I ESCAPE FROM THE PRESS.
I struggled and was savagely gripped by the arm. I stood grasped by two
huge brawny men, one of whom called out, “No caper-cutting, my lad. No
need to show your paces here.”
“I am first mate of the _Royal Brunswicker_,” I exclaimed.
“You looks like a first mate--the chap that cooks the mate. You shall
have mates enough, old ship--shipmates and messmates.”
“Let me go. You cannot take me; you know it. I am first mate of the
_Royal Brunswicker_--the ship astern of the frigate----”
“Heave ahead, lads,” exclaimed a voice that was not wanting in
refinement, though it sounded as if the person who owned it was rather
tipsy.
At the moment of seizing me the company of fellows had halted within the
sheen of the lamp at the corner of the street. They were a wonderfully
fine body of men, magnificent examples of the British sailor of a
period when triumphant successes and a long victorious activity had
worked the British naval seaman up to the highest pitch of perfection
that he ever had attained, a pitch that it must be impossible for him
under the utterly changed conditions of the sea life to ever again
attain. They were armed with cutlasses, and some of them carried
truncheons and wore round hats and round jackets and heavy belts. Two of
the mob were pressed men.
“Heave ahead, lads,” cried the refined dram-thickened voice.
I looked in the direction of the voice, and observed a young fellow clad
in a pea-coat, with some sort of head-gear on his head that might have
been designed to disguise him.
“Sir,” cried I, “are you the officer in command here?”
“Never you mind! Heave ahead, lads; steer a straight course for the
boat.”
In a moment the whole body of us were in motion. A seaman on either hand
grasped me by the arm, and immediately behind were the other two pressed
men.
“Tom Martin,” I roared out, hoping that the old fellow might yet be
within hearing; “you see what has happened. For God’s sake report to
Captain Round.”
“Who’s that bawling?” angrily and huskily shouted the young officer in
the pea-coat.
I marched for a few paces in silence, mad and degraded; bewildered, too;
nay, I may say confounded almost to distraction by the hurry of the
astonishing experiences which I had encountered within the last hour.
“What ship do you belong to?” I presently said, addressing a big
bull-faced man who guarded me on the left.
“The frigate out yonder,” he answered in a deep, wary voice; “keep a
civil tongue in your head and give no trouble, and what’s wrong will be
righted, if wrong there be,” and he looked at me by the light of a
second lamp that the company of us was tramping past.
“I am mate of the _Royal Brunswicker_ now probably getting her anchor
astern of your frigate,” said I. “Cannot I make your officer believe me,
for then he might set me aboard?”
The fellow on my right rumbled with laughter as though he would choke.
We trudged onward, making for that part of the beach upon which King
Street opens. Presently one of the pressed men in my wake began to
curse; he used horrible language. With frightful imprecations he
demanded to know why he should be obliged to fight for a king whose
throat he thirsted to cut; why he should be obliged to fight for a
nation which he didn’t belong to, whose people he hated; why he was to
be converted into a bloody piratical man-of-war’s man, instead of being
left to follow the lawful, respectable calling of a merchant seaman----
A mighty thump on the back, that sounded like the blow of a handspike
upon a hatch-cover, knocked his hideous speech into a single half-choked
growl, and the young gentleman with the refined but husky voice called
out:
“If that beast doesn’t belay his jaw, stuff his mouth full of shingle
and gag him.”
I guessed that this gang were satisfied with picking up three men that
night, for they looked neither to right nor left for more, and headed on
a straight course for their boat. After the ruffian astern of me had
been thumped into silence scarce a word was uttered. The sailors seemed
weary, as though they had had a long bout of it, and the officer,
perhaps, was too sensible of being under the influence of drink to
venture to define his state by more words than were absolutely needful.
I had heard much of the brutality of the press-gang, of taunts and
kicks, of maddening ironic promises of prize money and glory to the
miserable wretches torn from their homes or from their ships, of
pitiless usage, raw heads, and broken bones. All this I had heard of,
but I witnessed nothing of the sort among the men into whose hands I had
fallen. In silence we marched along, and the tramp of our feet was
returned in a hollow echo from the houses we passed, and the noise, of
our tread ran through the length of the feebly lighted street, which the
presence of the King’s seamen had desolated as utterly as though the
plague had been brought to Deal out of the East, and as though the
buildings held nothing but the dead.
By the time we had arrived at that part of the beach where lay the
boat--a large cutter, watched by a couple of seamen armed with cutlasses
and pistols--my mind had in some measure calmed down. The degradation of
being collared and man-handled was indeed maddening and heart-subduing;
but then I was beginning to think this--that first of all it was very
probable I must have lost my ship, press-gang or no press-gang, seeing
that I could not get a boat to put me aboard her; next, that my being
kidnaped, as I call it, would find me such a reason for my absence as
Captain Spalding and the owners of the vessel must certainly allow to be
unanswerable. Then, again, I was perfectly sure of being released and
sent ashore when I had represented my condition to the captain or
lieutenant of the frigate; and I might also calculate upon old Tom
Martin communicating with my uncle, who would, early in the day, come
off to the frigate and confirm my story.
These reflections, I say, calmed me considerably, though my mind
continued very much troubled and all awork within me, for I could not
forget the horrible picture of the gibbet and the prodigious flash of
fire which had delivered the dead hanging son to his wretched mother;
and I was likewise much haunted and worried by the thought of the poor
woman sitting upon the sand under the gibbet, fondling the loathsome
body and whispering to it, and often looking over the billowy waste of
glimmering sand, that would now be whitened by the moon, in the
direction I had taken, expecting, perhaps, that I should return or send
some human soul to help her bury the corpse, that it might not be hooked
up again.
The Downs were now full of life. There was a pleasant fresh breeze
blowing from the southward, and the water came whitening and feathering
in strong ripples to the shingle. The moon was riding over the sea south
of the southernmost limit of the Goodwin Sands. She was making some
light in the air, though but a piece of moon, and a short length of her
silver greenish reflection trembled under her. Almost all the vessels
had got under weigh and were standing in groups of dark smudges east or
west. It was impossible to tell which might be the _Royal Brunswicker_,
but I could see no craft answering to her size in that part near the
frigate where she had brought up.
When we were come to the cutter we three pressed men were ordered to get
into her. I quietly entered, and so did one of of the other two, but the
third--the man who had cursed and raged as he had walked along--flung
himself down upon the shingle.
“What you can’t carry you may drag,” he exclaimed, and he swore horribly
at the men.
“In with the scoundrel!” said the lieutenant.
And now I saw what sort of tenderness was to be expected from
press-gangs when their kindness was not deserved, for three stout
seamen, catching hold of the blaspheming fellow, one by the throat, as
it seemed, another by the arm, and a third by the breech flung him over
the gunwale as if he were some dead carcass of a sheep, and he fell with
a crash upon the thwarts and rolled, bloody with a wound in the head
and half stunned, into the bottom of the boat.
The lieutenant sat ready to ship the rudder, others of the men got into
the boat, and the rest, grasping the line of her gunwale on either hand,
rushed her roaring down the incline of shingle into the soft white wash
of the breakers, themselves tumbling inward with admirable alertness as
she was water-borne. Then six long oars gave way, and the boat sheared
through the ripples.
The breeze was almost dead on and the tide was the stream of flood, the
set of it already strong, as you saw by the manner in which the in-bound
shadows of ships in the eastward shrank and melted, while those standing
to the westward, their yards braced well forward or their fore and aft
booms pretty nigh amidships, sat square to the eye abreast, scarcely
holding their own. The frigate lay in a space of clear water at a
distance of about a mile and three-quarters. Though the corner of moon
looked askant at her, she hung shapeless upon the dark surface, a mere
heap of intricate shadow, with the gleam of a lantern at her stern and a
light on the stay over the spritsail yard.
The man who had been thrown into the boat sat up. He passed his wrist
and the back of his hand over his brow, turned his knuckles to the moon
to look at them, and broke out:
“You murdering blackguards! I’ll punish ye for this. If I handle your
blasted powder it’ll be to blow you and your----”
“Silence that villain!” cried the lieutenant.
“A villain yourself, you drunken ruffian! You are just the figure of the
baste I’ve been draming all my life I was swung for. Oh, you rogue, how
sorry I am for you! Better had ye given yourself up long ago for the
crimes you’ve committed than have impressed me. The hangman’s work would
have been over, but my knife----”
“Gag him!” cried the lieutenant.
The fellow sprang to his feet, and in another instant would have been
overboard. He was caught by his jacket, felled inward by a swinging,
cruel blow, and lay kicking, fighting, biting, and blaspheming at the
bottom of the boat. In consequence of the struggle four of the oarsmen
could not row, and the other two lay upon their oars. The lieutenant, in
a voice fiery with rage and liquor, roared out to his men to pinion the
scoundrel, to gag the villain, to knock the blasphemous ruffian over the
head. All sorts of wild, drunken, savage orders he continued to roar
out; and I was almost deafened by his cries of rage, by the howling and
shouting of the man in the bottom of the boat, by the curses and
growlings of the fellows who were man-handling him.
On a sudden a man yelled: “For God’s sake, sir, look out!” and, lifting
my eyes from the struggling figure in the bottom of the boat, I
perceived the huge bows of a vessel of some three hundred or four
hundred tons looming high, close aboard of us. She had canvas spread to
her royal mastheads, and leaned from the breeze with the water breaking
white from her stem, and in the pause that followed the loud, hoarse cry
of “For God’s sake, sir, look out!” one could hear the hiss and ripple
of the broken waters along her bends.
“Ship ahoy!” shouted one of the seamen.
The man in the bottom of the boat began to scream afresh, struggling and
fighting like a madman, and hopelessly confusing the whole company of
sailors in that supreme moment. The boat swayed as though she would
capsize; the lieutenant, standing high in the stern sheets, shrieked to
the starboard bow oar to “pull like hell!” others roared to the
approaching ship to port her helm; but, in another minute, before
anything could be done, the towering bow had struck the boat! A cry went
up, and, in the beat of a pulse, I was under water with a thunder as of
Niagara in my ear.
I felt myself sucked down, but I preserved my senses, and seemed to
understand that I was passing under the body of the ship, clear of her,
as though swept to and steadied at some depth below her keel by the
weight of water her passage drove in downward recoil. I rose, bursting
with the holding of my breath, and floated right upon an oar, which I
grasped with a drowning grip, though I was a tolerable swimmer; and
after drawing several breaths--and oh, the ecstasy of that respiration!
and oh, the sweetness of the air with which I filled my lungs!--my wits
being still perfectly sound, I struck out with my legs, with no other
thought in me _then_ than to drive clear of the drowning scramble which
I guessed was happening hard by.
The oar was under my arms, and my ears hoisted well above the surface of
the water. I heard a man steadily shouting--he was at some distance from
me, and was probably holding, as I was, to something that floated
him--but no other cries than that lonely shouting reached me; no
bubbling noises of the strangling; nothing to intimate that anything
lived.
I turned my head and looked in the direction of the ship. Her people may
or may not have known that they had run down a boat. Certainly she had
not shifted her helm; she was standing straight on, a leaning shadow
with the bit of moon hanging over her mastheads.
In a few moments the fellow that was shouting at some little distance
from me fell silent; but whatever his plight might have been, I could
not have helped him, for the tide was setting me at the rate of some two
or three miles in the hour into the northeast, and, to come at him, he
being astern of me as regards the direction of the tide, I should have
been obliged to head in the direction whence his voice had proceeded and
seek for him; and so, as I say, I could not have helped him.
We had pulled a full mile, and perhaps more than a mile, from the shore
when we were run down. The low land of Deal looked five times as far as
a mile across the rippling black surface on which I floated. Yet I knew
that the distance could not exceed a mile, and I set my face toward the
lights of the beach and struck out with my legs; but I moved feebly. I
had swallowed plentifully of salt water when I sank, and the brine
filled me with weakness, and I was heavy and sick with it. Then, again,
my strength had been shrunk by the sudden dreadful shock of the
collision and by my having been under water, breathless and bursting,
while, as I might take it, the whole length of the ship was passing over
me. I knew that I should never reach the land by hanging over an oar and
striking out with my legs. The oar was long and heavy; there was no
virtue in the kick of my weakened heels to propel the great blade and
loom of ash held athwart as I was obliged to hold it. And all this time
the tide was setting me away northeast, with an arching trend to the
sheerer east, owing to the conformation of the land thereabouts; so that
though for some time I kept my face turned upon Deal, languidly, almost
lifelessly, moving my legs in the direction of the lights of that town,
in reality the stream was striking me into the wider water; and after a
bit I was able to calculate--and I have no doubt accurately--that if I
abandoned myself to my oar and floated only (and in sober truth that was
all I could do, and pretty much all that I had been doing), I should
double the North Foreland at about two miles from that point of coast,
and strand, a corpse, upon some shoal off Margate or higher up.
I looked about me for a ship. Therein lay hope. I looked, not for a
ship at anchor, unless she hove in view right on end of the course my
oar was taking, but for a vessel in motion to hail as she came by; but I
reckoned she must come by soon, for on testing my lungs when I thought
of the shout I would raise if a ship came by, I discovered that she
would have to pass very close if she was to hear me. Indeed, what I had
undergone that night, from the moment of lighting upon the gibbet down
to this moment of finding myself floating on one oar, had proved too
much for my strength, extraordinarily robust as I was in those days: and
then, again, the water was bitterly cold--cold, too, was the wind as it
brushed me, with a constant feathering of ripples that kept my head and
face wet for the wind to blow the colder upon.
The light was feeble, the moon shed but scant illumination, and whenever
she was shadowed by a cloud, deep darkness closed over the sea. There
were vessels near and vessels afar, but none to be of use. A large
cutter was heading eastward about half a mile abreast of me; I shouted
and continued to shout, but a drowning sigh would have been as audible
to her people. She glided on, and when the moon went behind a cloud the
loom of the cutter blended with the darkness, and when the moon came out
again, and I looked for the vessel, I could not see her.
I afterward learned that I passed five hours in this dreadful situation.
How long I had spent hanging over the oar when my senses left me I know
not; I believe that dawn was not then far off; I seem to recollect a
faintness of gray stealing up off the distant rim of the sea like a
smoke into the sky, the horizon standing firm and dark against the
dimness as though the water were of thick black paint; and by that time
I guess I had been carried by the tide to a part of the Channel that
lies abreast of the cliffs between the town of Ramsgate and the little
bay into which the Stour empties itself.