious sailor-farmers of that ungenerous coast, in just such a rule-of-thumb manner as I have spoken of. When I got on board I pitied myself greatly. I felt cramped for room; I dreaded the colossal waves of the Atlantic at that stormy winter season, in what I considered to be a weakly built craft fit only for creeping closely along-shore. We worked down the river, also a new departure to me, always accustomed hitherto to be towed down to Beachy Head by a strenuous tug. The delicate way in which she responded to all the calls we made on her astonished our pilot, who was loud in his praises of her “handiness,” one of the most praiseworthy qualities a ship can have in a seaman’s eyes. Nevertheless, I still looked anxiously forward to our meeting with the Atlantic, although day by day, as we zigzagged down Channel, I felt more and more amazed at the sympathy she showed with her crew. At last we emerged upon the wide, open ocean, clear of even the idea of shelter from any land; and as if to show conclusively how groundless were my fears, it blew a bitter north-west gale. Never have I known such keen delight in watching a vessel’s behaviour as I knew then. As if she were one of the sea-people,[172] such as the foam-like gulls or wheeling petrels, next of kin to the waves themselves, she sported with the tumultuous elements, her motion as easy as the sway of the seaweed and as light as a bubble. And even when the strength of the storm-wind forbade us to show more than the tiniest square of canvas, she answered the touch of her helm, as sensitive to its gentle suasion as Hiawatha’s Cheemaun to the voice of her master. Never a wave broke on deck, although she had so little free-board that a bucket of water could almost be dipped without the aid of a lanyard. That gale taught me a lesson I have never been able to forget. It was, never to judge of the seaworthy qualities of a ship by her appearance at anchor, but to wait until she had an opportunity of telling me in her own language what she could do.
Then came a spell of favourable weather—for the season, that is—when we could carry plenty of sail and make good use of our time. Another characteristic now revealed itself in her—her steerability. Once steady on her course under all canvas, one turn of a spoke, or at most of two spokes, of the wheel was sufficient to keep her so; and for an hour I have walked back and forth before the wheel, with both hands in my pockets, while she sped along at ten knots an hour, as straight as an arrow in its flight. But when any sail was taken off her, no matter which, she would no longer steer herself, as if the just and perfect balance of her sail area had been disturbed; but[173] she was easier to steer then than any vessel I have ever known. Lastly, a strong gale tested her powers of running before it, the last touch of excellence in any ship being that she shall run safely dead before a gale. During its height we passed the Anchor liner California, a huge steamship some twenty times our bulk. From end to end of that mighty ship the frolicsome waves leaped and tumbled; from every scupper and swinging-port spouted a briny flood. Every sea, meeting her mass in its way, just climbed on board and spread itself, so that she looked, as sailors say, like a half-tide rock. From her towering hurricane-deck our little craft must have appeared a forlorn little object—just a waif of the sea, existing only by a succession of miracles. Yet even her muffled-up passengers, gazing down upon the white dryness of our decks, looked as if they could dimly understand that the comfort which was unmistakably absent from their own wallowing monster was cosily present with us.
Another vessel, built on the same coast, but three times the size of the Wanderer, was the Sea Gem, in which I had an extended experience. Under an old sea-dog of a captain who commanded her the first part of the voyage, she played more pranks than a jibbing mule with a new driver. None of the ordinary manœuvres necessary to a sailing-ship would she perform without the strangest antics and refusals. She seemed possessed of a stubborn demon of contrariness. Sometimes at night, when, at the change of the watch, all hands were kept on deck[174] to tack ship, more than an hour would be wasted in futile attempts to get her about in a seamanlike way. She would prance up into the wind gaily enough, as if about to turn in her own length, and then at the crucial moment fall off again against the hard-down helm, while all hands cursed her vigorously for the most obstinate, clumsy vessel ever calked. Or she would come up far enough for the order of “mainsail haul,” and there she would stick, like a wall-eyed sow in a muddy lane, hard and fast in irons. With her mainyards braced a-port and her foreyards a-starboard, she reminded all hands of nothing so much as the old sea-yarn of the Yankee schooner-skipper who for the first time found himself in command of a bark. Quite scared of those big square sails, he lay in port until, by some lucky chance, he got hold of a mate who had long sailed in square-rigged vessels. Then he boldly put to sea. But by some evil hap the poor mate fell overboard and was drowned when they had been several days out; and one morning a homeward-bounder spied a bark in irons making rapid signals of distress, although the weather was fine, and the vessel appeared staunch and seaworthy enough. Rounding to under the sufferer’s stern, the homeward-bound skipper hailed, “What’s the matter?” “Oh!” roared the almost frantic Yankee, “for God’s sake send somebody aboard that knows somethin’ about this kind er ship. I’ve lost my square-rigged mate overboard, an’ I cain’t git a move on her nohow!” He’d been trying to sail her “winged out,” schooner fashion. So disgusted was our skipper with the Sea[175] Gem that he left her in Mobile, saying that he was going to retire from the sea altogether. But we all believed he was scared to death that she would run away with him some fine day. Another skipper took command, a Yankee Welshman by the name of Jones. The first day out I heard the second mate say to him deferentially, “She’s rather ugly in stays, sir.” “Is she?” queried the old man, with an astonished air. “Wall, I should hev surmised she was ez nimble ez a kitten. Yew don’t say!” Shortly after it became necessary to tack, and, to our utter amazement, the Sea Gem came about in almost her own length, with never a suggestion that she had ever been otherwise than as handy as a St. Ives smack. Nor did she ever after betray any signs of unwillingness to behave with the same cheerful alacrity. Had her trim been different we could have understood it, because some ships handy in ballast are veritable cows when loaded, and vice versâ. But that reasoning had here no weight, since her draft was essentially the same.
Not without a groan do I recall a passage in one of the handsomest composite barks I ever saw. Her name I shall not give, as she was owned in London, and may be running still, for all I know. My eye lingered lovingly over her graceful lines as she lay in dock, and I thought gleefully that a passage to New Zealand in her would be like a yachting-trip. An additional satisfaction was some patent steering-gear which I had always longed to handle, having been told that it was a dream of delight to take a trick with it. I admit that she was right down to[176] her Plimsoll, and I will put it to her credit that she was only some dozen miles to leeward of the ill-fated Eurydice when that terrible disaster occurred that extinguished so many bright young lives. But the water was smooth, and we had no long row of lower-deck ports open for the sea to rush in when the vessel heeled to a sudden squall. It is only her Majesty’s ships that are exposed to such dangers as that. In fact, for the first fortnight out she was on her extra-special behaviour, although none of us fellows for’ard liked a dirty habit she had of lifting heavy sprays over fore and aft in a whole-sail breeze. Presently along came a snifter from the south-west, and every man of us awoke to the fact that we were aboard of a hooker saturated with every vicious habit known to ships. There was no dryness in her. You never knew where or when she would bow down to a harmless-looking sea and allow it to lollop on board, or else, with a perversity almost incredible, fall up against it so clumsily that it would send a blinding sheet of spray as high as the clues of the upper topsails. Words fail me to tell of the patent atrocity with which we were condemned to steer. Men would stand at the wheel for their two hours’ trick, and imagine tortures for the inventor thereof, coming for’ard at four or eight bells, speechlessly congested with the volume of their imprecations upon him. Yet I have no doubt he, poor man, considered himself a benefactor to the genus seafarer. In any weather you could spin the wheel round from hard up to hard down without feeling the slightest pressure of the sea against the rudder.[177] And as, to gain power, speed must be lost, two turns of the wheel were equal to only one with the old-fashioned gear. The result of these differences was to a sailor simply maddening. For all seamen steer as much by the feel of the wheel as by anything else (I speak of sailing-ships throughout), a gentle increase of pressure warning you when she wants a little bit to meet her in her sidelong swing. Not only so, but there is a subtle sympathy (to a good helmsman) conveyed in those alterations of pressure which, while utterly unexplainable in words, make all the difference between good and bad steering. Then, none of us could get used to the doubling of the amount of helm necessary. We were always giving her too much or too little. As she was by no means an easy-steering ship, even had her gear been all right, the consequence of this diabolical impediment to her guidance was that the man who kept her within two points and a half, in anything like a breeze, felt that he deserved high praise.
Still, with all these unpleasantnesses, we worried along in fairly comfortable style, for we had a fresh mess and railway-duff (a plum at every station) every Sunday. Every upper bunk in the fo’c’s’le was leaky, and always remained so; but we rigged up water-sheds that kept us fairly dry during our slumbers. So we fared southward through the fine weather, forgetting, with the lax memory of the sailor for miserable weather, the sloppy days that had passed, and giving no thought to the coming struggle. Gradually we stole out of the trade area, until the[178] paling blue of the sky and the accumulation of torn and feathery cloud-fields warned us of our approach to that stern region where the wild western wind reigns supreme. The trades wavered, fell, and died away. Out from the west, with a rush and a roar, came the cloud-compeller, and eastward we fled before it. An end now to all comfort fore and aft. For she wallowed and grovelled, allowing every sea, however kindly disposed, to leap on board, until the incessant roar of the water from port to starboard dominated our senses even in sleep. A massive breakwater of two-inch kauri planks was fitted across the deck in front of the saloon for the protection of the afterguard, who dwelt behind it as in a stockaded fort. As the weather grew worse, and the sea got into its gigantic stride, our condition became deplorable; for it was a task of great danger to get from the fo’c’s’le to the wheel, impossible to perform without a drenching, and always invested with the risk of being dashed to pieces. We “carried on” recklessly in order to keep her at least ahead of the sea; but at night, when no stars were to be seen, and the compass swung madly through all its thirty-two points, steering was mental and physical torture. In fact, it was only possible to steer at all by the feel of the wind at one’s back, and even then the best helmsman among us could not keep her within two points on each side of her course. We lived in hourly expectation of a catastrophe, and for weeks none of us forward ever left off oilskins and sea-boots even to sleep in. At last, on Easter Sunday, three seas swept on board simultaneously. One launched[179] itself like a Niagara over the stern, and one rose on each side in the waist, until the two black hills of water towered above us for fully twenty feet. Then they leaned toward each other and fell, their enormous weight threatening to crush our decks in as if they had been paper. Nothing could be seen of the hull for a smother of white, except the forecastle-head. When, after what seemed an age, she slowly lifted out of that boiling, yeasty whirl, the breakwater was gone, and so was all the planking of the bulwarks on both sides from poop to forecastle break. Nothing was left but to heave to, and I, for one, firmly believed that we should never get her up into the wind. However, we were bound to try; and watching the smooth (between two sets of seas), the helm was put hard down and the mizen hauled out. Round she came swiftly enough, but just as she presented her broadside to the sea, up rose a monstrous wave. Over, over she went—over until the third ratline of the lee rigging was under water; that is to say, the lee rail was full six feet under the sea. One hideous tumult prevailed, one dazzling glare of foaming water surrounded us; but I doubt whether any of us thought of anything but how long we could hold our breath. Had she been less deeply loaded she must have capsized. As it was, she righted again, and came up into the wind still afloat. But never before or since have I seen a vessel behave like that hove to. We were black and blue with being banged about, our arms strained almost to uselessness by holding on. Beast as she was, the strength of her hull was amazing, or she would have been racked to splinters: for in that awful sea she rolled clean to windward until she filled herself, then canted back again until she lay nearly on her beam-ends; and this she did continually for three days and nights. At the first of the trouble the cabin had been gutted so that neither officers nor passengers had a dry thread, and of course all cooking was impossible. I saw the skipper chasing his sextant (in its box) around the saloon-table, which was just level with the water which was making havoc with everything. And not a man of us for’ard but had some pity to spare for the one woman passenger (going out with her little boy to join her husband), who, we knew, was crouching in the corner of an upper bunk in her cabin, hugging her child to her bosom, and watching with fascinated eyes the sullen wash of the dark water that plunged back and forth across the sodden strip of carpet.
In spite of all these defects in the ship, she reached Lyttelton in safety at last; and I, with more thankfulness than I knew how to express, was released from her, and took my place as an officer on board a grand old ship three times her size. Unfortunately for me, my sea experience of her extended only over one short passage to Adelaide, where she was laid up for sale; and of my next ship I have spoken at length elsewhere, so I may not enlarge upon her behaviour here. After that I had the good fortune to get a berth as second mate of the Harbinger, to my mind one of the noblest specimens of modern shipbuilding that ever floated. She was lofty—210[181] feet from water-line to skysail truck—and with all her white wings spread, thirty-one mighty sails, she looked like a mountain of snow. She was built of steel, and in every detail was as perfect as any sailor could wish. For all her huge bulk she was as easy to handle as any ten-ton yacht—far easier than some—and in any kind of weather her docility was amazing. No love-sick youth was ever more enamoured of his sweetheart than I of that splendid ship. For hours of my watch below I have sat perched upon the martingale guys under the jib-boom, watching with all a lover’s complacency the stately sheer of her stem through the sparkling sea, and dreamily noting the delicate play of rainbow tints through and through the long feather of spray that ran unceasingly up the stem, and, curling outward, fell in a diamond shower upon the blue surface below. She was so clean in the entrance that you never saw a foaming spread of broken water ahead, driven in front by the vast onset of the hull. She parted the waves before her pleasantly, as an arrow the air; graciously, as if loath to disturb their widespread solitude.
But it needed a tempest to show her “way” in its perfection. Like the Wanderer, but in a grand and gracious fashion, she seemed to claim affinity with the waves, and they in their wildest tumult met her as if they too knew and loved her. She was the only ship I ever knew or heard of that would “stay” under storm-staysails, reefed topsails, and a reefed foresail in a gale of wind. In fact, I never saw anything that she would not do that a ship should do. She was so truly a child of the ocean that even a bungler could hardly mishandle her; she would work well in spite of him. And, lastly, she would steer when you could hardly detect an air out of the heavens, with a sea like a mirror, and the sails hanging apparently motionless. The men used to say she would go a knot with only the quartermaster whistling at the wheel for a wind.
Then for my sins I shipped before the mast in an equally large iron ship bound for Calcutta. She was everything that the Harbinger was not—an ugly abortion that the sea hated. When I first saw her (after I had shipped), I asked the cook whether she wasn’t a razeed steamboat—I had almost said an adapted loco-boiler. When he told me that this was only her second voyage I had to get proof before I could believe him. And as her hull was, so were her sails. They looked like a job lot scared up at ship-chandlers’ sales, and hung upon the yards like rags drying. Our contempt for her was too great for words. Of course she was under water while there was any wind to speak of, and her motions were as strange as those of a seasick pig. A dredger would have beaten her at sailing; a Medway barge, with her Plimsoll mark in the main-rigging, would have been ten times as comfortable. Somehow we buttocked her out in 190 days with 2500 tons of salt in her hold, and again my fortunate star intervened to get me out of her and into a better ship as second mate.
Of steamers I have no authority to speak, although they, too, have their ways, quite as non-understandable as sailing-ships, and complicated, too, by the additional entity of the engines within. But everything that floats and is built by man, from the three-log catamaran of the Malabar coast, or the balsa of Brazil, up to the latest leviathan, has a way of its own, and that way is certainly, in all its variations, past finding out.
Nothing is more loudly regretted by the praisers of old times than the gradual disappearance of etiquette under the stress and burden of these bustling days, and nowhere is the decay of etiquette more pronounced than at sea. Romance persists because until machinery can run itself humanity must do so, and where men and women live romance cannot die. But were it not for the Royal Navy, with its perfect discipline and unbroken traditions, etiquette at sea must without doubt perish entirely, and that soon. Such fragments of it as still survive in the Merchant Service are confined to sailing-ships, those beautiful visions that are slowly disappearing one by one from off the face of the deep. Take, for instance, the grand old custom so full of meaning of “saluting the deck.” The poop or raised after-deck of a ship over which floated the national flag was considered to be always pervaded by the presence of the Sovereign, and, as the worshipper of whatever rank removes his hat upon entering a church, so from the Admiral to the powder-monkey every member of the ship’s company as he set foot upon the poop “saluted the deck”—the invisible presence. As the division between men-of-war and merchantmen widened so the practice weakened in the latter, and only now[185] survives in the rigidly enforced practice of every person below the rank of Captain or mate coming up on to the poop by the lee side. And among the officers the practice is also observed according to rank, for with the Captain on deck the chief mate takes the lee side. But since in steamers there is often no lee side, the custom in them has completely died out. To etiquette also belongs the strict observance of the rule in all vessels of tacking “Sir” on to every reply to an officer, or the accepted synonym for his position to a tradesman who is a petty officer, as “Boss” for boatswain, “Chips” for carpenter, “Sails” for sailmaker, and “Doctor” for cook. A woeful breach of etiquette is committed by the Captain who, coming on deck while one of his mates is carrying out some manœuvre, takes upon himself to give orders direct to the men. It is seldom resented by junior officers for obvious reasons, but the chief mate would probably retire to another part of the vessel at once with the remark that it was “only one man’s work.”
In many cases etiquette and discipline are so closely interwoven that it is hard to know where one leaves off and the other begins, but in all such cases observance is strictly enforced as being one of the few remaining means whereby even a simulacrum of discipline is maintained in undermanned and oversparred sailing-ships—such as the repetition of every order given by the hearer, the careful avoidance of any interference by one man with another’s work in the presence of an officer,[186] and the preservation of each officer’s rightful attitude toward those under his charge and his superiors. Thus during the secular work of the day, work, that is, apart from handling the ship, the mate gives his orders to the boatswain, who sees them carried out. Serious friction always arises when during any operation the mate comes between the boatswain and his gang, unless, as sometimes happens, the boatswain be hopelessly incompetent.
In the private life of the ship every officer’s berth is his house, sacred, inviolable, wherein none may enter without his invitation. And in a case of serious dereliction of duty or disqualification it becomes his prison. “Go to your room, sir,” is a sentence generally equivalent to professional ruin, since a young officer’s future lies in the hollow of his Commander’s hand. The saloon is free to officers only at meal-times, not a common parlour wherein they may meet for chat and recreation, except in port with the Captain ashore. And as it is “aft” so in its degree is it “forrard.” In some ships the carpenter has a berth to himself and a workshop besides, into which none may enter under pain of instant wrath—and “Chips” is not a man to be lightly offended. But in most cases all the petty officers berth together in an apartment called by courtesy the “half-deck,” although it seldom resembles in a remote degree the dingy, fœtid hole that originally bore that name. Very dignified are the petty officers, gravely conscious of their dignity, and sternly set upon the due maintenance of their rightful status as the[187] backbone of the ship’s company. Such a grave breach of etiquette as an “A.B.” entering their quarters, with or without invitation, is seldom heard of, and quite as infrequent are the occasions when an officer does so. In large ships, where six or seven apprentices are carried, an apartment in a house on deck is set apart for their sole occupation, and the general characteristic of such an abode is chaos—unless, indeed, there should be a senior apprentice of sufficient stability to preserve order, which there seldom is. These “boys’ houses” are bad places for a youngster fresh from school, unless a conscientious Captain or chief mate should happen to be at the head of affairs and make it his business to give an eye to the youngsters’ proceedings when off duty. Of course etiquette may be looked for in vain here, unless it be the etiquette of “fagging” in its worst sense.
The men’s quarters, always called the forecastle, even when a more humane shipowner than usual has relegated the forecastle proper to its rightful use as lockers for non-perishable stores and housed his men in a building on deck, is always divided longitudinally in half. The port or mate’s watch live on the port side, the starboard or second mate’s watch on the starboard side. To this rule there is no exception. And here we have etiquette in excelsis. Although the barrier between the two sides is usually of the flimsiest and often quite imaginary in effect, it is a wall of separation with gates guarded and barred. The visitor from one side to the other, whatever his excuse, approaches humbly, feeling ill[188] at ease until made welcome. And from dock to dock it is an unheard-of thing for any officer save the Captain to so much as look into the forecastle. Of course, exceptional circumstances do arise, such as a general outbreak of recalcitrancy, but the occasion must be abnormal for such a breach of etiquette to be made. Some Captains very wisely make it their duty to go the round of the ship each morning, seeing that everything is as it should be, and these enter the forecastle as a part of their examination. But this is quite the exception to the general rule, and is always felt to be more or less of an infringement of immemorial right.
In what must be called the social life of the forecastle, although it is commonly marked by an utter absence of social observances, there are several well-defined rules of etiquette which persist in spite of all other changes. One must not lock his chest at sea. As soon as the last landsman has left the ship, unlock the “donkey,” throw the key ostentatiously into the till, and, letting the lid fall, seat yourself upon it, and light your pipe. It is a Masonic sign of good-fellowship, known and read of all men, that you are a “Sou’ Spainer” indeed, at home again. The first time that the newly assembled crew sit down gipsy fashion to a meal (for tables are seldom supplied), there may be one, usually a boy, who fails to remove his cap. Then does the nearest man’s hand seek the “bread-barge” for a whole biscuit, generally of tile-like texture and consistency. Grasping it by spreading his fingers all over its circumference, the mentor brings it down crushingly[189] upon the covered head of the offender, who is thus initiated, as it were, to the fact that he must “show respect to his grub,” as the term goes. But often when the commons have been exceptionally short or bad an old seaman will deliberately put on his cap again with the remark “’Tain’t wuth it.” If a man wants to smoke while a meal is in progress let him go outside, unless he desires deliberately to raise a storm. And when on the first day of serving out stores a man has been induced to undertake the onerous duty of dividing to each one his weekly portion—“whacking out”—gross indeed must be his carelessness or unfairness before any sufferer will raise a protest. It used to be the practice to load the boys or ordinary seamen (a grade between “A.B.” and boy) with all the menial service of the forecastle, such as food-fetching, washing up utensils, scrubbing, &c. But a juster and wiser plan has been borrowed from the Navy, whereby each man takes in rotation a week as “cook of the mess.” He cooks nothing, the “Doctor” will take care of that, but he is the servant of his house for that week, responsible for its due order and cleanliness. The boys are usually kept out of the forecastle altogether, and berthed with the petty officers, a plan which has with some advantages grave drawbacks. One curious old custom deserves passing notice. Upon a vessel’s arrival in ports where it is necessary to anchor, it is usual to set what is called an “anchor-watch” the first night. All hands take part in this for one hour each, or should do so, but that sometimes there are too few and sometimes too many.[190] As soon as the order is given to “pick for anchor-watch” an old hand draws a rude circle on the deck, which he subdivides into as many sections as there are men. Then one man retires while all the rest come forward and make each man his private mark in a section. When all have contributed, the excluded one (whose mark has been made for him by deputy) is called in and solemnly rubs out mark after mark, the first to be rubbed out giving its owner the first hour’s watch, and so on.
Nothing has been said about etiquette in the Royal Navy, because there it is hardly ever to be distinguished from disciplinary rule. Nor has allusion been more than casually made to steamships, whose routine excludes etiquette, having no more room for it than it has for seamanship, except upon rare occasions.
Beloved of the poet and the painter, appealing by the inimitable grace of their curves and marvel of their motion to all mankind, the waves of the sea take easily their high place with the stars and the mountains as some of the chief glories attendant upon the round world. Only an artist, perhaps, could do justice to the multiplicity of lovely lines into which the ruffled surface of the ocean enwreathes itself under the pressure of the storm. Yet any one with an eye for the beautiful will find it hard to leave a sight so fair, will watch unweariedly for hours the gliding, curling masses as they rise, apparently in defiance of law, subside and rise again and yet again.
Sailors often speak of an “ugly” sea, but the adjective has quite another meaning to that usually attached to it. They do not mean that it is ugly in appearance, for they well know that the beauty of a wave is as much a part of it as is the water—it cannot be otherwise than beautiful, as it cannot cease to be wet. What they mean is a dangerous sea. And by “sea” they always mean wave. A sailor never speaks of a “high wave,” “cross waves,” “heavy waves”; in fact, on board ship, except when passengers are getting information from officers, you will not hear the word “wave” mentioned at all.[192] It is necessary to mention this purely nautical detail to save constant explanation and digression. To return, then, to the sailor’s “ugly” sea. Its ugliness may be due to many different causes, but in the result the waves do not run truly with the wind; they rise unexpectedly and confusedly, changing the natural motion of the ship into a bewildered stagger, such as one will sometimes see in a horse when a brutal, foolish driver is beating him over the head and wrenching first at one rein and then the other without knowing himself what he wants the poor brute to do. It is very pitiful, too, to watch a gallant ship being pressed through an ugly, untrue sea—such, for instance, as may be met with in the North Atlantic with a south-west gale blowing, and the vessel in the midst of the Gulf Stream. The conflict between wind and current, all the more terrible for its invisibility, is deep-reaching, so deep that every excuse must be found for those who have spoken of seas running mountains high. As the steady, implacable thrust of the storm booms forth, the black breadths of water rise rebellious; they would fain flow in the face of the wind, but that cannot be. So they rise, sullenly rise, peak-like, against their persecutor, until his might compels them forward against the mighty stream beneath, and their shattered crags and pinnacles tumble in ruinous heaps around.
Even this, however, is less dangerous than that time—to be spoken of by those who have seen it, and live, with bated breath—when, rotating like some wheel of the gods, the tropical cyclone whirls across the Indian seas. Round and round blow the incredibly furious winds, having a centrifugal direction withal, and yet the whole mighty system progresses in some given direction, until towards its centre there is a Maelstrom indeed—a space where the wind hath left, as it were, a funnel of calm in the world-tumult. And there the waves hold high revel. Heap upon heap the waters rise, without direction, without shape, save that of fortuitous blocks hurled skyward and falling again in ruin. The fountains of the great deep appear to be broken up, and woe to man’s handiwork found straying there in that black hour.
All those who have ever “run the Easting down” will remember, but not all pleasurably, the great true sea of the roaring “forties” or “fifties.” How, unhindered in its world-encircling sweep, the premier wind of all comes joyously, unwaveringly, for many a day without a pause, while the good ship flies before it with every wing bearing its utmost strain. In keeping with the wind, the wave—the long, true wave of the Southern Seas, spreading to infinity on either hand, a gorgeous concave of blue, with its direction as straightly at right angles to the ship’s track as if laid by line, and its ridge all glistening like a wreath of new-fallen snow under silver moon or golden sun. It pursues, it overtakes, rises astern with majestic sound as of all the war-chariots of Neptune; then, easily passing beneath the buoyant keel, it is gone on ahead, has joined its fellows in their stately progress to the East. Adown its far-spreading shoulders stream pennons of white; in the[194] broad valley between it and the next wave the same bright foam creams and hisses until wherever the eye can rest is no longer blue but white—a wilderness of curdling snow just bepatched with azure.
The strong, exultant ship may rejoice in such a scene as this, but it is far otherwise with the weakling. Caught up in this irresistible march of wind and wave, she feels that her place is otherwhere; it is not hers to strive with giants, but to abide by the stuff. Then do the hapless mariners in charge watch carefully for a time when they may lay her to, watch the waves’ sequence, knowing that every third wave is greater, and leaves a broader valley of smooth behind it than its fellows; while some say that with the third sequence of three—the ninth wave—these differences are at their maximum. Why? Who knows? Certain it is that some waves are heavier than others, and equally certain it is that in the case of a truly running sea these heavier seas appear at regularly recurrent intervals of three. And that is all sailors know. Sufficient too, perhaps, as with their weak and overladen ship they watch the smooth, to swing her up between two rolling ranges of water, and without shipping more than thirty or forty tons or so, heave her to, her head just quartering the oncoming waves, and all danger of being overwhelmed by them removed.
Curious indeed are the waves to be found over uneven bottoms with strong undercurrents—as, for instance, on the coast of Nova Scotia—and known as “overfalls.” Sufficiently annoying to vessels of large size that get among them, they are most dangerous to small craft. The water rises in masses perpendicularly, and falls a dead weight without apparent forward motion—a puzzling, deadly sea to meet when a howling gale is driving your small vessel across those angry waters. But the overfall character is common to nearly all waves raised in shallow seas and tidal streams. It adds to the dangers of navigation immensely, and although the eye must be charmed when from the lofty cliff we see the green-bosomed, hoary-shouldered wave come thundering shoreward, we need not expect those to greet him lovingly who must do so in weakness and undefended.
What of the tidal wave; that mysterious indispensable swelling of the waters that, following the “pull” of the moon, rolls round this globe of ours twice in each twenty-four hours, stemming the outflow of mighty rivers, penetrating far inland wherever access is available, and doing within its short lease of life an amount of beneficent work freely that would beggar the wealthiest Monarchy of the world to undertake if it must needs be paid for? Mysterious it may well be called, since, though its passage from zone to zone be so swift, it is, like all other waves, but an undulatory movement of that portion of the sea momentarily influenced by the suasion of the planet—not, as is vulgarly supposed, the same mass of water vehemently carried onward for thousands of miles. No; just as a tightly stretched sheet of calico shows an undulation if the point of a stick be[196] passed along beneath its surface and pressed upward against it, an undulation which leaves every fibre where it was originally, so does the whole surface remain in its place while the long, long wave rolls round the world carrying up to their moorings the homeward-bound ships, sweetening mud-befouled tidal harbours, and giving to forlorn breadths of deserted shallows all the glory and vitality of the youthful sea.
To meet a tidal wave at sea is in some parts of the watery world a grim and unforgettable experience. Floating upon the shining blue plain, with an indolent swelling of the surface just giving a cosy roll to your ship now and then, you suddenly see in the distance a ridge, a knoll of water that advances vast, silent, menacing. Nearer and nearer it comes, rearing its apparently endless curve higher and higher. There is no place to flee from before its face. Neither is there much suspense. For its pace is swift, although it appears so deliberate, from the illimitable grandeur of its extent. It is upon the ship. She behaves in accordance with the way she has been caught and her innate peculiarities. In any case, whatever her bulk, she is hurled forward, upward, backward, downward, as if never again could she regain an even keel, while her crew cling desperately to whatever holding-place they may have reached, lest they should be dashed into dead pieces.
Some will have it that these marvellous upliftings of the sea-bosom are not tidal waves at all—that they do not belong to that normal ebb and flow of the ocean that owns the sway of the moon. If so, they would be met with more frequently than they are at sea, and far more disasters would be placed to their account. This contention seems reasonable, because it is well known that lonely islets such as St. Helena, Tristan d’Acunha, and Ascension are visited at irregular intervals by a succession of appalling waves (rollers) that deal havoc among the smaller shipping, and look as if they would overwhelm the land. The suggestion is that these stupendous waves are due to cosmic disturbance, to submarine earthquakes upheaving the ocean-bed and causing so vast a displacement of the ocean that its undulations extend for several thousands of miles.
As to the speed of waves, judging from all experience, they would seem never to exceed sixteen to eighteen knots an hour in their hugest forms. And yet it is well known that they will often outstrip the gale that gave them birth, let it rage never so furiously. Lying peacefully rolling upon the smoothest of summer seas, you shall presently find, without any alteration in the weather, the vessel’s motion change from its soothing roll to a sharp, irritable, and irritating movement. And, looking overside, there may be seen the forerunners of the storm that is raging hundreds of miles away, the hurrying waves that it has driven in its path. So likewise, long hours after a gale is over, the waves it has raised roll on, still reluctant to resume their levelled peace, and should a new gale arise in some contrary direction, the “old” sea, as the sailor calls it, will persist, making the striving ship’s progress full of weariness and unease to those on board. Of the energy of waves, of the lessons they teach, their immutable mutability, and other things concerning them that leap to the mind, no word can now be spoken, for space is spent.