close saw that he trembled violently, 'der toyfel is on boardt dis
ship. I have seen her mit mine eyes. If I hov not seen her den I was a
nightmare und she was mad. Look up dar.'
"He obtained no answer. The seamen attending the indication of the
Dutchman were to a man gazing aloft with hanging chins; for on high up
in the cross-trees, a visible bulk of shadow, there sat, squatted,
hung--what? A man? No angel from heaven surely? A demon then with
folded wings like those of a bat resting in his flight from the halls
of fire to some star of Satan? Mateys, if you think this language too
poetical, I'll translate my thought into fok'sle speech. But I'd
rather leave the job to others," said the grey-haired respectable
seaman; "I've forgotten the profanities of the sea-parlour. I have not
used a bad word for thirty year."
Some interruption by laughter attended this flight. The grey-haired
sailor looked round him with his slow critical motion of eye, and
continued:
"'What's wrong aloft forrad there?' bawled the mate, and now he sung
out with energy and decision, for the figure of the captain was
alongside of him.
"'There's something aloft that looks like a man,' howled a seaman, one
of the upstaring crowd about the Dutchman. 'Come forrad, sir. You'll
see him.'
"The mate and the captain went forward and looked up.
"'It's a man,' exclaimed the captain. 'Aloft there! What are you doing
skylarking up in those cross-trees? Come down!' he cried, angrily.
"'You sick-hearts, what d'ye see to stare at, or seeing, why don't you
go for it?' thundered the mate, after a pause, during which the figure
on high had made no answer or motion, and as he spoke the words the
officer bounded on to the bulwarks, and ran up the fore-shrouds.
"He travelled with heroic speed till he got as high as the foretop.
There he stood at gaze; presently, after you might have counted fifty,
putting his foot into the topmast rigging he began to crawl, with
frequent breathless stops; his passage up those shrouds had the dying
uncertainty of the tread of a blue-bottle when it climbs a sheet of
glass in October.
"On a sudden he came down into the top very fast. There he stood
staring aloft as though fascinated or electrified, then putting his
foot over the top he got into the fore-shrouds, and trotted down on
deck, all very quick. The captain stood near the main hatch, looking
up. The mate approached him, and, in a whisper of awe and terror,
exclaimed, whilst his eyes sought the shadow up in the foretopmast
cross-trees, 'I believe the Dutchman's right, sir, and that we've been
boarded by the devil himself.'
"'What are you talking about?'
"'I never saw the like of such a thing,' said the mate, in shaking
tones.
"'Is it a man?' said the captain, staring up with amazement, while the
seamen came hustling close in a sneaking way to listen, and the
Dutchman drew close to the mate.
"'It has the looks of a man,' said the mate; 'yet it sha'n't be murder
if you kill him.'
"'She vos no man, sir. I vos close. I vent closer don you. I oxpect,
sir,' said the Dutchman, 'she's an imp. Strange dot I did not see him
till I was upon her.'
"The captain went swiftly to his cabin for a binocular glass. The
lenses helped him to determine the motionless shadow in the
cross-trees, and he clearly distinguished an apparently large human
shape, but in what fashion, or whether or not habited, it was
impossible to see. How had he come into the ship? The captain went on
to the poop and searched the silent sea with the glass with some fancy
of finding a boat within reach of his vision. Nothing was to be seen
but the glass-smooth face of the deep, with here and there the light
of a large trembling star draining into it. The catspaw had died out,
and it mattered nothing whether they braced the fore-yards round or
not.
"It got wind in the forecastle that something wild, unearthly,
hellish, was aloft, and the watch below turned out, too restless to
sleep, and all through those hours of darkness the sailors walked the
decks in groups, again and again staring up at the foretopmast
cross-trees, where the mysterious bulk of blackness sate, squatted, or
hung motionless, like some brooding fiend, or incarnation of ill-luck,
sinking by force of meditation its curses not loud, but deep, into the
bottom of the very hold itself.
"'Why don't the captain let me shoot him?' said the second mate at
four o'clock. 'I cannot miss that mark; my rifle will bring him to
your feet at the cost of a single shot.'
"'No,' said the chief mate, 'I've talked of trying what shooting will
do. The captain means to wait for sunlight. But how did it get on
board?' said he, sinking his voice in awe. 'There's no land for
hundreds of leagues. Is it some sort of human sea-monster, some merman
whose looks blind you with their ugliness, which this ship's been
doomed to discover, and perhaps carry home?'
"It was not long before day whitened the east. In those climates the
morning is a quick revelation, and hardly had the dawn broke when sea
and sky were lighted up. And then, and even then, what was it? There
it sat up in the cross-trees, a hairy, sulky bulk of man or beast,
black, and the creature looked hard down whilst all hands were staring
hard up.
"Seized if it isn't a gorilla!" said the mate.
"'No.' said the captain, letting fall his binocular, 'look for
yourself. Yet, it's not a man, either.' He burst into a laugh as
though for relief. 'It's a huge, hairy baboon, one of the biggest I
ever saw in my life. He'll be as fierce as a mutinous crew, and strong
as a frigate's complement. What's to be done with him?'
"'How in Egypt did he come on board?' said the mate, viewing the beast
through the glass.
"'By that, maybe, sir,' exclaimed the second mate, pointing to some
object floating flat and yellow, faint and far out upon the starboard
quarter.
"The captain levelled the ship's telescope. 'A large raft!' he
exclaimed, after some minutes of silent examination. 'Take a boat and
examine it.'
"A quarter-boat was lowered, and the second mate and four men pulled
away for the raft in the distance. It was a very large raft,
manifestly launched by some country wallah in the last throes: a
complicate huge grating, or floating platform, of immensely thick
bamboos and spare spars, secured by turns of Manilla or coir rope. It
was clean swept; not a rag was to be seen. Whether the sufferers had
been taken off, leaving the baboon behind them, whether they had died,
and the wash of the ocean had slipped their bodies overboard, the
baboon holding on to the raft, who was to tell? 'At sea,' said Lord
Nelson, 'nothing is impossible and nothing improbable.'
"The raft had floated to the bows of the ship in the silent midnight,
and the baboon sprang aboard and aloft.
"The creature on high was a clear picture in the bright sunshine. It
made many dreadful grimaces, by the exhibition of its teeth, and when
the boat drew alongside it moved and stood up, and showed a great
tail, then hung with one fist, looking down. It next descended with
the velocity of wind into the foretop.
"The captain said: 'The beast don't seem faint, but I guess he's
thirsty, and he may fall mad, come down, and bite some of us. So,'
says he to the chief officer, 'send a hand aloft with a bucket of
fresh water for the poor brute and a pocketful of ship's bread. If we
can civilise him, so much the better.'
"But it never came to it," said the grey-haired respectable seaman.
"The creature fled to the cross-trees nimble as light when he saw a
couple of seamen mounting to the top, then descended, and ate and
drank ravenously when they had come down, which feeding murdered him,
and ruined the captain's hopes of carrying the fellow to London and
selling him at a large price to the Zoölogical Gardens. For he refused
to come on deck. He bared his teeth, and his eyes shone with the
malice of hell if the men attempted to approach him. It was impossible
to let him rest aloft throughout the night to command the ship, so to
speak; for he might sink to the deck stealthy as the shadow of a cloud
blown by the wind, and he was strong enough and big enough to tear a
sleeping man's throat out.
"'He must be shot,' said the captain, and he told the second mate to
fetch his rifle.
"The second mate, that he might make sure of his aim, went aloft into
the foretop. The beast was then sitting on the topgallant yard. He had
been in command of the fabric of the fore all day. Had it come on to
blow so as to oblige the captain to shorten sail, the deuce a seaman
durst have gone aloft to stow the canvas. The second mate, standing in
the top, was in the act of lifting his rifle, when the monster,
running on all fours out to the dizzy topgallant yard-arm, stood erect
a breathless instant, poised--in human posture--a marvellous picture
of the man-beast against the liquid blue, then sprang into the air.
"'Come down,' roared the captain to the second mate, 'and shoot him
through the head, for God's sake!'
"As the beast rose with a wild grin after having been so long out of
sight through the frightful height he had jumped from, you'd have
thought he'd have risen with a burst skin, the captain bawled out,
'Blessed if he's not making for his raft.'
"The baboon, with a fixed expression, and with eyes askew upon the
ship as he drove past, swimming very finely with long easy flourishes
of his arms and dexterous thrusts of his legs, whilst the end of his
tail stood up astern of him as though it was some comical little man
there steering,--the baboon, I say, was undoubtedly and with amazing
sagacity making straight for the raft, having taken its bearings when
aloft; but at the moment the second mate knelt to level his piece,
meaning to murder the poor brute out of pure mercy, the thing uttered,
oh, my God! what a horrible cry! and vanished, and a quantity of blood
rose and dyed a bright patch upon the calm blue. No more was seen of
the baboon, but a little later the black scythe-like fins of three
sharks showed in the spot where he had disappeared."
_Plums from a Sailor's Duff._
It has been commonly expected of sailors in all ages that they should
encounter nothing upon the ocean but hair-breadth escapes. The theory
is that the mariner but half discharges his duties when his
experiences are limited to his work as a seaman. That he may be fully
and perfectly accomplished vocationally he must know what it is to
have been cast away, to have barely come off with his life out of a
ship on fire, to have been overboard on many occasions in heavy seas,
to have chewed pieces of lead in open boats to assuage his thirst--to
have encountered, in short, most of the stock horrors of the oceanic
calling. Considering, however, that the sailor goes to sea holding his
life in his hands, I cannot but think that his mere occupation is
perilous enough to satisfy the romantic demands of the shore-going
dreamer. It is feigned that the sea-faring life is not one jot more
dangerous than most of the laborious callings followed ashore. Let no
man credit this. The sailor never springs aloft, never slides out to a
yard-arm, never gives battle to the thunderous canvas, scarcely
performs a duty, indeed, that does not contain a distinct menace to
his life. That the calling has less of danger in it in these days than
it formerly held I will not undertake to determine. If in former times
ships put to sea destitute of the scientific equipment which
characterises the fabrics of this age, the mariner supplied the
deficiencies of the shipyard by caution and patience. He was never in
a hurry. He waited with a resigned countenance upon the will of the
wind. He plied his lead and log-line with indefatigable diligence.
There was no prompt despatch in his day, no headlong thundering,
through weather as thick as mud in a wineglass, to reach his port. We
have diminished many of the risks he ran through imperfect appliances,
but, on the other hand, we have raised a plentiful stock of our own,
so that the balance between then and now shows pretty level.
My sea-faring experiences covered about eight years, and they hit a
traditional period of immense moment--I mean the gradual
transformation of the marine fabric from wood into iron. I was always
afloat in wood, however, and never knew what it was to have an iron
plate between me and the yearning wash of the brine outside until I
went on a voyage to Natal and back in a big ocean steamer that all day
long throbbed to the maddened heart in her engine room, like some
black and gleaming leviathan rendered hysterical by the lances of
whalers feeling for its life, and all night stormed through the dark
ocean shadow like a body of fire, faster than a gale of wind could in
my time have driven the swiftest clipper keel that furrowed blue
water.
What hair-breadth escapes did I meet with? I have been asked. Was I
ever marooned? Ever cast away, as Jack says, on the top crust of a
half-penny loaf? Ever overboard among sharks? Ever gazing madly round
the horizon, the sole occupant of a frizzling boat, in search of a
ship where I might obtain water to cool my blue and frothing lips?
Well, my duff is not a very considerable one, and the few plums in it
I fear are almost wide enough apart to be out of hail of one another.
However a sample or two will suffice to enable me to keep my word and
to write something at all events autobiographic.
So let us start off Cape Horn on a July day in the year of grace 1859.
The ship was a fine old Australian liner, a vessel of hard upon 1400
tons, a burden that in those days constituted a large craft. She was
commanded by one Captain Neatby, something of a favourite I believe in
the passenger trade--a careful old man with bow-legs and a fiery
grog-blossom of a nose. He wore a tall chimney-pot hat in all weathers,
and was reckoned a very careful man because he always furled his fore
and mizzen royals in the first dog-watch every night. We were a long
way south; I cannot remember the exact latitude, but I know it was
drawing close upon sixty degrees. There was a talk in the midshipmen's
berth amongst us that the captain was trying his hand at the great
Circle course, but none of us knew much about it down in that gloomy,
'tween-decks, slush-flavoured cavern in which we youngsters lived. I
was fourteen years old, homeward bound on my first voyage; a little
bit of a midshipman, burnt dry by Pacific suns, with a mortal hatred
and terror of the wild, inexpressibly bitter cold of the roaring
ice-loaded parallels in whose Antarctic twilight our noble ship was
plunging and rolling now under a fragment of maintopsail, now under a
reefed foresail and double-reefed foretopsail, chased by the shrieking
western gale that flew like volleys of scissors and thumbscrews over
our taffrail, and by seas, whose glittering, flickering peaks one
looked up at from the neighbourhood of the wheel as at the brows of
tall and beetling cliffs. The gale was white with snow, and dark with
the blinding fall of it too, when I came on deck at noon. I was in the
chief mate's, or port watch, as it is called. The ship was running
under a double-reefed topsail--in those days we carried single
sails,--reefed foresail, close-reefed foretopsail, and maintopmast
staysail. The snow made a London fog of the atmosphere; forward of the
galley the ship was out of sight at times when it came thundering down
out of the blackness aft, white as any smother of spume. She pitched
with the majesty of a line-of-battle ship, as she launched herself in
long floating rushes from gleaming pinnacle to seething valley with a
heavy, melancholy sobbing of water all about her decks, and her
narrow, distended band of maintopsail hovering overhead black as a
raven's pinion in the flying hoariness. We were washing through it at
twelve or thirteen knots an hour, though the ship was as stiff as a
madman in a strait-jacket, with the compressed wool in her hold and
loaded down to her main-chain bolts besides. By two bells (one
o'clock) forward of the break of the poop the decks were deserted,
though now and again, amidst some swiftly passing flaw in the storm of
snow, you might just discern the gleaming shapes of two men on the
look-out on the forecastle, with the glimpse of a figure in the
foretop, also on the watch for anything that might be ahead. The
captain in his tall hat was stumping the deck to and fro close against
the wheel, cased in a long pilot coat, under the skirts of which his
legs, as he slewed round, showed like the lower limb of the letter O.
Through the closed skylight windows I could get a sort of watery view
of the cuddy passengers--as they were then called--reading, playing at
chess, playing the piano, below. There were some scores of steerage
and 'tween-deck passengers, deeper yet in the bowels of the ship, but
hidden out of sight by the closed hatches.
I know not why it should have been, but I was the only midshipman on
the poop, though the ship carried twelve of us, six to a watch. The
other five were doubtless loafing about under cover somewhere. I stood
close beside the chief mate to windward, holding to the brass rail
that ran athwart the break of the poop. This officer was a Scotchman,
a man named Thompson, and I suppose no better seaman ever trod a
ship's deck. He was talking to me about getting home, asking me
whether I would rather be off Cape Horn in a snow-storm or making
ready to sit down with my brothers and sisters at my father's table to
a jolly good dinner of fish and roast beef and pudding, when all on a
sudden he stopped in what he was saying, and fell a-sniffing
violently.
"I smell ice," said he, with a glance aft at the captain.
"Smell ice!" thought I, with a half look at him, for I believed he was
joking. For my part, it was all ice to me--one dense, yelling
atmosphere of snow; every flake barbed, and the cold of a bitterness
beyond words. He fell a-sniffing again, quickly and vehemently, and
stepped to the side, sending a thirsty look into the white blindness
ahead, whilst I heard him mutter, "There 's ice close aboard, there 's
ice close aboard!" As he spoke the words, there arose a loud and
fearful cry from the forecastle.
"Ice right ahead, sir!"
"Ice right ahead, sir!" repeated the chief mate, whipping round upon
the captain.
"I see it, sir! I see it, sir!" roared the skipper. "Hard a
starboard, men! Hard a starboard for your lives! Over with it!"
The two fellows at the helm sent the spokes flying like the
driving-wheel of a locomotive; the long ship, upborne at the instant
by a huge Pacific sea, paid off like a creature of instinct, sweeping
slowly but surely to port just in time. For right on the starboard bow
of us there leapt out into proportions terrible and magnificent, within
a musket shot of our rail, an iceberg that looked as big as St. Paul's
Cathedral, with stormy roaring of the gale in its ravines and valleys,
and the white smoke of the snow revolving about its pinnacles and
spires like volumes of steam, and a volcanic noise of mighty seas
bursting against its base and recoiling from the adamant of its
crystalline sides in acres of foam. We were heading for it at the rate
of thirteen miles an hour as neatly as you point the end of a thread
into the eye of a needle. In a few minutes we should have been into
it, crumbled against it, dissolved upon the white waters about it, and
have met a nameless end. Boy as I was, and bitter as was the day, I
remember feeling a stir in my hair as I stood watching with open mouth
the passage of the mountainous mass close alongside into the pale void
astern, whilst the ship trembled again to the blows and thumps of vast
blocks of floating ice.
"Ice right ahead, sir!" came the cry again, nor could we clear the
jumble of bergs until the dusk had settled down, when we hove-to for
the night. No one was hurt, but I suppose no closer shave of the kind
ever happened to a ship before.
Again, and this time once more off Cape Horn. It was my third voyage;
I was still a midshipman, and in the second mate's watch. I came on
deck at midnight and found the ship hove-to, breasting what in this
age of steamboats, and, for the matter of that, perhaps in any other
age, might be termed a terrific sea. She was making good weather of
it--that is to say, she kept her decks dry, but she was diving and
rolling most hideously, with such swift headlong shearing of her spars
through the gale that the noises up in the blackness aloft were as
though the spirits of the inmates of a thousand lunatic asylums had
been suddenly enlarged from their bodies and sent yelling into limbo.
The wind blew with an unendurable edge in the sting and bite of it.
The second mate and I, each with a rope girdling his waist to swing
by, stood muffled up to our noses under the lee of a square of canvas
seized to the mizzen shrouds. Presently he roared into my ear, "Sort
of a night for a pannikin of coffee, eh, Mr. Russell?" "Ay, ay, sir,"
I replied, and with that, liberating myself from the rope, I clawed my
way along the line of the hencoops--the decks sometimes sloping almost
up and down to the heavy weather _scends_ of the huge black
billows,--and descended into the midshipmen's berth. It was not the
first time I had made a cup of coffee for myself and the second mate in
the middle watch during cold weather. An old nurse who had lived in my
family for years had given me an apparatus consisting of a spirit-lamp
and a funnel-shaped contrivance of block tin, along with several pounds
of very good coffee, and with this I used to keep the second mate and
myself supplied with the real luxury of a hot and aromatic drink
during wet and frosty watches. The midshipmen's berth was a narrow
room down in the 'tween decks, bulkheaded off from the sides, fitted
with a double row of bunks, one on top of another, the lower beds
being about a foot above the deck. There were five midshipmen all
turned in and fast asleep. The others, who were on watch, were
clustered under the break of the poop for the shelter there. A lonely
one-eyed sort of slush lamp, with sputtering wick and stinking flame,
swung wearily from a blackened beam, rendering the darkness but little
more than visible. I slung my little cooking apparatus near to it,
filled the lamp with spirits of wine, put water and coffee into the
funnel, and then set fire to the arrangement. I stood close under it,
wrapped from head to foot in gleaming oilskins--looking a very bloated
little shape, I don't doubt, from the quantity of clothing I wore
under the waterproofs,--waiting for the water to boil. The seas roared
in thunder high above the scuttles to the wild and sickening dipping
of the ship's side into the trough. The humming of the gale pierced
through the decks with the sound of a crowd of bands of music in the
distance, all playing together and each one a different tune. The
midshipmen snored, and coats and smallclothes hanging from the bunk
stanchions wearily swung sprawling out and in, like bodies dangling
from gallows in a gale of wind.
All in a moment a sea of unusual weight and fury took the ship and
hove her down to the height as you would have thought, of her
topgallant rail; the headlong movement sent me sliding to leeward; the
forethatch of my sou'wester struck the spirit-lamp; down it poured, in
a line of fire upon the deck, where it surged to and fro in a sheet of
flame, with the movements of the ship. I was so horribly frightened as
to be almost paralysed by the sight of that flickering stretch of
yellowish light, sparkling and leaping as it swept under the lower
bunks and came racing back again to the bulkhead with the windward
incline. I fell to stamping upon it in my sea-boots, little fool that
I was, hoping in that way to extinguish it. A purple-faced midshipman
occupied one of the lower bunks, and his long nose lay over the edge
of it. He opened his eyes, and after looking sleepily for a moment or
two at the coating of pale fire rushing from under his bed, he snuffed
a bit, and muttering, "Doocid nice smell; burnt brandy, ain't it?" he
turned over and went to sleep again with his face the other way.