THE “LADY MARY WOOD”
Our week’s voyage is now drawing to a close. We have just been to look
at Cape Trafalgar, shining white over the finest blue sea. (We, who
were looking at Trafalgar Square only the other day!) The sight of that
cape must have disgusted Joinville and his fleet of steamers, as they
passed yesterday into Cadiz bay, and to-morrow will give them a sight
of St. Vincent.
One of their steam-vessels has been lost off the coast of Africa; they
were obliged to burn her, lest the Moors should take possession of her.
She was a virgin vessel, just out of Brest. Poor innocent! to die in
the very first month of her union with the noble whiskered god of war!
We Britons on board the English boat received the news of the
“Groenenland’s” abrupt demise with grins of satisfaction. It was a sort
of national compliment, and cause of agreeable congratulation. “The
lubbers!” we said; “the clumsy humbugs! there’s none but Britons to
rule the waves!” and we gave ourselves piratical airs, and went down
presently and were sick in our little buggy berths. It was pleasant,
certainly, to laugh at Joinville’s admiral’s flag floating at his
foremast, in yonder black ship, with its two thundering great guns at
the bows and stern, its busy crew swarming on the deck, and a crowd of
obsequious shore-boats bustling round the vessel—and to sneer at the
Mogador warrior, and vow that we English, had we been inclined to do
the business, would have performed it a great deal better.
Now yesterday at Lisbon we saw H.M.S. “Caledonia.” THIS, on the
contrary, inspired us with feelings of respect and awful pleasure.
There she lay—the huge sea-castle—bearing the unconquerable flag of our
country. She had but to open her jaws, as it were, and she might bring
a second earthquake on the city—batter it into kingdom-come—with the
Ajuda palace and the Necessidades, the churches, and the lean, dry,
empty streets, and Don John, tremendous on horseback, in the midst of
Black Horse Square. Wherever we looked we could see that enormous
“Caledonia,” with her flashing three lines of guns. We looked at the
little boats which ever and anon came out of this monster, with humble
wonder. There was the lieutenant who boarded us at midnight before we
dropped anchor in the river: ten white-jacketed men pulling as one,
swept along with the barge, gig, boat, curricle, or coach-and-six, with
which he came up to us. We examined him—his red whiskers—his collars
turned down—his duck trousers, his bullion epaulets—with awe. With the
same reverential feeling we examined the seamen—the young gentleman in
the bows of the boat—the handsome young officers of marines we met
sauntering in the town next day—the Scotch surgeon who boarded us as we
weighed anchor—every man, down to the broken-nosed mariner who was
drunk in a wine-house, and had “Caledonia” written on his hat. Whereas
at the Frenchmen we looked with undisguised contempt. We were ready to
burst with laughter as we passed the Prince’s vessel—there was a little
French boy in a French boat alongside cleaning it, and twirling about a
little French mop—we thought it the most comical, contemptible French
boy, mop, boat, steamer, prince—Psha! it is of this wretched vapouring
stuff that false patriotism is made. I write this as a sort of homily à
propos of the day, and Cape Trafalgar, off which we lie. What business
have I to strut the deck, and clap my wings, and cry
“Cock-a-doodle-doo” over it? Some compatriots are at that work even
now.
We have lost one by one all our jovial company. There were the five
Oporto wine-merchants—all hearty English gentlemen—gone to their
wine-butts, and their red-legged partridges, and their duels at Oporto.
It appears that these gallant Britons fight every morning among
themselves, and give the benighted people among whom they live an
opportunity to admire the spirit national. There is the brave honest
major, with his wooden leg—the kindest and simplest of Irishmen: he has
embraced his children, and reviewed his little invalid garrison of
fifteen men, in the fort which he commands at Belem, by this time, and,
I have no doubt, played to every soul of them the twelve tunes of his
musical-box. It was pleasant to see him with that musical-box—how
pleased he wound it up after dinner—how happily he listened to the
little clinking tunes as they galloped, ding-dong, after each other! A
man who carries a musical-box is always a good-natured man.
Then there was his Grace, or his Grandeur, the Archbishop of Beyrouth
(in the parts of the infidels), His Holiness’s Nuncio to the Court of
Her Most Faithful Majesty, and who mingled among us like any simple
mortal,—except that he had an extra smiling courtesy, which simple
mortals do not always possess; and when you passed him as such, and
puffed your cigar in his face, took off his hat with a grin of such
prodigious rapture, as to lead you to suppose that the most delicious
privilege of his whole life was that permission to look at the tip of
your nose or of your cigar. With this most reverend prelate was his
Grace’s brother and chaplain—a very greasy and good-natured
ecclesiastic, who, from his physiognomy, I would have imagined to be a
dignitary of the Israelitish rather than the Romish Church—as profuse
in smiling courtesy as his Lordship of Beyrouth. These two had a meek
little secretary between them, and a tall French cook and valet, who,
at meal times, might be seen busy about the cabin where their
reverences lay. They were on their backs for the greater part of the
voyage; their yellow countenances were not only unshaven, but, to judge
from appearances, unwashed. They ate in private; and it was only of
evenings, as the sun was setting over the western wave, and, comforted
by the dinner, the cabin-passengers assembled on the quarter-deck, that
we saw the dark faces of the reverend gentlemen among us for a while.
They sank darkly into their berths when the steward’s bell tolled for
tea.
At Lisbon, where we came to anchor at midnight, a special boat came
off, whereof the crew exhibited every token of reverence for the
ambassador of the ambassador of Heaven, and carried him off from our
company. This abrupt departure in the darkness disappointed some of us,
who had promised ourselves the pleasure of seeing his Grandeur depart
in state in the morning, shaved, clean, and in full pontificals, the
tripping little secretary swinging an incense-pot before him, and the
greasy chaplain bearing his crosier.
Next day we had another bishop, who occupied the very same berth his
Grace of Beyrouth had quitted—was sick in the very same way— so much so
that this cabin of the “Lady Mary Wood” is to be christened “the
bishop’s berth” henceforth; and a handsome mitre is to be painted on
the basin.
Bishop No. 2 was a very stout, soft, kind-looking old gentleman, in a
square cap, with a handsome tassel of green and gold round his portly
breast and back. He was dressed in black robes and tight purple
stockings: and we carried him from Lisbon to the little flat coast of
Faro, of which the meek old gentleman was the chief pastor.
We had not been half-an-hour from our anchorage in the Tagus, when his
Lordship dived down into the episcopal berth. All that night there was
a good smart breeze; it blew fresh all the next day, as we went jumping
over the blue bright sea; and there was no sign of his Lordship the
bishop until we were opposite the purple hills of Algarve, which lay
some ten miles distant,—a yellow sunny shore stretching flat before
them, whose long sandy flats and villages we could see with our
telescope from the steamer.
Presently a little vessel, with a huge shining lateen sail, and bearing
the blue and white Portuguese flag, was seen playing a sort of
leap-frog on the jolly waves, jumping over them, and ducking down as
merry as could be. This little boat came towards the steamer as quick
as ever she could jump; and Captain Cooper roaring out, “Stop her!” to
“Lady Mary Wood,” her Ladyship’s paddles suddenly ceased twirling, and
news was carried to the good bishop that his boat was almost alongside,
and that his hour was come.
It was rather an affecting sight to see the poor old fat gentleman,
looking wistfully over the water as the boat now came up, and her eight
seamen, with great noise, energy, and gesticulation laid her by the
steamer. The steamer steps were let down; his Lordship’s servant, in
blue and yellow livery (like the Edinburgh Review), cast over the
episcopal luggage into the boat, along with his own bundle and the
jack-boots with which he rides postilion on one of the bishop’s fat
mules at Faro. The blue and yellow domestic went down the steps into
the boat. Then came the bishop’s turn; but he couldn’t do it for a long
while. He went from one passenger to another, sadly shaking them by the
hand, often taking leave and seeming loth to depart, until Captain
Cooper, in a stern but respectful tone, touched him on the shoulder,
and said, I know not with what correctness, being ignorant of the
Spanish language, “Senor ’Bispo! Senor ’Bispo!” on which summons the
poor old man, looking ruefully round him once more, put his square cap
under his arm, tucked up his long black petticoats, so as to show his
purple stockings and jolly fat calves, and went trembling down the
steps towards the boat. The good old man! I wish I had had a shake of
that trembling podgy hand somehow before he went upon his sea
martyrdom. I felt a love for that soft-hearted old Christian. Ah! let
us hope his governante tucked him comfortably in bed when he got to
Faro that night, and made him a warm gruel and put his feet in warm
water. The men clung around him, and almost kissed him as they popped
him into the boat, but he did not heed their caresses. Away went the
boat scudding madly before the wind. Bang! another lateen-sailed boat
in the distance fired a gun in his honour; but the wind was blowing
away from the shore, and who knows when that meek bishop got home to
his gruel?
I think these were the notables of our party. I will not mention the
laughing ogling lady of Cadiz, whose manners, I very much regret to
say, were a great deal too lively for my sense of propriety; nor those
fair sufferers, her companions, who lay on the deck with sickly,
smiling female resignation: nor the heroic children, who no sooner ate
biscuit than they were ill, and no sooner were ill than they began
eating biscuit again: but just allude to one other martyr, the kind
lieutenant in charge of the mails, and who bore his cross with what I
can’t but think a very touching and noble resignation.
There’s a certain sort of man whose doom in the world is
disappointment,—who excels in it,—and whose luckless triumphs in his
meek career of life, I have often thought, must be regarded by the kind
eyes above with as much favour as the splendid successes and
achievements of coarser and more prosperous men. As I sat with the
lieutenant upon deck, his telescope laid over his lean legs, and he
looking at the sunset with a pleased, withered old face, he gave me a
little account of his history. I take it he is in nowise disinclined to
talk about it, simple as it is: he has been seven- and-thirty years in
the navy, being somewhat more mature in the service than Lieutenant
Peel, Rear-Admiral Prince de Joinville, and other commanders who need
not be mentioned. He is a very well- educated man, and reads
prodigiously,—travels, histories, lives of eminent worthies and heroes,
in his simple way. He is not in the least angry at his want of luck in
the profession. “Were I a boy to-morrow,” he said, “I would begin it
again; and when I see my schoolfellows, and how they have got on in
life, if some are better off than I am, I find many are worse, and have
no call to be discontented.” So he carries Her Majesty’s mails meekly
through this world, waits upon port-admirals and captains in his old
glazed hat, and is as proud of the pennon at the bow of his little
boat, as if it were flying from the mainmast of a thundering
man-of-war. He gets two hundred a year for his services, and has an old
mother and a sister living in England somewhere, who I will wager
(though he never, I swear, said a word about it) have a good portion of
this princely income.
Is it breaking a confidence to tell Lieutenant Bundy’s history? Let the
motive excuse the deed. It is a good, kind, wholesome, and noble
character. Why should we keep all our admiration for those who win in
this world, as we do, sycophants as we are? When we write a novel, our
great stupid imaginations can go no further than to marry the hero to a
fortune at the end, and to find out that he is a lord by right. O
blundering lickspittle morality! And yet I would like to fancy some
happy retributive Utopia in the peaceful cloud-land, where my friend
the meek lieutenant should find the yards of his ship manned as he went
on board, all the guns firing an enormous salute (only without the
least noise or vile smell of powder), and he be saluted on the deck as
Admiral Sir James, or Sir Joseph—ay, or Lord Viscount Bundy, knight of
all the orders above the sun.
I think this is a sufficient, if not a complete catalogue of the
worthies on board the “Lady Mary Wood.” In the week we were on board—it
seemed a year, by the way—we came to regard the ship quite as a home.
We felt for the captain—the most good-humoured, active, careful, ready
of captains—a filial, a fraternal regard; for the providor, who
provided for us with admirable comfort and generosity, a genial
gratitude; and for the brisk steward’s lads— brisk in serving the
banquet, sympathising in handing the basin— every possible sentiment of
regard and good-will. What winds blew, and how many knots we ran, are
all noted down, no doubt, in the ship’s log: and as for what ships we
saw—every one of them with their gunnage, tonnage, their nation, their
direction whither they were bound—were not these all noted down with
surprising ingenuity and precision by the lieutenant, at a family desk
at which he sat every night, before a great paper elegantly and
mysteriously ruled off with his large ruler? I have a regard for every
man on board that ship, from the captain down to the crew—down even to
the cook, with tattooed arms, sweating among the saucepans in the
galley, who used (with a touching affection) to send us locks of his
hair in the soup. And so, while our feelings and recollections are
warm, let us shake hands with this knot of good fellows, comfortably
floating about in their little box of wood and iron, across Channel,
Biscay Bay, and the Atlantic, from Southampton Water to Gibraltar
Straits.