his mate had departed the Cockney and the herring-back and I used to
run together and go waltzing round the back part of Hull pretty well all
night. Once we sat on the steps of a bank for nearly four hours, between
twelve and four. With us were two young ladies, who were possibly not
very respectable but about whom I knew nothing as I had never seen them
before and never saw them again, and another young sailor who was good
at yarns. I didn't know his name. Absurd as it may seem we were all
quite happy. The policeman on the beat saw that we were, and evidently
hated to disturb us. He came past us three times, and each time asked us
very nicely to go home. Next time he repeated his request, and as he
said he would look on our doing so in the light of a personal favour to
himself, we agreed to evacuate the bank at last.
Our greatest privation at the Salthouse Lane establishment was want of
tobacco. We rarely had any of it. I remember one day, when want of
nicotine made me very sad, we went, on my suggestion, into the bag-room
and pulled out our bags and chests. My chest was what seamen call a
round-bottomed chest, _i.e._, a sailor's canvas bag. The beauty of it is
that anything wanted is always at the bottom. In turning the bag out I
found half a plug of tobacco. If we had been gold-mining and I had
struck a "pocket," or come across big nuggets we could not have been
happier. We sat in the smoking-room, and having divided the plug we had
a grand debauch. Of course we sometimes begged a pipe or two from
luckier men about the docks, but to find a real half plug was something
to gloat over.
When I had been in the Home nearly two months, and owed what seemed an
amazing amount of money, I really began to think that if I could not
ship in a steamer I must go in a wind-jammer again after all. So I
really began to hunt round in earnest, and after trying all sorts and
conditions of craft I landed on a job in the _Corona_ of Dundee. She was
a biggish composite vessel of about seventeen hundred tons register,
with that horrible thing, wire running rigging. In her I made the
acquaintance of one of her old crew, who had stayed by her in Hull
river, who told me various yarns of her behaviour at sea, and how one
man had been killed in her on her homeward passage from San Francisco.
As we got to be pals he suggested I should bring some more men if I knew
of any in want of a job. I brought along Ginger and the herring-back,
and we went to work cleaning out the limbers. It was not a nice job, for
the limbers of a ship which has been carrying wheat are, to say the
least of it, rather malodorous. We scraped the rotting black muck out
with boards and scrapers, and sent it up on deck. It was a two and a
half days' job. Then the mate set me over my two friends to "break out"
casks of beef and pork from the fore-peak. As I hadn't been much to sea
it rather amused me to find myself bossing two men who had been at it
all their lives. But I have to own that they were two of the stupidest
men I ever met, though they were not bad fellows. Then the time came for
us to go to London by the "run." They offered us 30s. for the run to
London river. This, with the five shillings a day I had earned by six
days' work on board, made £3. I had practically spent nothing while I
was working in her, although we left the Home too early in the morning
to have breakfast there. We used to go to a coffee-stall near the dock
entrance and get what is described by Cockneys as "two doorsteps and a
cup of thick" for about 2d. We went home for dinner and supper. Thus I
had nearly all my £3 for the boss of the Home. He got the money when we
were out in the "stream" with the tug ahead of us.
We were only one night at sea. We washed her down and cleaned her a bit
generally and made her look a little decent, and I had the look-out that
night. As we towed the whole distance we came up London river next
afternoon. It was a gloomy and miserable day, which made London horrible
to behold. It was like entering hell itself to come up into the parts
where the big warehouses stand and where the docks are. We came at last
to Limehouse, where she was to be dry-docked. I was at the wheel then,
and it took us two hours before we got her in and had her settled down
upon the blocks with the shores to hold her. Then I took my
round-bottomed chest and left her. The mate, who had taken a fancy to
me, asked me to ship in her for her next voyage, but I said I meant to
"swallow the anchor" and have no more of that kind of work. My
experience in Hull--the semi-starvation, the fighting, the loneliness
and general blackguardism of the whole show--had somewhat sickened me of
the life. And yet seamen are good fellows, and might be much better if
it were not for the greed of owners, who feed them badly, house them
vilely, and think of nothing in the world but dividends. Seamen know
what they know, and they resent with bitterness the way they are
treated. They have a bitter saying, "That's good enough for hogs, dogs
and sailors." The day must come when England will cry to her children of
the sea, and weep because they are not.
THE GLORY OF THE MORNING
According to his temperament a man's memory of travel and the strange
wild places of the earth deals chiefly with one set of reminiscences or
with another. For me the remembered mornings of the wide and lonely
world, whether in the bush, or on the prairie, or the veldt, or at sea,
are my chiefest delight. For in them, as in the morning even now, is
something especial and peculiar which recalls and recreates youth: which
breaks up the dead customs of to-day, and sends one back again to the
swift, sweet hours of experiment and change. Assuredly the nights had
their charm, whether they were spent by some great camp-fire on the
winding Lachlan, in the darkness of a pine forest in British Columbia,
or on the fo'c'sle-head of a ship upon the sea; and yet the night was
the night, the prelude to sleep, and not to activity, the chief joy of
man.
I can recall how a morning broke for me once which was the morning of a
kind of freedom almost appalling to the child of cities. This was the
morning of youth, or rather of earliest manhood, when I was timid and
yet unafraid, curious, and, after a manner, innocent, when I had slept
by my first camp-fire, on the Bull Plains of Australia's Riverina. And
yet I can remember nothing of those hours clearly. Rather is there in my
mind as typical of the Australian dawn such hours as those I spent away
beyond the Murray, the Murrumbidgee and the Lachlan, on a station on the
banks of the Willandra Billabong. It was early summer and shearing time
for a hundred thousand sheep, whose fleeces were destined for Lyons and
the North of England. I had dropped off a wearied horse close upon
midnight, and yet by half-past three I was up once more. I stumbled
sleepily in the starry darkness to the mare that was kept up, one
Beeswing by name, a mare so swift and keen for a little while that to
ride her was a delight. She whinnied and muzzled me all over as I put
the saddle on her and drew the girths tight. Then I swung across her,
and for some minutes she went gingerly, for she was unsound and wanted
warming for the hot task before her. Yet it was her only work in the
long day and she delighted in it even as I did. We picked our way across
the shadows of big salt-bush and the rounded humps of cotton-bush, then
brown and leafless, to the paddock, a mile square, where the other
horses were at pasture, and as I rode sleep dropped away from me and my
eyes opened and my lips grew moist as I sucked in the air of dawn. In
the east the pale ghost of the day's forerunner stood waiting. The wind
in that hot season came from the north; it had no intoxicating quality
save that of comparative coolness after the furnace of yesterday. Yet
how sweet it was, when I remembered the burning noon, the hot labours of
the stock-yard and its dust as the ten thousand of that day's driving
entered reluctantly. And in the darkness the plain stretched before me
without a break for a thousand miles save for the Barrier Ranges. With
no map on the whole station I knew not even of them, and as far as eye
could reach not a rolling sand-dune marred the calm oceanic level of
that brown sea of land.
And now upon this morning, that yet was night, I was adrift upon a horse
with a definite task in the great circle of immensity. The rest of the
world was nothing, and I rode delicately over the rotten grey ground
till the starshine dwindled and the day came up like a slow diver
through dark waters. The pallid air was odorous as I rode with rolled-up
sleeves and open breast, and I sang a little, for the night was out of
me and my throat was sweet. And Beeswing warmed, and under me grew
nimble, with the swing and easy spring of the dancer, and she reached
out to feel the bit lightly with an unspoiled mouth and to feel my
hands, and she raised her lean head and sniffed the air for her own kind
that we were after. Were we not horse-hunting? She bent her neck and
went as delicately as ever Agag went, and then bounded lightly over a
hole in the rotten ground of the great horse-paddock. She and I were
partners in the morning as the dawn came up. And now, indeed, the
morning tide broke over the eastern bar, and was like a pale grey flood
moving over level earth. Then she whinnied low as though she spoke to me
in a whisper, and I saw one dark, moving shadow, and another, as she
broke into a gallop. Oh, but out of seven alarmed shadows, fearful of
work, I needed three, and neither Beeswing nor her rider could endure in
their pride to drive in seven when a special chosen three were enough.
The dawn's game began, and though it was yet dawn's dusk we went at a
gallop. For Beeswing and I together were the swiftest two, or the
swiftest one, on that great station by the Willandra. But though the
night was not gone there was enough light to see which horses I needed
and which horses I had to discard, and to note how they broke apart
cunningly. For two went this way, and one that; and four split into
units as I swung round the outside edge of them in a wide circle. The
rottenness of the ground gave chances, and made it hazardous. But
Beeswing knew her work and the paddock, and now she was warm and as keen
as fire, and any touch of lameness went away from her. She stretched out
her fine lean head, and her eyes were quick; her open nostrils almost
smelt and swept the ground as her head swung to and fro. Beneath me she
was live steel, tense and wonderful as she sprang to this side and that
of danger, and yet galloped. Again and again she swerved, and then, as a
ten-foot hole showed before her, she leapt it in her stride. And again,
another and another, for here the ground was crumbling, patchy, sunken,
with little rims of hard earth in between cup-like openings. And as we
went, and the day came, I swung my long stock-whip and shouted when it
cracked. I was on them, into them, and they broke back, being
over-pressed. But Beeswing was a bred stock-horse, she knew the game and
loved it. Back she swung right upon her haunches, and was away upon the
hunt after a great raking mare called Mischief. We galloped almost side
by side, and then Mischief quailed and turned coward. As Beeswing swung
again I brought the whip down on my quarry's quarters.
And now the joy of the game of dawn was great, for selection came in and
the skill of the game. To-day I wanted Mischief and Black Jack and the
grey mare. So as I galloped, still with swinging and reverberating whip,
I edged up and put my knees into Beeswing. As she answered and sprang
forward, with a rush I was within whip length of Mischief and Tom, with
Mischief on the outside. One flick of the lash and the mare outpaced
Tom, leaving him last of the seven. Had I edged up outside of him
Beeswing might have doubted whether I wanted him or not, but I sent her
up on his near side, and when I flicked him he plunged back and out and
she let him go. There were six to deal with, though he came after us
whinnying; yet not being urged he presently stayed, and then I shot
forward again and cut off two that I did not want, and now among the
four there was but one I wished to leave behind. They were well aware
that one or more of them was not to work to-day, for I still hung upon
them with some eager discrimination. They knew the final shout of
victory as well as I who sent it up. But Lachlan, the horse I wished to
leave, was the fastest of the four and kept ahead. So I ran them hard
for a quarter of a mile and then edged out a little, and slowed down
till they slowed and left a space betwixt the three and Lachlan. I
suddenly spoke to Beeswing and shook her up till she came swiftly
abreast of my three galloping like horses in a Roman chariot. Then
left-handed I cut Lachlan in the flank, and with a swift turn Beeswing
swept between him and the others. They stayed and turned while disparted
Lachlan ran wildly. And now my three, being turned, ran back for the
others; and Beeswing followed them like fire and came up with them, and
once more turned them and sent them for home. To keep them going while
the others whinnied meant urging; it meant filling their minds,
occupying their attention. So once more, with a great shout, I was upon
them and swung the whip, letting it fall with a crack first on this side
and then on that, and now in the growing daylight the dust rose up as we
galloped. And presently I saw the little "tin" house where the
out-station boss lived, and the tent I shared with my chum the
"rouseabout." And as we went fast and faster (for it was morning and I
was young) the sun thrust up a shoulder behind me and it was day in
Australia, day in the Lachlan back-blocks. And I could see Long Clump, a
patch of dwarf-box, over my shoulder as I turned loosely in the saddle
to note whether the other horses still followed. I laughed at the day
(for it was dawn), and yet I knew as I ran my three into the yard that
ere the day was done I should have ridden sixty miles, and have mustered
20,000 sheep in Long Clump Paddock. And when I stayed outside the
stock-yard and put up the slip panels and patted Beeswing on the neck
the one great pleasure of the day was over. The rest was not to be
accomplished in the dusk of dawn and under the morning star, but had to
be wrought out in flying dust, amid the plague of flies and the fierce
heat of an Austral noon, whose heat increased with the slow sun's
decline. But that swift sweet hour of the morning had been my very own.
The remainder of the day belonged to the world, to duty, to the man who
paid me a pound a week and "tucker" for my hands and arms and as much
brains as work with sheep demanded. Yet through these hours sometimes
the glory of the morning remained.
* * * * *
There are mornings on land and mornings on the sea, and when the world
is a grey wash and a mask of spindrift it is good to be alive upon the
sea, high on a topsail-yard, to see the grey return of the glory of the
day. The work is often sheer murder, but it is the work of men, and
though the skin cracks and the nails bleed, as the bulging, slatting,
frantic canvas surges like a cast-iron wave, the thin red-shirted line
along the jack-stay does heroic work without meaning it, without one
touch of consciousness, without praise, and mostly without even that
reward of a "tot" of grog so sweet to the simple-minded sailorman. Ah,
yes, to be sure we were heroes, and I too (though now soft and
self-conscious) played an Homeric part upon the yard, was bold, and
afraid, and "funked" it with any god-smitten, panic-driven half-god by
Scamander's banks, or the windy walls of Troy. Now I know what it was,
and can see the grey wash of ocean, and the grey wash of white-faced
morning with the great seas driving against the rising day, even as the
rollers of the Atlantic surge against the base of a high berg. Little
good men at home, fat men, rotund, easy souls, or those who are neither
good, nor fat, nor easy, may stare and imagine yet not come near the
reality when the wind booms and the sea rises, and the great concave of
night sky flattens and presses down upon the driven ship, and men
strive to escape doom and yet care not, and work till they are blind,
and then drop down into the scant shelter of the deck, where the icy
wind seems warm after the strife and bellowing up aloft. Heroes? To be
sure we were heroes. What is being shot at a mile off, or a hundred
yards off, to being shot at by the very heavens while one hangs over the
gaping trenches of the sea? There is not an old shellback alive who has
clung between angry heaven and the grey-green pastures of the deep but
deserves a Victoria Cross for unconscious, dutiful, grumbling, growling
valour. He might justly call every scanty dollar he earns a medal. For
he has often fought in the Pacific, or by the Horn, or off the windy
Cape. To recall the thick tempest at midnight, when the wind harps
thunder on the stretched rigging, is to be a man again. If I blow their
trumpet, the trumpet of the old sea-dogs, these scallawags, these
Vikings, what matter if I seem to blow my own, having been their
companion one campaign or two upon the deep? That "Me" is dead, I know,
and can only be resurgent in memory, and will never laugh or feel afraid
again when the slatting canvas jars one's very teeth. Yet to remember
(as I can remember) how one wild night on the Southern Pacific grew into
morning gives me back youth and morning again when I cared nothing for
death, since death was as far off, as impossible, ay, as absurd, as Fame
itself.
It had blown hard all day, and an hour after midnight our scanty band,
some ten of us (mostly Cockneys like myself), stood upon the foot-ropes
of the lower fore-topsail. There should have been twenty, but to be
undermanned has been English fashion since Agincourt. Growl we ever so
loudly where could more be found? The work was to be done by ten, one
more even was not to be asked for. If the task seemed possible, why, it
was possible, and when we scrambled to that narrow line of battle in the
dark it seemed as easy as most things at sea, where the difficult is
done hourly. Risks are nothing there; to risk nothing would be to risk
destruction and to incur the bitter reproach of having shipped "not to
go aloft." Each man to his fellow on the yard was a shadow and a pale
blot of a face; each voice was a windy whisper, a bellow blown down into
silence. As the ship ran, and lifted, and pitched and trembled, her
narrow wedge shape was a blot beneath us: on each side of her white foam
marked the hissing, hungry sea. But, with the sail surging before us in
its gear like a mad balloon, who noted aught but the sail? I leant out
upon my taut bulge of living canvas, beat it with the flat of my hand,
and being the youngest waited for the word to "leech" it or "skin" it
up. Being tall I was not at the extremity of the yard arm; my fellow
fore-topman and a little squat man from the lower Thames stood outside
me. My mate and the man inside were my world. The others I saw and heard
not. The word came along the yard from the bunt to "leech" it up, and we
leant over and caught the leech and pulled it on the yard. Now the fight
began, but the beginning of it was easy sparring, and though the wind
blew heavy, and each minute we had to remember death when she checked
her roll with a jerk, the weather leech came up easy and we chuckled,
each being glad. And in half an hour, or an hour, we were half masters
of the wind, or as much of it as gave the sail life, after many small
defeats. And then (whose fault of fingers for not being steel hooks, who
shall say?) the wind, having got reinforcements, tore the victory from
us and away went the sail once more free and thundering in the dark. The
word was passed again, the indomitable word by the indomitable bo'sun at
the bunt, this time to "skin" it up, and each man clawed out again at
the flat booming canvas, clawed at it with his crooked fingers as
wrestlers claw for hold behind each others' backs. A wrinkle gave hold,
we nipped it, and then the ironic devil in the gale shrieked with
laughter and snatched even so small an advantage from us. We knew the
"old man" and the mate were cursing us down below. Did they curse us, or
the weather, or the owners, or our English Agincourt trick once more?
What did it matter to us, beaten and unbeaten, as we rested for a moment
and then again stretched out bleeding fingers for some little advantage,
knowing well that when such a gale blew victory was only possible when
by constant trials the chance came of each being given good or fair
handhold at once. Then came a shriek of wind and a blown-out lull and a
wrinkle lapsed into a fold. We shouted "Now!" left hold of the
jack-stay, and with feet outstretched grabbed slack canvas and hung on
as another squall came singing like shrapnel across the peaks of the
leaping sea. "Hold on now, hold on!" so sang all of us, and we cursed
each other furiously. "Oh, oh, you miserable devil, hang on or it's lost
again!" We cursed ourselves, felt our muscles crack, our nails shred,
our skin peel and stretch and sting, and yet (thanks to our noble
selves) we only lost an inch. Once more--"Now, now up, you dogs!" and
that's the long-lost, long-waited, sudden, surprising clock of dawn
yonder. We have been two hours here, and once more the sail leaps up and
comes down. Here, two hours, two compressed swift hours, two compacted
eternities measured in gasps and half the work is done unless we weaken
and let up and let go.
But that's the dawn!
Morning and the glory of it, the grey wash of Eternity; sea-grey and
world-grey and sky-grey, all in one great wash with a little whiteness
standing for daylight. Beyond the illimitable wash where the sea breaks
against the sky is the sun; source of all, strength of all. And there is
no sleep to wash out of our eyes before we catch up strength from it,
and encouragement. Lately we might have raised the Ajax cry, "In the
light, in the light, destroy us," but now we see the little sea-plant of
grey-green grow in the east, and we are strong. There is light, or a
blight, a greyness out ahead and the deck whitens all awash, and the
"old man" shivers in his oilskin coat as he hangs on to a pin in the
rail to watch us. The poop is wet and gleaming, wet with the spray of
following seas, and as our ship rolls the swash of shipped seas hisses,
and her cleanness is as the cleanness of something newly varnished. Once
and again as she rolls (the wind now quartering) the scuppers spout
geyser-like and gurgle. As she ran like a beaten thing she wallowed a
little, dived, scooped up seas and shook them off. And yet the topsail
was not conquered.
And now and once again the squalls howled, and we held on, gaining
nothing, yet losing nothing. We were blind but obstinate; to have gained
something when everything might be lost beneath us gave us grip and
courage. Ah, and then, then the great chance came, and as the last great
fold of white canvas rose up like a breaking wave we shouted, flung
ourselves upon it, and as our bellies (lean by now) held the rest,
smothered it and beat its last life out. The thing had been alive; the
gods too had blown, and we had been all but dissipated, but now we were
conquerors, and the gaskets bound our dead prey to the yard. And the
morning was up, a wild and evil-minded waste it flowered in; the music
of the storm shrieked like the Valkyries scurrying through grey space.
But what cared we, since now she would carry or drag what sail remained,
creaseless, resonant, wide-arched and wonderful. The light leapt from
crest to crest, and a little pale yellow blossom of blown dawn peeped
out of the grey. Like a touch of fire it reanimated our washed and
reeling world; we laughed as we dropped down after our three hours'
battle with the demons of the air. It was morning; there was coffee and
tobacco; our souls were satisfied and satiated with rewarding toil; if
Fate was kind there would be neither making nor shortening of sail till
the next day. We touched the deck and ran for'ard laughing. We saluted
the cook, blinking at the door of his galley. "Good-morning, doctor!"
and it _was_ "good-morning!" for we were mostly young.
* * * * *