lest I should be very roughly manhandled for my carelessness. There
was a deal of "raffle" under the bunks--sea-boots, little bundles of
clothing, and I know not what else; but thanks to Cape Horn everything
was happily as damp as water itself. There was therefore nothing to
kindle, nor was there any aperture through which the burning spirit
could run below into the hold; so by degrees the flaming stuff
consumed itself, and in about ten minutes' time the planks were black
again. I went on deck and reported what had happened to the second
mate. All he said was "My God!" and instantly ran below to satisfy
himself that there was no further danger. I can never recall that
little passage of my life without a shudder. There were a hundred and
ninety-five souls of us aboard, and had I managed to set the ship on
fire that night the doom of every living creature would have been
assured, seeing that no boat could have lived an instant in such a sea
as was then running.
In a very different climate from that of Cape Horn I came very near to
meeting with an extremely ugly end. It was a little business entirely
out of the routine of the ordinary ocean dangers, but the memory of it
sends a thrill through me to this hour, though it is much past twenty
years ago since it happened. I was making my second voyage aboard a
small full-rigged ship that had been hired by the Government for the
conveyance of troops to the East Indies. I was the only midshipman;
the other youngsters consisted of five apprentices. We occupied a
deck-house a little forward of the main-hatch. This house was divided
by a fore and aft bulkhead; the apprentices lived in the port
compartment, the third and fourth mates and myself slung our hammocks
on the starboard side. The third mate was a man of good family, aged
about twenty-one, a young Hercules in strength, with heavy under-jaws
and the low, peculiar brow of the prize-fighter. He had been a
midshipman in Smith's service, and was a good and active sailor, very
nimble aloft and expert in his work about the ship, but of a sullen,
morose disposition, and a heavy drinker whenever the opportunity to
get drink presented itself. I think he was regarded by all hands as a
little touched, but I was too young to remark in him any oddities
which might strike an older observer. He was given to delivering
himself of certain dark, wild fancies. I remember he once told me that
if he owed a man a grudge he would not scruple to plant himself
alongside of him on a yard on a black night and kick the foot-rope
from under him when his hands were busy, and so let him go overboard.
But this sort of talk I would put down to mere boasting, and indeed I
thought nothing of it.
We were in the Indian Ocean, and one evening I sat at supper (as tea,
the last meal on board ship, is always called) along with this man and
the fourth mate. We fell into some sort of nautical argument, and in
the heat of the discussion I said something that caused the third mate
to look at me fixedly for a little while, whilst he muttered under his
breath, in a kind of half-stifled way, as though his teeth were set. I
did not catch the words, but I am quite certain from the fourth mate's
manner, that he had heard them, and that he knew what was in the
other's mind. I say this because I recollect that very shortly
afterwards the fellow rose and walked out on deck with an air about
him as if he was willing to give the third mate a chance of being
alone with me. It was a mean trick, but then he was a cowardly rogue,
and when I afterwards heard that he had been dismissed from the
service he had formerly entered for robbing his shipmates of money and
tobacco and the humble trifles which sailors carry about with them in
their sea-chests I was wicked enough, recalling how he had walked out
of that deck-house, leaving me, a little boy, alone with a strong,
brutal, crazy third mate, to hope that he might yet prove guilty of
larger sins still, for I could not but regard him as a creature that
deserved to be hanged. The instant this man stepped through the door
the third mate jumped up and closed it. It travelled in grooves, and
he whipped it to with a temper which caused the whole structure to
echo again to the blow.
"Now, you young--" he exclaimed, turning his bulldog face, white with
rage, upon me, yet speaking in a cold voice that was more terrifying
to listen to than if he had roared out, "I have you and I mean to
punish you," and with that he unclasped his heavy belt, and then
clasped it again so as to make a double thong of the leather, and
grasped me by the collar.
What my feelings were I am unable to state at this distance of time. I
believe I was more astonished than frightened. I could not imagine
that this huge creature was in earnest in offering to beat me for what
I had said, and yet I was sensible too of an unnatural fire in his
eyes--a glow that put an expression of savage exultation into them;
and this look of his somehow held me motionless and speechless. He
half raised his arm, but a sudden irresolution possessed him, as
though my passivity was a check upon his intentions.
"No, no," he exclaimed, after a little, "I'll manage better than
this"; and still grasping me by the collar of my jacket he dropped his
belt and ran me to the fore end of the compartment, threw me on my
back, and knelt upon me. Within reach of his arm, kneeling as he was,
were three shelves on which we kept such crockery and cutlery as we
owned, along with our slender stores of sugar and flour and the cold
remains of previous repasts. He felt for a knife; I could hear the
blades rattle as his fingers groped past his curved wrist for one of
them, and then flourishing the black-handled weapon in front of my
eyes he exclaimed, "Now I'm going to murder you." I lay stock-still; I
never uttered a word; I scarcely breathed indeed. Again, I say that I
do not know that I was terrified. My condition was one of
semi-stupefaction, I think, with just enough of sense left in me to
comprehend that if I uttered the least cry or struggled, no matter how
faintly, I should transform him into a wild beast. Nothing but my
lying corpse-like under the pressure of his knee saved me, I am
certain. My gaze was fixed upon his face, and I see him now staring at
me with his little eyes on fire, and the knife poised ready to plunge.
This posture maybe he retained for two or three minutes; it ran into
long hours to me. Then on a sudden he threw the knife away backwards
over his shoulder, rose and went to the door, where he stood a little
staring at me intently. I continued to lie motionless. He opened the
door and passed out, on which I sprang to my feet and fled as nimbly
as my legs would carry me to the poop, where I found the chief mate.
He was a little Welshman of the name of Thomas, a brother of Ap
Thomas, the celebrated harpist, and if he be still alive and these
lines should meet his eyes, let him be pleased to know that my memory
holds him in cordial respect as the kindest officer and the smartest
seaman I ever had the fortune to be shipmates with. To him I related
what had happened.
"O--ho," cried he, "attempted murder, hey? Our friend must be taught
that we don't allow this sort of thing to happen aboard _us_."
He gave certain orders and shortly afterwards the third mate was
seized and locked up in a spare cabin just under the break of the
poop. Two powerful seamen were told off to keep him company. How much
the unfortunate man needed this sort of control I could not have
imagined but for my hearing that he was locked up and my going to the
cabin window that looked on to the quarter deck to take a peep at him
if he was visible. He saw me and bounded to the window, bringing his
leg-of-mutton fist against it with a blow that crashed the whole plate
of glass into splinters. His face was purple, his eyes half out of
their sockets. There was froth upon his lips, with such a general
distortion of features that it would be impossible to figure a more
horrible illustration of madness than his countenance. I bolted as if
the devil had been after me, catching just a glimpse of the powerful
creature wrestling in the grasp of the two seamen who were dragging
him backwards into the gloom of the cabin. Such an escape as this I
regard as distinctly more eventful, if not more romantic, than falling
overboard and being rescued when almost spent, or being picked up
after a fortnight's exposure in an open boat. My most sleep-murdering
nightmares nearly always include the phantom form of that burly,
crazed third mate kneeling upon my motionless little figure and
feeling for a knife on one of the shelves just over my head.
Another little plum out of my plain sailor's pudding. This time my
ship was an East Indian trader that whilst lying at Calcutta was
chartered by the Government to convey troops to the North of China. It
was in 1860. Difficulties had arisen, and John Chinaman was to be
attacked. We proceeded to Hong Kong with the headquarters of the 60th
Rifles on board, and thence to the Gulf of Peche-li, which I should
say submitted one of the finest spectacles in the world, with its
congregations of transports and English and French and Yankee ships of
war. It was an old-world scene which the sponge of time has
obliterated for ever, and I behold again in memory those two noble
frigates, the _Impérieuse_ and the _Chesapeake_, straining tightly at
their cables, with smoke-stacks too modest in proportions to impair to
the critical nautical eye the tack and sheet suggestions of the
graceful, exquisitely symmetrical fabric of spars and yards and
rigging soaring triumphantly aloft to where the long whip or pennant
at the main flickered like a delicate line of fire against the hard
cold blue of the Asiatic sky.
We lay for many months in that bay, and were obliged repeatedly to
send ashore for fresh meat, vegetables, and the like. On one occasion
I recollect going with the mate in the long-boat some distance up the
river Peiho, a rushing, turbid stream at the mouth of which the
Chinese had fixed a very _chevaux-de-frise_ of spikes, upon which they
had fondly hoped our men-of-war would impale themselves, forgetting
that the depth of water scarcely permitted the approach of a shallow
gunboat. We were returning to the ship with a fair wind, and on top of
the fierce rush of the river, when our helmsman run us plump against
one of Johnny's huge impalers. The shock of the blow threw the mate
into an immense basket of fresh eggs. He fell with a squelch past all
power of forgetting, and lay wriggling in a very quagmire of yolk and
white and fragments of shells. We pulled him out blind and streaming
with eggs. His aspect was so preposterously absurd that the helmsman,
rendered almost imbecile by laughter, let the boat drive into a second
pile, when, as I live to write it, the mate, who was cleaning himself
near to the basket, was thrown a second time into the glutinous mess!
I will not attempt to repeat the sea-blessings he bestowed upon the
steersman. Happily eggs were cheap, and a dollar might have
represented a more considerable smash. Now it was two days following
this that the captain sent the long-boat to procure some sheep and
poultry from a little village situated close to the shores of the bay
on the north of the river. The second mate took charge, and I and
another midshipman and a couple of sailors went along with him. We
landed and left the boat in charge of a seaman, and strolled towards
the village. The second mate was a wild, dissolute young fellow, who,
before he quitted China, became the recipient of more than one round
dozen by order of the provost-marshal for looting. A little knot of
Chinamen stood watching as we approached, whilst just beyond we caught
sight of a couple of women hobbling nimbly away out of reach of our
sight, as though they walked on stilts. Sherman--for such was the
second mate's name,--approaching the Chinamen, began with them in
pigeon English. They did not understand. He exhibited a few dollars,
and traced the outline of a sheep upon the ground, and, with many
surprising motions of his arms, sought to acquaint them with the
object of his visit. All to no purpose. "What's to be done?" said
Sherman, looking at us. "There's nothing that resembles a sheep
hereabouts." His eyes suddenly brightened as they lighted on a large
concourse of cocks and hens pecking in tolerably close order at some
fifty paces distant from us. "Boys," he shouted, "as these chaps can't
be made to understand, let's help ourselves. Each one seize what he
can get and make for the boat. Follow me." He sprang with incredible
agility towards the fowls, and in a trice had a couple of them
shrieking and fluttering in his grasp. In a breath the
Chinamen--thirty or forty strong--uttering a long, peculiar shout,
armed themselves with pitchforks--at all events, a species of weapon
that to my young eyes resembled a pitchfork,--sticks, and stones, and
gave chase. They tramped after us with the noise of an army in pursuit.
We flew towards the boat, screaming to the fellow in charge to haul in
and receive us. A stone struck me in the small of my back, and urged
me forwards faster than my legs were travelling. Down I should have
tumbled on my nose, and in that posture have been straightway
massacred, but for the timely grip of a sailor who was running by my
side. "Hold up, my hearty!" he roared, hooking his fingers into the
back of my collar and jerking me backwards. In a few moments we gained
the boat, wading waist-high to come at her, and rolling like drunken
men over her gunwale into her bottom. A volley of stones rattled about
our ears, but we were safe. Had the Chinamen carried firearms, not one
of us but must have been shot down.
I could relate a score or more of such experiences: of ugly collisions
with the police in Calcutta, of a narrow escape of being thrown
overboard by a dinghy-wallah of the river Hooghley, of a desperate
fight in the slings of the mizzen-topgallant yard with an apprentice
of my own age, and the like; but the space at my disposal obliges me
to conclude. Very little of the heroic enters the sailor's life. The
risks he runs, the adventures he encounters, have, as a rule, nothing
of the romantic in them; they are mainly brought about by his own
foolhardiness, by the proverbial carelessness that is utterly
irreconcilable with the stern obligations of vigilance, alertness, and
foresight imposed upon him by the nature of his calling, by the
imbecility of shipmates, and much too often by drink. Yet no matter
what the cause of most of the perils he meets with, his experiences, I
take it, head the march of professional dangers. Small wonder that
faith in the "sweet little cherub that sits up aloft" should still
linger in the forecastle. For certainly were it not for the bright
look-out kept over him by some sort of maritime angel, the mariner
would rank foremost as amongst the most perishable of human products.
_The Strange Adventures
of a South Seaman._
On November 4th, 1830, a number of convicts were indicted at the
Admiralty Sessions of the Old Bailey for having on the 5th of
September in the previous year piratically seized a brig called the
_Cyprus_. A South Seaman was innocently and most involuntarily, as
shall be discovered presently, involved in this tragic business, to
which he is able to add a narrative that is certainly not known to any
of the chroniclers of crime. But first as to the piratical seizure.
The _Cyprus_, a colonial brig, had been chartered to convey a number
of convicts from Hobart Town to Macquarie Harbour, on the northern
coast of Tasmania, and Norfolk Island, distant about a week's sail
from Sydney--in those days a penal settlement. There were thirty-two
felons in all. These men had been guilty of certain grave offences at
Hobart Town, and they had rendered themselves in consequence liable to
new punishment; they were tried before the Supreme Court of Judicature
there, and sentenced to be transported to the place above mentioned.
Only the very worst sort of prisoners were sent to Norfolk Island and
Macquarie Harbour. The discipline at those penal settlements was
terrible; the labour that was exacted, heart-breaking. The character
of the punishment was well known, and every felon re-sentenced to
transportation from the colonial convict settlements very well
understood the fate that was before him.
The _Cyprus_ sailed from Hobart Town in August, 1829. In addition to
the thirty-two convicts, she carried a crew of eight men and a guard
of twelve soldiers, under the command of Lieutenant Carew, who was
accompanied by his wife and children. The prisoners, as was always
customary in convict ships, were under the care of a medical man named
Williams.
Nothing of moment happened until the brig either brought up or was
hove-to in Research Bay, where Dr. Williams, Lieutenant Carew, the
mate of the vessel, a soldier, and a convict named Popjoy went ashore
on a fishing excursion. They had not been gone from the ship above
half-an-hour when they heard a noise of firearms. Instantly guessing
that the convicts had risen, they made a rush for the boat and pulled
for the brig. It was as they had feared: the felons had mastered the
guard and seized the brig. They suffered no man to come on board save
Popjoy, who, however, later on sprang overboard, and swam to the
beach. They then sent the crew, soldiers, and passengers ashore, but
without provisions and the means of supporting life. Then, amongst
themselves, the prisoners lifted the anchor and trimmed sail, and the
little brig slipped away out of Research Bay.
The chroniclers state that the vessel was never afterward heard of,
though some of the convicts were apprehended, separately, in various
parts of Sussex and Essex. The posthumous yarn of the mate of an
English whaler disproves this. He relates his extraordinary experience
thus:
"We had been fishing north of the Equator, and had filled up with a
little 'grease,' as the Yankees term it, round about the Galapagos
Islands, but business grew too slack for even a whaleman's patience.
Eleven months out from Whitby, and, if my memory fails me not, less
than a score of full barrels in our hold! So the Captain made up his
mind to try south, and working our way across the Equator, we struck
in amongst the Polynesian groups, raising the Southern Cross higher
and higher, till we were somewhere about latitude 30 deg., and
longitude 175 deg. E.
"I came on deck to the relief at four o'clock one morning: the weather
was quiet, a pleasant breeze blowing off the starboard beam; our ship
was barque-rigged, with short, topgallant masts--Cape Horn fashion;
she was thrusting through it leisurely under topsails and a
maintopgallantsail, and the whole Pacific heave so cradled her as she
went that she seemed to sleep as she sailed.
"Day broke soon after five, and as the light brightened out I caught
sight of a gleam on the edge of the sea. It was as white with the
risen sun upon it as an iceberg. I levelled the glass and made out the
topmast canvas of a small vessel. There was nothing to excite one in
the spectacle of a distant sail. The barque's work went on; the decks
were washed down, the look-out aloft hailed and nothing reported, and
at seven bells the crew went to breakfast, at which hour we had risen
the distant sail with a rapidity that somewhat puzzled the captain and
me. For, first of all, she was not so far off now but that we could
distinguish the lay of her head. She looked to be going our way, but
clearly she was stationary, for the _Swan_, which was the name of our
barque, though as seaworthy an old tub as ever went to leeward on a
bowline, was absolutely without legs: nothing more sluggish was ever
afloat; for _her_ then to have overhauled anything that was actually
under way would have been marvellous.
"'Something wrong out there, Grainger?' said the captain.
"'Looks to me to be all in the wind with her,' I answered.
"'Make out any colour?' said the captain.
"'Nothing as yet,' said I.
"'Shift your helm by a spoke or two,' said he. 'Meanwhile, I'll go to
breakfast.'
"He was not long below. By the time he returned we had risen the
distant vessel to the line of her rail. I got some breakfast in the
cabin; on passing again through the hatch I found the captain looking
at the sail through the telescope.
"'She is a small brig,' said he, 'and she has just sent the English
colours aloft with the jack down. She is all in the wind, as you said.
Her people don't seem to know what to do with her.'
"She now lay plain enough to the naked sight; a small black brig of
about a hundred and eighty tons, apparently in ballast as she floated
high on the water. She, like ourselves, carried short topgallantmasts,
but the canvas she showed consisted of no more than topsails and
courses. I took the glass from the captain, and believed I could make
out the heads of two or three people showing above the bulwark rail
abaft the mainmast.
"'What's their trouble going to prove?' said the captain.
"'They're waiting for us,' said I. 'They saw us, and put the helm
down, and got their little ship in irons instead of backing their
topsail yard. No sailor-man there, I doubt.'
"'A small colonial trader, you'll find,' said the captain, 'with a
crew of four or five Kanakas. The captain's sick and the mate was
accidentally left ashore at the last island.'
"It blew a four-knot breeze--four knots, I mean, for the _Swan_.
Wrinkling the water under her bows, and smoothing into oil a cable's
length of wake astern of her, the whaler floated down to the little
brig within hailing distance. We saw but two men, and one of them was
at the wheel. There was an odd look of confusion aloft, or rather let
me describe it as a want of that sort of precision which a sailor's
eye would seek for and instantly miss, even in the commonest old
sea-donkey of a collier. Nothing was rightly set for the lack of
hauling taut. Running gear was slackly belayed, and swung with the
rolling of the little brig like Irish pennants. The craft was clean at
the bottom, but uncoppered. She was a round-bowed contrivance, with a
spring aft which gave a kind of mulish, kick-up look to the run of
her.
"One of the two visible men, a broad-chested, thick-set fellow, in a
black coat and a wide, white straw hat, got upon the bulwark, and
stood holding on by a backstay, watching our approach, but he did not
offer to hail. I thought this queer; it struck me that he hesitated to
hail us, as though wanting the language of the sea in this business of
speaking.
"'Brig ahoy!' shouted the captain.
"'Hallo!' answered the man.
"'What is wrong with you?'
"'We are short-handed, sir, and in great distress,' was the answer.
"'What is your ship, and where are you from, and where are you bound
to?'
"When these questions were put the man looked round to the fellow who
stood at the brig's little wheel. It was certain he was not a sailor,
and it was possible he sought for counsel from the helmsman, who was
probably a forecastle hand. He turned his face again our way in a
minute, and shouted out in a powerful voice:
"'We are the brig _Cyprus_, of Sydney, New South Wales, bound to the
Cape of Good Hope, and very much out of our reckoning, I dare say,
through the distress we're in.'
"The captain and I exchanged looks.
"'Heading as you go,' the captain sang out, 'you're bound on a true
course for the Antarctic Circle, and, anyway, it's a long stretch for
Agulhas by way of Cape Horn out of these seas. How can we serve you?'"
'Will you send one of your officers in a boat?' came back the reply
very promptly, 'that he may put us in the way of steering a course for
the Cape of Good Hope? He'll then guess our plight, and if you'll lend
us a hand or two we shall be greatly obliged. We can't send a boat
ourselves--we're too few.'
"'He's no sailor-man, that fellow,' said the captain, 'and he ha'n't
got the colonial brogue, either. I seem to smell Whitechapel in that
chap's speech. Is he a passenger? Why don't he say so? Looks like a
play-actor, or a priest. But take a boat, Grainger, and row over and
see what you can make of the mess they're in. There's something rather
more than out-of-the-way in that job, if I'm not mistaken.'
"A boat was lowered; I entered it, and was rowed across to the brig by
three men. No attempt was made to throw us the end of a line, or in
any way to help us. The bowman got hold of a chain plate, and I
scrambled into the main-chains and so got over the rail, bidding the
men shove off and lie clear of the brig, whose rolling was somewhat
heavy, owing to her floating like an egg-shell upon the long Pacific
heave.