My many Professions—I turn Poet—On a Tramp Steamer—“Shivering
Timbers”—Modern Seamen—Struck by Lightning—I leave the Ship
I HAVE been almost everything in my travels. Stow-away, sailor before
the mast, bandmaster on a mail steamer, wet-nurse to Samoan twins,[13]
bushman, boundary rider, woodcutter, sundowner, post-digger,
snow-sweeper in North America, painter, deck-hand, “shilling-a-monther”
in a liner’s stokehold, messroom steward, native overseer, private
grave-digger, author, violinist to South Sea kings and chiefs, solo
violinist and orchestral violinist in the large cities of the world,
music teacher, song-writer, cornet-player, composer of music for
military bands, actor and singer, trader, canvasser for crank patents
and medicine, banana planter in Jamaica, nut planter in the South Sea
Islands, gold miner in Australia, violinist to Geisha girls in Japan,
and the leader of numerous splendid schemes that mostly failed. Glorious
schemes they were; but you can never be sure of anything except that you
will be certain to attend your own funeral.
Footnote 13:
Their mother, a native woman, was drowned by the upsetting of a canoe.
A Norwegian sailor and I found the infants, screaming, in a hut on the
coast. We secured a ripe coco-nut, and opening the eye-hole in the
shell, we placed it in turns at the mouths. They both tugged away and
pressed the shell with their hands as though they were at the breast!
and soon went off fast asleep. In the morning we gave them into the
charge of a native girl, who took them both away to the dead mother’s
relations.
I have also been a poet. I wrote a little volume of Australian lyrics
which are all burnt now. I was so pleased with the first proofs that I
put them on my bedroom mantelpiece, so that I could see them ere I slept
and directly I awoke at daybreak. The reviews in the newspapers and
journals thrilled me. “Full of sincerity, spirit and impulse.”
“Marvellous descriptive ability.” “A real barbarian poet of the South
Seas.” I thought my fortune was made, and I could not sleep through
thinking of coming fame and fortune. I thought surely such reviews in
the newspapers will sell thousands of copies of my book, and I was very
happy over my bright outlook. It was summer-time. I became restless, and
with the reviews in my pocket I went off, walking very fast in my
excitement. I soon arrived in the country at a beautiful spot.
A windmill on the hill-top whirled its big black hands as though trying
to catch the winged music of skylarks in the deep blue morning sky. By
the lane-side stood a cottage for sale. The very place for me, I
thought. I will buy it and write there. What glorious poems of Australia
and the South Seas they will be! The bird singing in a clump of firs
just by my future front door rippled out notes as though its little body
would burst with joy. I took an old envelope from my pocket and started
to write a lyric—how happy I was—even the lyric was good!
A month later I wrote to the publisher and said:
“DEAR SIR—Will you kindly send me a cheque in settlement for
copies of my _Australian Lyrics_ sold. I would not trouble you
before the quarter, but unexpected calls on my purse have
arrived at an inopportune moment.”
Two weeks later I received this reply:
“DEAR SIR—In reply to yours of the 16th, no copies of your book
have been sold, and we would call your kind attention to balance
of £2, 10s. overdue for binding, and £1, 18s. for corrections in
proof, etc., and 9s. 4d. for postage in sending out review
copies.”
So ended my volume of poetry, though I must add that the publisher
turned out a good sort. I would sooner deal with publishers, some of
them, than with stokehold bosses and concert managers. Music and book
publishers cannot publish authors’ inspirations that do not sell and
keep the author as well. I wish they could. As for the reviewers of my
poetry, they made me feel the happiest of aspirants for four weeks, and
I feel grateful for that four weeks of greatness.
I think it was after a voyage to the Cape that I stayed in London for a
week, and then secured a berth on board the s.s. _Port Adelaide_, a
tramp steamer. We called at Las Palmas, and then went slap, bang across
the world for Sydney. It was a monotonous voyage. We had a stowaway on
board; they sent him down into the stokehold. He had been a London
street arab and street singer, was a jolly youth and sang _The Ivy and
the Myrtle were in Bloom_. Then he came round with the hat and got
tobacco from the amused crew. The sailors encouraged him to tell his
experiences and were delighted to hear how he carried parcels for
passengers at the railway stations, and often bolted with the parcel if
it looked valuable! He would finish, and then take his tin whistle out
and blow it, do a jig and sing some mournful street prayer.
We had very bad weather after rounding the Cape, “running the Easter
down.” There were four passengers on board, and one died of consumption.
He lay on the hatchway for two days and nights: the weather was so bad
that we couldn’t stop the ship and decently bury “It.” He was canvassed
up and weighted with lead, and seas came over the body all night long;
we crept by it on deck like frightened shadows. When it was calmer the
captain said the burial service, and then all the crew, standing round
the tied canvas length, said “Amen.” Then gently, with the chief mate, I
pushed it forward into the grave of wandering waters and heard the awful
plomp as it touched the sea. At once the bell in the engine-room rang
full speed ahead, the engines started banging and we were off again.
About a week after that we sighted a full-rigged sailing ship bound for
New Zealand, a Shaw Saville boat painted with white squares. She was
doing about twelve knots and coming right across our bows. The main-mast
was snapped off by the main-yard and two of the boats were gone; she had
been through some terrible weather. She came dipping and rolling by, so
close that as we looked over the side we saw the apprentices wave their
hands; we all waved back as she passed by, dipping her flag to us, and
we saluted back with ours. I felt a choky feeling as I watched her pass,
with her broken spars and torn sails, flying away towards the mist of
the sunset, the figure-head with hands stretched in prayer at the bows.
The white-crested, curling waves lifted their arms and plucked at her
sides as she went rolling and pitching by. There was something in the
sight of that beaten ship that inspired me with more tenderness than
anything I have ever seen at sea.
I would often sit in the dim, oil-lit fo’c’sle as we swayed and dipped
along. The tiny round port-holes lifted to the fall and rise of the
bows, revealing the tossing blue moonlit seas outside. In that roaming
home of merchant sailormen, at regular intervals, came the steady-drawn,
thundering music of the steamer’s onward plunge as the screw urged her
across the world. From the middle of the deck roof swung the oil lamp,
its faint beams showing the outlines of the huddled sea-chests on the
deck floor and, all around, the narrow coffin-sized bunks wherein lay
the sleeping or wakeful crew. Some snored, their bearded mouths wide
open; others smoked and made ribald remarks, as Jim English the
boatswain, a typical sailor of the old school, yarned of long-ago
voyages on windjammers. A real old shellback he was, and the only sailor
whom I ever heard use the expressions “Shiver my timbers!” and “Avast
there!” I had voyaged in many sailing ships and tramp steamers, and
mixed with many crews in foreign seaports, but never till then had I
heard a living mouth utter those ancient nautical phrases so familiar to
me in my old sea novels. “Stow yer gab,” “Holy Moses,” “Who the hell?”,
“Gawd lummy” and “Gorblimy” were almost the only typical remarks in
which sailors of my experience expressed their various moods.
This old shellback, Jim English, was about sixty-five years of age, and
had sailed the seas before most of the crew were born. Sitting on his
huge brown sea-chest, he would half close his eyelids as I played.
“Give us that again, matey; my old mother sang that to me when I was a
nipper,” he would say as I scraped some old melody out of the
carpenter’s cheap fiddle, and his thin, wrinkled lips smiled as though
he dreamed pleasantly in sleep. I never tired of listening to his yarns
as he sat and took bites from his tobacco plug, his kind grey eyes
moving quickly as he brought his fist down with a crash to emphasise the
main facts of his wonderful tales. At night, when the wind was blowing
and you could only just see the outlined forms of the watch tramping to
and fro on the bridge, he would sit and tell us eerie things—how he had
seen the phantom ship off the Cape on moonlight nights, dead shipmates
climbing aloft among the grey sails, singing chanteys.
“Chummy,” he would say, “my wife’s been dead these ’ere twenty years,
but often at night she sits on that old sack by my bunk there, looks at
me in the old way and sez: ‘Jim, keep off the booze, and don’t make the
round trip a dead ’orse.’ And never a drop have I touched these ten
years; and the old girl comes with me and sits there and looks at me
with her laughing grey eyes on every trip now.”
So earnest was he that our heads instinctively turned as we looked at
the sack in the dark corner. We half expected to see his dead wife
sitting there staring. He believed implicitly in dreams, for all the
dire disasters of his life had been foretold in them. He was a kind of
old priest of the sea; he wore an oilskin skull-cap and looked upon all
of us as mere children; and we felt like children as we listened to his
advice and experiences. He had cures for all our ailments, and was most
superstitious. Once while he was yarning and sewing his socks he put one
of them on inside out. Suddenly discovering it, he whipped it off, then
turned almost purple to the centre of his bald head and said: “Now I’ve
done it, mates! Some cursed thing’s sure to happen before the trip’s
over. I’ve lost four shipmates overboard and all through them putting
their socks on inside out!” As he said this anguish wrinkled his
sea-beaten face, and I too almost cursed the unfortunate mistake. The
sailors shuffling cards at the fo’c’sle table looked over their
shoulders through wreaths of tobacco smoke and wondered. As for me, I
believed all he said. My awestruck eyes watched him as he yarned on and
fed my imagination till I was a child again. His personality filled me
with admiration; I almost worshipped him. I really think if he had
mutinied, and secured the old tramp steamer, I should have followed him,
as a son his father, and thrown in my lot with him.
Nor do I exaggerate in saying this, for his weird personality took me
out of myself and away back. He refired the magic blaze, the still
smouldering embers of my boyhood’s romance, and I was romantic, almost
to madness, as a boy. Old bearded heroes, with unflinching eyes, stared
through my memories, and fell, striking that last brave blow for right!
Beautiful women, running by the magic moonlit sea-foams of undiscovered
shores, stretched their arms seaward as the wooden galleons with reefed
topsails stood inland for the shore. Forlorn, lovelit eyes shone like
stars through the dead sunsets on the sky-lines of vanished yesterdays,
till I heard the windy poplar-trees wailing in the lanes outside my
bedroom window and the robin singing on the leafless apple-tree. Once
more the stolen candle shone, and the light never seen on sea or land
blazed through my eyes as I travelled across magic seas and enchanted
distant lands, lands peopled with warriors and the beautiful creations
of the torn novel by my bedside.
That old sea priest loved hymns. He was truly religious, and often sat
turning the leaves of his well-fingered Bible. _Abide with me, fast
falls the eventide_ was a favourite hymn of his. I think I must have
played it to him a hundred times, so that now the melody to me suggests
ships far out at sea; and the old shellback, whom I loved, used to sit
on his sea-chest telling us boys of the wooden ships that went down the
seas and came back from other lands laden with scented cargoes, and that
have faded away into the romantic dreams of this generation.
The remainder of the crew were a mixed lot, not very different from the
usual run of sailors on tramp steamers. They were quiet men, and had
little to do with the firemen and trimmers, who inhabited that
half-fo’c’sle that was portioned off for them. I remember one of them
was a “shilling-a-monther,” working his passage to the Colonies for his
health. He was a fine, broad-chested fellow, but in consumption, and
whenever he was off duty he seemed to be busy rubbing his chest with
oils. He had quite a dozen bottles at the foot of his bunk, which he had
purchased in London from quacks: each bottle held oil that was a certain
cure for consumption! We were very friendly with each other. I often
helped him and, following his instructions, rubbed his back with the
oils till the flesh was red. His little hacking cough would disappear
for several days and he would be quite cheerful; then the cough would
return and blood-spitting follow, and I felt very sorry for him,
especially as, when he felt better, he would hit his chest with his fist
and show me that he was at last cured.
Playing cards or dominoes, sleeping and smoking were the usual
excitements of the crew. On duty, they washed the decks down with the
hose, tramped their watches, rolled ropes, cleaned brass work, and
followed the most monotonous life under the sun. After rounding the Cape
to run the Easter down they became busy with the sails, which helped the
engines, when the wind was fair, to urge the vessel on the lonely
voyage. A trip across the world on a sailing ship is very different from
a voyage on a tramp steamer. She rides the waves and seeks the winds,
and like a mammoth bird thing, with men singing chanteys climbing along
the bones of her spread wings, she races the clouds that fly overhead,
and seems to sway the moon, stars or sun as she rolls and pitches along.
The crews of sailing ships when I was a boy were a different type of men
from the crews of tramp boats. They were real sailors, or young fellows
who had taken to sea life to learn to be sailors. A few of the old-time
men among them, with their weather-beaten faces and old sea ways, gave
that atmosphere to the fo’c’sle that has now gone for ever.
It must have been the romantic dreamer’s paradise to go down to the sea
in sailing ships before the world was worldly. I can imagine those old
sailors, uneducated and superstitious, on the great ocean waters,
watching the sky-lines and the dying sunsets as they dreamed of
undiscovered shores, or by night on deck fancied they could hear the
breakers beating against the starlit sky-line where loomed the shores of
Eternity. Time and science have swept all that away from the sea for
ever. To-day the seaman stands on the deck and thinks of the latest
trade union grievance.
The ways of the ocean no longer suggest eternity behind the stars, or
undiscovered lands afar inhabited by strange peoples. To him the ocean
tracks are simply the main highways to New York, London and the Colonial
cities, and to ports that are like railway stations of the high seas.
Passengers get off at Suez, Colombo, Sydney or Apia and catch the next
boat or train as the quartermaster shouts: “All aboard! Make haste,
ladies and gentlemen.” Rich puffing ladies and gentlemen with their
daughters reship with their touring luggage for the next port, and they
drag their deck-chairs and pet poodles behind them.
Old-time romance of thought has hardened and petrified into our stone
carved, grey terraced cities; but the blue horizons of dreams sparkle on
for ever! Yet withal, I have enjoyed two blessings in life. One is to
have been born civilised, for I have never wanted to hurt a man or do
anything really outrageous. The other is to have been born in civilised
times that have enabled me to wander the world unarmed and safe; to have
sniffed the tropical winds, seas and flowers of far-off countries, and
gazed across primeval plains or on the mountain peaks of lonely isles;
to have heard the mighty silence of vast forests and peered into the
eyes of semi-savage peoples.
The cook of that tramp steamer was a strange old seaman, who drank gin
and seldom spoke. He had a gnarled, stolid-looking face and
expressionless eyes, very deep set. The green and flower of his youth
had left him for ever; not a sentimental leaf or faded flower lingered
in his memory.
He reminded me of the mummified, blackened face of an old native I saw
once, who still stood erect, just as he had died, in the hollow of a
huge tree trunk in a forest of New Caledonia, a tree wherein he had
taken shelter just before it was struck by lightning! Heat had blistered
the dead face till it resembled gnarled bark. There was still a glassy
gleam deep in the eye-sockets, for though the eyes had gone ants had
eaten the back of the head away, and so light crept through from behind,
where there was a small decayed hole in the tree trunk. It was very
faint though, and as I stood a little way off that awful facial
expression reminded me of some hideous living mortal, whose soul slept,
mole-like, in the cold, winter sleep of age, dead, yet still alive long
after the real owner had committed suicide by strangling all his
passions.
It is strange how such sights impress us and cling to our memory, for we
meet dead men daily, whose faculties are fungus growths; we see their
moving lips, shake their dead hands and wonder on the stony expression
of their eyes, eyes that have not even the light of heaven behind them,
as it lit up that Caledonia mummy’s eye-sockets.
Our captain was a Naval Reserve man who carried himself with incurable
haughtiness. He saw life’s great drama and the light of creation only by
being awestruck at himself and measuring all vastness from the soles of
his feet to the crown of his head. The chief engineer was a jolly
Scotsman, who tipped the convivial chief steward and so always had a
bottle of whisky under his bunk. When he was “half-seas-over” he sang
_Ye Banks and Braes_ and _Will Ye No’ Come Back Again?_ as the engines
thumped and the tramp steamer rolled and pitched along the highway of
the world. We ran into terrifically bad weather, and with the sails set,
for the wind was fair, the old engines crashed away as she pitched and
the screw blades bobbed up behind.
I have never followed the sea directly as a profession, but I have lived
and communed with the hearts of sailors, held their hands in warm
comradeship, as well as shared their hardships at sea and ashore. And so
I have read them as they cannot read the sea or themselves. To the
majority of sailors to have been to sea, say for twenty years, simply
means to them, “I’ve been to sea for twenty years,” and means nothing
more. To have been able to go to sea mentally, as well as physically,
and to have been thrilled by the wild poetry of the wind’s songs and the
romance of the sea, is to be in a strong sense a sailor of sailors.
While the average sailor can still chew tobacco and tell you the names
of ropes, women and grog shanties in distant seaports, I cannot even
chew tobacco; but I can sit in my little room and watch the thundering
seas tossing by my bedside, ablaze with the true light of sea romance,
while sailing ships, with their crews aloft singing chanteys full of
joy, pass and repass through my bedroom door, outbound for the seaports
of the world.
About a week later the albatross that sailed the winds with restless
eyes behind us night and day wheeled round and put out for the open sea,
for we were nearing the coast of Australia. I went ashore in Adelaide
and got two shillings’ worth of tomatoes for a treat. The man on the
wharf helped my chum carry them. They gave me half-a-hundredweight for
two shillings!
Adelaide is a real old Colonial seaboard town. I bought a good violin
there and a lot of strings. We left next day for Melbourne, and I played
the violin the whole way. In Melbourne the stowaway bolted, and the
donkeyman swore all the way to Sydney, for the careful London arab
started life in the new land with his “go-ashore boots” and shirts, as
well as taking, in case of emergency, about forty plugs of the crew’s
allowance tobacco. We did not feel sorry for the stowaway in his venture
in a new life; he had the annexing instincts of the old British stock,
and we all felt he would do well in Australia.
I very seldom made a round trip and so, bidding the old boatswain
good-bye, after taking him ashore to hear him mutter for the last time
“Shiver my timbers,” I left the ship.
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