The tug pulled the _Kelvinhaugh_ to the Tail of the Bank and the
barque dropped her anchor there. During the journey down the river the
second mate kept Donald busy on odd jobs, and several times he was in
close proximity to Captain Muirhead, but the latter never even greeted
him by word or look. When the tug departed, the Captain eyed the sky,
cloudy and overcast, and went below to his cabin. Hinkel also went
below, after ordering Donald to sweep up the poop, and he was sweeping
when Mr. Nickerson came aft.
"Waal, boy, what d'ye think of it all?" he enquired blithely. "Goin'
to like it?"
"I'll like it after a while, sir," answered Donald with a smile. "When
I get more used to the ship and the work."
The mate laughed and a saturnine smile came over his sharp features.
"Which means you don't think a hell of a lot of it so far, eh? Waal,
son, ye're dead right. It's a dog's life, and the man who goes to sea
for a livin' nowadays 'ud go to hell for pleasure!" And after
delivering the ancient deep sea proverb, he too turned and went below.
After sweeping up the poop, Donald went down to the half-deck and
found Thompson having his dinner. "Come along, nipper!" he cried
cheerfully. "What'll you have? Roast stuffed duckling with baked
potatoes, string beans and brussels sprouts, jam roly-poly and
coffee! How would that suit you?"
"That would suit me fine!" exclaimed Donald eagerly looking for
evidences of such a menu.
"You bally well bet it would suit you!" laughed Thompson, "but there
ain't no sich luck, as the Yankees say! Here's your chow! Dig in and
curse your uncle!" As he spoke he pushed a large tin pan containing
mushy potatoes and a fat, disgusting lump of pork, towards Donald. He
also indicated a hook-pot and a small wooden half-pail. "There's the
tea and coffee in the pot--it's coffee in the morning and tea at other
times, but it's the same stuff--and there's hard bread in the barge
there. Sink me! I don't know why I left a comfortable home to go
knocking around in one of these mean Scotch ships!"
Donald helped himself to the food and made a meal of the worst viands
he had ever swallowed in his life. "Is it always like this?" he asked,
disgustedly pushing the mess-kit away from his sight.
"Always like this?" echoed Thompson in mock indignation. "Well, I'm
blowed! Godfrey, nipper, you'll appreciate chow as good as that afore
this trip's ended! Yes, siree! you'll learn to thank the good Lord for
a penny herring and a slice o' white bread and a real potato yet. And
you'll eat your fill o' rotten grub afore you hit the beach again, my
son! Such ungratefulness, Oliver Twist!--damned if it ain't!"
Thompson would have continued in this strain for a while, but there
came a tug at the half-deck door and two youths leaped in dragging
bags and chests. "Hullo, Jack!" shouted both in unison. "Here we are
again!" Both were dressed in apprentice's uniform and were chunky lads
around sixteen years of age. "Who's the new chum, Jack?" queried
one--a chubby, curly-haired chap with a pleasant smile and nice white
teeth.
Thompson waved a lazy hand. "McKenzie, meet Jenkins and Moore. Jenkins
has done one stretch, but Moore has only four days of his four years
in. Jenkins here is a fat-head for sleep, while Moore is a young
sailor but a damned old soldier and would sooner skulk than work. Now
you know them!"
Jenkins laughed, but Moore scowled. He was a swarthy complexioned lad
with a large ugly mouth and beady black eyes. Donald sized his two
shipmates up quickly. Jenkins would be alright, but Moore would be
quarrelsome. Two minutes later, his deductions were verified when both
started to protest at having to take lower bunks. "I say, Thompson,
old man," said Jenkins, "the nipper will have to turn out of that
bunk--"
"No he won't," answered Thompson, calmly smoking away. "I told him to
put his truck there and he'll stay there!"
"Oh, I say, dam'-it-all," expostulated Jenkins. Moore started to pull
Donald's stuff out of the bunk. Donald jumped to his feet. "What the
deuce are you doing with my things?" he cried calmly.
"I'm goin' to take this bunk," he growled. "If you or Jenkins want a
punch in the jaw, I'll give it to you!"
Donald realized in a flash that his comfort in future absolutely
depended upon himself--nobody else would help him here, so he gave
Moore a blow on the mouth with all the power of his right fist. The
Irish lad's beady eyes snapped savagely, and with the blood streaming
from his cut lips, he went for Donald and the two mixed it up in a
proper rough and tumble.
Thompson jumped from the seat and hauled Moore away. "You leave
McKenzie and his bunk alone, you blighter, or I'll wipe the deck with
you! You take that bunk there and be blamed glad to get it!" And he
hove Moore down into the worst located of the two lowers.
Donald sat down panting with an eye which was rapidly discoloring. "I
say, Jenkins," he said to the other apprentice, "I'm sorry to have
done you out of a good bunk, but I'm game to toss you for it--" "No,
you won't," laughed Jenkins. "It serves me right for not joining the
ship in Glasgow. First come, first served. You keep the bunk, nipper.
Let's have a drink!" He produced a bottle of whisky, and on Donald
refusing to join in, they offered a drink to Moore, who sullenly
accepted.
This whisky drinking by lads of sixteen and twenty rather shocked
Donald, but he had scarcely been an hour in the company of the three
before he heard enough to convince him that there wasn't much in the
way of vice they didn't know. The drinking, swearing, and the
recounting of vicious adventures and questionable stories caused
Donald to wonder why such wickedness was not visited by instant
retribution from Heaven. Blasphemy and the ribald use of the most
sacred things seemed to roll from the tongues of his companions like
water from a fountain.
Thompson had been applying himself to the bottle rather heavily and he
was fast becoming "tight." He turned around to Donald, who was sitting
on his chest listening to the talk. "Look at that poor l'il devil
there!" he drawled thickly. "I like that l'il feller--he's such a
pale-faced skinny l'il nipper. He c'd crawl through a ring-bolt, by
Godfrey! Ne'mind, son! You've jus' got t' learn to drink a four-finger
nip 'thout blinkin' or coughin', an' learn to spin nine hundred dirty
yarns, an' swear to music, an' keep watch snoozin' between bells, an'
you'll be a real dyed-in-the-wool shellback, with every finger a
fishhook, and every hair a ropeyarn, an' blood of Stockholm tar!"
Thompson rambled on. "His uncle owns this hooker. Th' lousy Scotch
miser! But he don't love that kid, he don't. Sends him to sea in this
ruddy coffin an' fits him out with a donkey's breakfast and a dog's
wool blanket an' a kit ye could shoot peas through--"
A heavy tramp of sea-booted feet halted outside. Jenkins whipped the
bottle away, as the broad ugly face of Mr. Hinkel appeared in the
door. "Now, den, vot are you lazy defils loafin' avay your time in
here for?" he rasped in his guttural brogue. "Gome oudt of dot und
bear a hand to bend der flying yib und overhaul some of der gear
aloft. Dam' rigger's snarls everywhere und dam' lazy boys loafin' und
yarnin' und egspecting Gottalmighty to do der vork!" He slammed the
door and Jenkins extended a spread hand with a thumb to his nose,
while Thompson cursed the second mate for a "beastly yumping yiminy
Yudas Dutchman!"
The boys toiled and mucked all afternoon in the rain and bitter wind,
and Donald crawled to his bunk at seven that evening aching in every
limb and muscle and with his hands skinned and painful. For hours he
tossed around listening to the snores of his ship-mates, and the
sighing of the rain-laden wind in the gear aloft. It had been an
eventful day, but a day in which his clean ideal of a sea-life had
been rudely shattered. He was seeing it now in its naked, unvarnished,
unromantic reality, and he was realizing that if he would hold his own
he must protect his rights by physical force and steel himself to
endure many hardships in soul and body; case-harden his finer
feelings, and rigorously restrain all impulses of sympathy and the
fine charity which can be exhibited ashore. His father was the
embodiment of all that was good and honorable and kind, yet, no doubt,
he was as unimpressionable and as callous as Thompson or even Mr.
Nickerson, while roughing it in his early days at sea. He thought of
Thompson and Jenkins. Both these lads were "straight" according to
youthful ethics, but how rough and tough they were in their sea-life,
yet, in their homes they were possibly, and probably, as fine, true
and as honorable young fellows as those environed by gentler walks of
life. Sea-ways were not shore-ways, and it did not take Donald long to
find out that a sea-life would make of a man exactly what he himself
desired. Youth was left very much to his own resources. There was no
mother to caress or to correct in a ship's half-deck, and in the ruck
of it all, with its disgusting familiarity, evil talk and callousness,
the lad who had the instincts of a gentleman and a clean heart
implanted in him, would come through it without being contaminated in
mind or speech or diseased in body.
The _Kelvinhaugh_ lay for three days at the Tail of the Bank getting
ready for sea. Though a brand new ship and fresh from the riggers'
yard, yet there was more to do in getting her ready than in a craft
that had been under sailors' hands for a dozen voyages. Standing gear
had to be screwed up again, running gear rove off through the right
leads and a hundred and one small gadgets installed which riggers omit
and sailors have to fit. In this work, Donald did his share and spent
many hours aloft working with the other lads. There was a rare thrill
in this climbing and toiling with good honest cordage up in the tops
and on the yards--and he felt that clambering and swinging about on
the barque's dizzy eminences savored of the real adventure of
sea-faring. Like all boys, he could climb, and being free from
giddiness, he thoroughly enjoyed the view from aloft. Looking down on
the ship, she appeared to his unsailorly eye, a most beautiful model,
and the men working on deck seemed as pigmies, while he, suspended
like Mahomet's tomb, between sea and sky, felt a strange
exhilaration--a sensation which lent zest to the work and made him
look to the future with a happier heart. Alas, he was unconsciously
imbibing the doctrines of all sailoring, in which one remembers the
good times and forgets the hardships and the miserable days.
On the third day there was enough blue in the sky "tae mak' a
Hielanman a pair o' breeks" and the wind was coming away fair for a
slant south. The two short-shipped men had turned up, dazed and
useless in the aftermath of a carouse, and were in the fo'c'sle
"sleeping it off." At nine a tug came out, and the bos'n having got
steam up in the donkey, the anchor was hove up without capstan-bar or
chantey, and the _Kelvinhaugh_ trailed at the end of a tow-line down
the Firth of Clyde with a fresh northerly breeze whipping the short
combers into white-capped corrugations.
By mid-afternoon the barque had pulled through the Cumbraes and the
captain was up on the poop squinting around. He had discarded his
shore toggery and slumped around in a cloth cap, a cardigan jacket,
heavy woollen pants and carpet slippers. After a long scrutiny of sky
and sea, and a tap at the mercurial barometer hanging in the
chart-house, he spoke to the mate. "We'll get the muslin on her when
she comes up wi' Arran. Wi' this northerly we're no needin' a tug and
A'm thinkin' we'll be safe in rinnin' doon the Irish Channel."
The mate nodded. "Aye, sir. Looks like a fair wind, sir!" And he
sniffed at the breeze like a hound scenting his quarry. The Old Man
grunted and resumed his pacing along the weather side of the poop.
When the high purple-heathered hills of Arran came abeam, the master
ceased his pacing. "Get yer tops'ls on her, mister!" he ordered the
mate, and his quiet command seemed to galvanize ship and crew to
stirring action. "Loose tops'ls!" roared Mr. Nickerson, and the hands
working on "stowing-away" jobs, at which they were time-spinning,
seemed to be imbued with new life. "Loose tops'ls--he says!" cried the
bos'n directing his squad. "Move yerselves, blast ye! Loose th' fore,
you! Main an' mizzen you! Look spry now, my sons, or ye'll have th'
mate down among ye wi' some Yankee salt to put on yer tails!" The
latter _sotto voce_.
Donald went up with Thompson to the lower mizzen topsail yard, and
under the senior apprentice's direction, cast the confining gaskets
adrift. Almost simultaneously from the three masts came the shout,
"All gone, sir. Sheet home!" As the canvas rustled and flapped from
the yards and bellied in the restraining gear, the mate's nasal
bawlings could be heard injecting action. "Lay daown from aloft you
skulkers 'n get some beef on them tops'l sheets. Look slippy naow!"
The chain sheets rattled and clanked through the sheaves as the men,
standing on the fife-rail and deck, hove down, "hey-ho'ing!" and
barking, on the slack and brought the lower clews of the fore lower
topsail nigh to the sheaves of the fore-yard-arms. A man squinted
aloft after the last sweat had been given at the sheets. "What a hell
ov a poor cut sail," he remarked.
"To yer main an' mizzen tops'ls naow!" came the mate's roar. "Never
mind gamming. Ye're not on a spouter (whaler)!" Main and mizzen lower
topsails were set to the wind, and the _Kelvinhaugh_ started to drive
ahead on her own and the tow-rope began to light up. "Up on yer
foretopm'st-stays'l!" "Stand-by to get that tow-line aboard. For'ard
with ye!" The tug blew a blast of her whistle and made a wide sheer
from under the bows. The tow-rope was let go, and while twenty men
hauled the wet, snakey manilla aboard over the foc'slehead, the tug
steamed around and came up on the barque's weather quarter to receive
a material valediction--in the shape of a bottle of whisky--and the
last letters. Donald saw the package being thrown down on the tug's
decks at the end of a heaving-line, and he watched with some anxiety
for the safety of the hastily-written note which he had indited to his
mother. It was a cheerful note--full of optimism which he did not feel
when writing it, and he played up the most promising and alluring
aspects of a sea-life and the men in whose company he would be for
many months. Poor lad! the romantic ideal was fast fading and it was
hard to write paragraphs of happy fiction with Thompson and Jenkins
swapping gloomy prognostications for the future over the mess-table.
The tow-boat blew a long farewell blast from her whistle and dropped
astern. Within five minutes she had swung around and was steaming up
the Firth as fast as her slatting paddle-blades would take her, and
with her went the _Kelvinhaugh's_ last link with the land for many a
long day.
"Upper tops'ls naow!" came the order, and under the curseful
directions of the two mates and the bos'n, able-bodied, ordinary and
apprentice seamen were hustled from job to job, and in the midst of
the action, Donald scarce realized that he was assisting to carry out
those wonderful manoeuvres over which he had gloated in printed
page. Somehow the actual seemed different from the visionary. There
was surly venom in the barking orders of--"Tops'l halliards naow an'
put yer bloody backs into it you lazy hounds!" and such bitter remarks
as "Struth! A poor bunch of beef in this crowd. Sailormen have all
died an' nawthin' left naow but skulking kids an' broken-down sojers!"
which came from the mate. In the novels the mate was usually a bluff,
fatherly old codger who sung out "Heave away, my lads!" or "Haul away,
my hearties!" in a hurricane roar, and with many good-humored asides
interspersed between orders, but in cold realism on the _Kelvinhaugh_,
Donald felt that Mr. Nickerson was only using his tongue because he
was denied the use of his fist and boot, and the hulking German second
mate growled and grunted and pushed in sullen self-restraint because
British sea laws forbade him commencing the voyage by killing someone.
Running with square yards past the Arran hills, the deep-laden barque
ploughed along with all hands sweating at the halliards and sheets and
dressing the _Kelvinhaugh_ in her "muslin." Her tops'l yards were
heavy, and it did not take the old hands in the crew long to realize
that they had signed in a "work-house" in this short-handed,
heavily-sparred craft. With the tops'l halliards led to a main-deck
capstan, the crew stamped around straining at the bars in sullen
silence. The stolid, brutal German barked guttural curses--he was too
thick-headed to notice anything unusual in this silent labor, but the
keen-eared mate sensed the absence of the deep-water working chorus,
and he was down on the scene in a minute giving tongue.
"Come on thar', bullies! Ain't thar' a chantey-man in the crowd?
Strike a light someone! A chantey does the work of ten men, so walk
her raound an' sing aout!" A West Indian negro showed his white teeth
in an ingratiating smile and the mate spied him. "A black-bird to sing
every time!" he cried. "Come you coon--loosen up yer pipes an' shout
an' walk them tops'l yards to the mast-head!" Thus encouraged, the
negro commenced in a clear tenor,
"Shanandoah, I love yore daughter!"
"Bark you hounds!" roared the mate. "Sing aout an' heave 'round!" And
the chorus was timidly voiced in half-a-dozen keys.
"Away! My rolling river!"
The black soloist pushed and sang.
"Oh, Shanandoah, I loves to hear yo!"
Then the crowd, warming to their work, roared in unison.
"Ah, ha, we're bound away--
'Cross the wide Missouri!"
The ancient chantey "took hold" and the men woke up from their sullen
apathy and stamped around the clinking capstan roaring the plaintive
refrains to the negro's quavering solo. The mate stood watching with a
smile on his keen visage. "That's what we want to hear aboard these
hookers!" he said. "When I don't hear a craowd singin' out they're
liverish and I'm ready to dose 'em up with a double whack of black
draught!"
Whether it was through a new spirit of cheerfulness at getting under
sail or through dread of the old sea medicine, the crowd commenced
chanteying, and in hauling out the topgallantsail sheets and
mastheading the royal yards, Donald felt something of seafaring
romance, amidst the hard work and his burning hands, in lustily
bawling the ancient choruses of "Sally Brown I love yer daughter!"
"Whisky Johnny," or "On the plains of Mexico."
By the time Pladda was abeam, it was becoming dark, and the barque,
sail-clad from scupper to truck, was rolling, a creamy "bone in her
teeth" from her blunt bows and slugging along with a slight roll to
port and starboard. With the blue bulk of Ailsa Craig ahead over the
jib-boom and her royals and fores'l set, the big wind-jammer began to
smell the windy spaces of her unsailed traverses, while aft on the
poop paced the Old Man--proud of his new command and anxious to see
how she was shaping up. Down in the half-deck, Donald, aching in bone
and muscle, and with hands blistered, skinned and paining, gulped his
tea in a daze, with but one consuming desire--to get into his bunk and
court blessed oblivion.