All yesterday evening I came upon little knots of sailor men gathered
along the quay or at the corners of the streets of Harwich and
Dovercourt. Their weather-beaten parchment-brown faces were drawn and
troubled, and they spoke in the jerkily lowered voices of men not wont
to hold their tongues or passions in restraining leash. There was
something in the half-stunned, half-angry looks suggestive of the
expressions I had seen on the faces of the sailors at a North Wales
port on the evening that a carelessly-framed despatch had tricked them
into transient belief that the British Fleet had been beaten by the
Germans in the North Sea. But I had been with naval men all afternoon,
and knew that there was nothing fresh to report from behind the grey
fog-curtain to the north. The trouble was of another kind, but from
past experience I knew that the moment when the British sailor man
spoke through clenched teeth in those jerkily lowered tones, with his
brow corrugated in mahogany wrinkles of perturbation and his blue eyes
fixed absently on the fingers of his working hands, was not the one
for even the most sympathetically curious to intrude upon him.
Enlightenment came later, when I asked the maid who lowered the
shutters and drew the double curtains of my room in the little hotel
on the Dovercourt cliff, why it was that the children playing in a
narrow street that branched off diagonally below my window hushed
their voices and tiptoed as they came down toward the seaward end, and
why many of even belated and hurrying delivery carts were pulling up
and taking another way on their clattering rounds.
“Is somebody sick?” I asked, “or is one of the neighbours dead?”
“Didn’t you know, sir?” faltered the girl. “That is Captain Fryatt’s
’ome down there. It’s the little red-brick ’ouse--the fourth or fifth
from the corner, sir. We all o’ us ’ere knew ’im, sir, an’ loved ’im;
an’--you’ll excuse me, sir” (her voice broke for a moment and the
starting tears glistened in the flickering light of her candle)--“but
I was thinkin’ o’ the missus an’ the nippers. They’s waitin’ down
there for more news from Belg’um. I hates to think o’ ’em, sir. It
makes me want to scream an’--an’ to fight. I’ll be going now, sir; it
gets me all wrought up w’en I talks about it.”
It came to me all at once what those stunned angry sailors on the
street were talking of, and the hot wave of indignation--checked for
an hour or two by the excitement of meeting and boarding a returning
submarine--that had surged over me that afternoon when I first read
the news of Captain Fryatt’s execution in the paper, welled up anew
inside me and throbbed against my temples. I was conscious of the
passing of one of a class of men whom I had learned to know and love
during many years of intimate association--in craft stout and frail,
on seas fair and stormy--and the fact that the death of this man had
been compassed with a cold-blooded cynicism scarcely paralleled in
modern history brought the significance of it home to me with especial
poignancy. In a dull sort of way I had been conscious of a similar
feeling every time I had read of the loss of merchant officers and
crews from the inauguration of the submarine campaign, but only now
had I come to understand how much of a hold these same sailor men had
on my affection, what parts they had played in scores of the vivid
incidents of my life that I cared most to dwell upon in memory.
Three of the last ten years of my life had been spent upon the sea, I
reflected, and of this time perhaps six months had been put in on one
or another of the “floating palaces” of the main tourist routes, and
not more than that aboard ships under the German, French, Dutch, or
American flag. That left a good two years--more than seven hundred
days and nights--spent aboard the smaller British merchantmen--tramps,
coasters, colliers, traders, flat-bottomed river stern-wheelers--in
out-of-the-way water-lanes of the world.
Two years of my life--and what treasured years they were, too!--spent
in the care of the bold, bluff, bronzed British merchant captains who
drove “the swift shuttles of an Empire’s loom.” What strange seas they
had steered me through, and what strange corners in the ports that
served those seas! And what adventures they had run me into, and what
scrapes got me out of! And what courtesy, what consideration--aye,
even what tenderness in times of misadventure and sickness--had I not
enjoyed at their hands!
Pulling on my cardigan jacket, I “stood-by” at the hour of
one--midnight by the sun-time, by which the ships of the sea still
sail--and at the instant when the steamers in the harbour would have
been sounding “Eight bells” had there been no lurking Zeppelins to
guard against, leaned out of the open window till the indrifting fog
blew sharp against my face and began my “watch.”
Just so--with a rough blue sleeve brushing against my own--had I
leaned over the bridge or taffrail of a hundred steamers ploughing a
hundred sea-ways, and now, with the familiar breath of the sea in my
nostrils and the familiar mist of the sea damping my hair again, old
friends of other days strode down the corridors of memory and ranged
themselves, one at a time, by my side. At first I tried to muster them
chronologically, in the order I had known them from my first tentative
coastal voyages in the Pacific--(B----, of the Vancouver-Seattle
packet, who let me sleep on his cabin couch one night when the rooms
were all taken in order that I might be rested for the tennis
tournament I was engaging in at Tacoma on the morrow; R----, of the
old Alaska “Inland Passage” coaster, who taught me to “box” the
compass and awoke the slumbering love o’ the sea in my blood with
tales of the Victoria sealing fleet; P----, of the Mexican trader, who
smuggled me out of Guaymas when the Sonora authorities were trying to
arrest me for landing on Tiburon without a permit)--but presently the
magnet of my quickened memory began drawing them forward out of turn,
and ere long they were crowding on like guests at a reception.
Now I would think of the bravery of them, and instantly a series of
pictures took shape before my eyes, a score of names leapt to my lips,
a score of hands--hard brown hands, with a world of warmth in their
steady grip--reached out to clasp my own. Who was the bravest among
men that had all been brave? I asked myself; and then how the pictures
formed and dissolved as one stirring incident after another flashed
across my mind! What could have been finer than the way Captain K----,
of that cranky clipper-bowed old “C.N.” steamer, had stuck out that
typhoon off Taiwan, lashed to the bridge for three days, and
subsisting on coffee and rum and pilot bread? I could see his
brine-white face (as I saw it when I took a timid peep up the
companion way on the day the “twister” began to die down) taking shape
out there in the drifting fog even as the recollection of that
fearsome storm crystallised in my memory, and then fancy turned
another cog, and it was a sun-blistered South Pacific trader that I
seemed to see, with a sallow, fever-wracked figure at the wheel, and
two or three dozen naked blacks writhing in agony on the forrard deck.
How old B----, of the _Cora Andrews_, took his load of plague-stricken
Papuans through the Barrier Reef and into the quarantine station at
Townsville is a South Sea epic.
Then came memories with a more personal touch, and I dwelt for a few
moments over the shifting scenes of the mix-up I started the time I
tried to take a flashlight of the smokers in the “Opium Den” of the
old _Yo San_, plying on the Hongkong-Bangkok run. Some of the Chinese
crew were smuggling opium that voyage, and, taking me for a Secret
Service officer on search, started to wipe up the deck with my
protesting anatomy. Curled round my camera under a bunk in the corner
of the opium den, with nothing but the fact that my assailants were so
numerous that they got in each other’s way saving me from instant
annihilation, and expecting every moment that one of them would gather
his wits together sufficiently to pounce down on me through the slats,
I cowered in terror, and was ever music sweeter than the raucous
bellow of bluff old Captain G---- when, cursing like a pirate and
banging right and left with the belaying pins he held in either hand,
he ploughed his way into the den and yanked me out by the scruff of
the neck. Poor old G----! he was lost with his ship two voyages later,
when the ancient _Yo San_ was piled up by a typhoon on the Tongking
coast.
Then the recollection of the ignominious way in which old G---- had
pulled me out from under the bunk by the coat collar recalled the time
when another British skipper--his command was only a “P.S.N.C.” tender
in Valparaiso, and I had long since forgotten his name--saved my life
by handling me in quite the same unceremonious manner. The schooner on
which I had planned to sail to Juan Fernandez had broken loose in a
violent “Norther” and was fast driving before the mountainous swells
upon the _malecon_ or seawall, when the “Navigation Company’s” tender,
out to salve some drifting barges, came nosing cautiously in toward
where the hollow waves were curling over into crashing breakers. The
barges and their cargoes were probably worth more than our walty old
hooker, but the skipper of the tender, noting only that there were
lives to be saved on the latter, hesitated not an instant about
deciding to try and stand-by. Unfortunately, we had a lot of German
_colonistas_ aboard, and the panic among them prevented many from the
schooner being saved. I was one of the half-dozen who did not fail in
their leaps for the tender’s outreaching starboard bow, but my hold on
the slippery rail was so precarious that only the mighty hand of the
skipper on my neck prevented my slipping back into the sea. For a
moment now, out in the drifting fog, I saw his round red face, under
its “sou’wester,” just as I had peered up into it after he dragged me
over the rail and slammed me down on the heeling deck.
At times memories crowded so that they became confused. I was not
sure, for instance, whether it was T----, of the _Eimoo_, or P----, of
the _Levuka_, whom I had seen go over the rail into shark-infested
Rotrura Lagoon to jerk the kink out of an air-hose before his diver
strangled; or which of two otherwise well-remembered “B.I.” skippers
it was that waded in, barehanded, and floored every one of a bunch of
Lascars who were fighting with their knives; or whether it was the
mate or the skipper of the East African coaster who, with one of his
thighs being torn to ribbons by the beast’s hind claws, kept his grip
on the throat of a young leopard that had slipped from its cage, and
which he was afraid might become panic-stricken and jump overboard
before it could be recaptured; or whether it was the captain of a
“Burns, Philips” or a “Union” steamer that I had seen put out through
the tortuous passage of Suva Bay when the wind was snapping the tops
from the coconut palms, and the barometer was at 28.50 and still
falling, just because the wife of the missionary on some obscure
little bit of the Fijian Archipelago to the north was expecting to
become a mother and needed the attention of the ship’s doctor.
I would have gone on to the end of my “watch” thinking of the
bravery--moral and physical--the ready nerve and the general
“sufficiency unto occasion” of my old friends, but most that had been
brave had also been kind and considerate, and every now and then I
found my mind occupied with recollections of the little things they
had done for me, or that I had seen them do for others. There was
B----, of the old _Changsha_, running from Yokohama to Sydney, who
went miles off his course just to satisfy my whim to pass over the
spot where _Mary Gloster_ was buried at sea. What an afternoon that
was! The Straits of Macassar “oily and treacly,” just as Kipling had
described them, and the milk-warm land breeze wafting the odours of
the spice groves of Celebes. B---- had his volume of Kipling and I had
mine, and between us was the reef-freckled chart of Macassar Straits
with Borneo to starboard, Celebes to port, and a thousand dotted
lines indicating islets and reefs and rocks--mostly lurking,
half-submerged--in between.
“By the Little Paternosters, as you come to the Union Bank,
We dropped her--I think I told you--and I pricked it off where she
sank--
(Tiny she looked on the grating--that oily, treacly sea--)
Hundred and eighteen East, remember, and South just three.
Easy bearings to carry....”
read B----, running his finger along the chart.
“Aye, easy to carry. _Here’s_ the spot,” and he marked it with a
circled dot. Then we “dead reckoned” the latitude from the noon sight,
and “shot” for the longitude as we “came to the Union Bank.” And
finally, when we were over the spot as near as might be determined
from hasty reckoning, nothing would do but B---- must start the lead
going to determine the depth. Never shall I forget the way his face
lit up when the leadsmen droned out “Fourteen,” and there were tears
glistening in his eyes as he turned back a couple of pages and read--
“And we dropped her in fourteen fathoms; I pricked it off where
she sank.”
“I might have known that Kipling worked it out with a chart,” he
exclaimed; “but what a thrill it gives one to find it exact, even to
the soundings!”
The margins of “The _Mary Gloster_,” in my “Seven Seas,” bear the
pencilled records--now thumbed and fingered into dim blurs--of our
“mid-sea madness” to this day, and there is nothing that I treasure
more. B---- would never have taken his 5,000-ton freighter miles off
her course, at the cost of some hours of time and a number of tons of
good Nagasaki coal, had he been any less daft about Kipling than I
was. But all British sailors love Kipling; as a class, I have always
felt that they had a fuller appreciation of the message of “the
uncrowned Laureate” than have any others.
For an hour at least I must have turned in fancy the pages of Kipling,
now with this well-remembered skipper, now with that, until the
recollection of how kind old N----, of a Liverpool Para-Manaos
freighter, had read to me “The Hymn Before Action” one night when I
was half delirious from the Amazon “black-water” fever he had been
nursing me through set the current of my thought on another tack.
N---- was only one of a dozen who had coddled me through some sort of
tropical illness or patched me up after some sort of a smash-up.
It was R----, of the Valparaiso-Panama coaster, who had put my hand in
splints after it had been crushed between the gangway and a dug-out
full of ivory nuts off some pile-built village of Ecuador, and it was
my fault rather than his that the little finger was still crooked.
And it was H----, of the big White Star freighter on the
Australia-South Africa run, who laboured for an hour in helping the
ship’s doctor worry back into place the shoulder I had dislocated in
the “sports” one afternoon; and it was D----, of the Rangoon-Calcutta
“B.I.,” who had reduced with horse-liniment the ankle I had sprained
in dodging out of the path of a temperamental water-buffalo while
ashore at Akyab; and it was A----, of the Lynch river boat plying from
Basra to Bagdad, who stitched up my scalp after the Arabs of the
bazaar of then almost unheard-of Kut-el-Amara had amused themselves
with bouncing rocks off my head because (this was during the
Turco-Italian war) they imagined I looked like an “alien enemy.”
A---- was killed when the Turks shelled his ship--then a
transport--early in the Mesopotamian operations, I remembered, and
this led my thoughts off to the long watch I kept by the bedside of
poor old Y----, on whose “B.P.” steamer I had been roaming in and out
among the Solomons, New Hebrides, Fijis and other islands of western
Polynesia for two months. Y----’s heart had been giving out for a
number of years, and now very hot weather following, the excitement of
seeing his ship through an unusually heavy hurricane had hastened an
end long inevitable. He knew his “number was up,” and so he told me,
that night, of things he wanted me to explain and set right for him in
Australia. It was the thinking of these, and the visit that I
subsequently paid to his wife and children in the Illawara, that
finally brought my mind back to that other bereaved family in the
little red house beneath my window.
The short night had passed, the fog had lifted, and now in the early
morning light I saw a milkman stop his cart a half-dozen doors from
the Fryatt home and go softly tip-toeing on his near-by deliveries to
avoid making unnecessary noise. Out of the retreating fog-bank to
seaward two small freighters took sharpened line and headed for the
harbour mouth. They were much of a size and type, but the gay red and
white splashes on the bows of the more northerly ones indicated she
sailed under the flag of an enterprising Scandinavian country, while
the unbroken black of the side of the other told just as plainly that
she was British. As I watched, the shifting of the shadows on the
sides of the Norwegian told me that she was altering her course
sharply every few hundred yards--“zigzagging” to minimise the danger
from submarine attacks. A wise precaution, I told myself; now what
about the other? I took up my glass and held it on the Briton. One,
two, three, four, five minutes passed. All the time the wave curled
evenly back from her forefoot; not a ripple of shifting light or
shadow told of deviation in her course of the fraction of a point.
“Straight on to your goal, little ship,” I said, saluting with my
glass.
But I might have known as much. That was Fryatt’s way, and that was
the way all my friends of the Red Ensign did, and always will do.
“Good luck, fair weather and snug berths to you all; aye, and a quiet
haven when the last watch, the long watch, is finally over!”
* * * * *
Knots of troubled sailor men still gathered along Harwich quay this
morning, but now that I understood by what they were moved I no longer
hesitated to mingle and talk with them. Their slow anger was steadily
mounting--gradually crowding out all other feelings--with every word
that was spoken, with every hour that passed; but among them were
still men who were stunned and dazed, who could not understand how a
thing so monstrous really could have happened.
“But w’y, w’y ha’ the ’Uns done it?” persisted a grizzled old salt,
turning his troubled eyes to mine after all the others had shaken
their heads perplexedly.
“It is just possible,” I said, “that the Germans believe that the
execution of one skipper who attempted to ram one of their submarines
will make the others think twice before trying to do the same thing.”
Two or three of the older men fairly snorted in their incredulity that
even the Germans should thus cheaply rate the British sailor, but the
plausibility of the theory soon convinced even these.
“Do you re’ly believe the ’Uns think that o’ us?” one of them finally
ventured.
“I do,” I replied, “for there is nothing else to think.”
The old man took a deep breath and turned his eyes away to sea. “God
pity all ’Uns!” he muttered, and “God pity ’em!” “God pity ’em!”
echoed his mates.