MY FELLOW PASSENGERS
It blew a hard breeze of wind that night. Soon after I had left
the deck they furled the mainsail and topgallant-sail, reefed the
maintopsail, and tied another reef in the mizzen-topsail. In fact, it
looked as if we were to have a black gale of wind, dead on end too,
with a sure prospect then of bearing up for the Downs afresh. How it
may be in these steamboat times, I will not pretend to say; but my
experience of the old sailing-ship is that the first night out, let the
weather be what it will, is, on the whole, about as wretched a time as
a man at any period of his life has to pass through.
Mr. Colledge was sound asleep in his bunk, his brandy flask within
convenient reach of his hand. It was certain enough that he had heard
nothing of the disturbance on deck. I undressed and rolled into my
bed, and there lay wide awake for a long time. The ship creaked like
a cradle. The full dismalness of a first night out was upon me, and it
was made weightier yet--how much weightier indeed!--by the recollection
of the wild and sudden tragedy of the evening. Oh, the insufferable
weariness of the noises, the straining of the bulkheads, the yearning
roar of the dark surge washing the porthole, with the boiling of it
dying out into a dim simmering upon the wind, the instant stagger of
the ship to the blow of some heavy sea full on her bow, the sensation
of breathless descent as the vessel chopped down with a huge heave to
windward into the trough, the pendulum swing of one’s wearing apparel
hanging against the bulkhead, the half-stifled exclamations breaking
from adjacent cabins, the whole improved into a true oceanic flavour
by the occasional hoarse songs of the sailors above, faintly heard, as
though you were in a vault, and that strange vibratory humming which
the wind makes to one hearkening to it out of the cabin of a ship.
I fell asleep at last, and was awakened at half-past seven by the
steward, who wished to know if I wanted hot water to shave with. The
moment I had my consciousness, I was sensible that a heavy sea was
running.
‘No shaving this morning, thank you,’ said I, ‘unless I have a mind to
slice the nose off my face. How’s the weather, steward?’
‘Blowing a buster from the south’ard, sir,’ he answered, talking with
his lips at the venetian of the closed door, ‘and the ship going along
’andsomely as a roll of smoke.’
Here somebody called him, and he trotted away.
Mr. Colledge awoke. ‘By George!’ he exclaimed, ‘I’ve had a doocid long
sleep.’
‘How d’ye feel?’ said I.
‘In no humour to rise,’ he answered. ‘I suppose I can have what
breakfast I’m likely to eat brought to me here?’
‘Bless you, yes,’ I answered.
‘Any news, Mr. Dugdale?’ he asked, his voice beginning to languish as
a sensation of nausea grew upon him with the larger awakening of his
faculties.
‘We ran down a French lugger last night,’ said I, ‘and drowned a lot of
men. That’s all.’
He eyed me dully, thinking perhaps that I was joking, and then said:
‘Well, there it is, you see. Yesterday, you were talking of the fun of
a voyage; and the very earliest of the humours is the drowning of a lot
of men.’
‘And women,’ said I.
‘Poor devils!’ he exclaimed. ‘Will you hand me a bottle of Hungary
water that you’ll find in my portmanteau? Much obliged to you, Dugdale:
and will you kindly tell the steward as you pass through the cabin to
bring me a cup of tea?’
‘Get up by-and-by, if you feel equal to it,’ said I. ‘Nursing
sea-sickness only makes the demon more pitiless. Show yourself on
deck, and the wind’ll blow the nausea out of you. And I’ll tell you a
better cure than Hungary water or brandy flasks--a cube of salt-horse,
Colledge; a hearty lump of marine beef, something to work up the
muscles of your jaws, and to sharpen your teeth for you.’
‘Oh gracious, my dear fellow--don’t,’ he exclaimed, turning his face to
the wall of the ship; and I heard him exclaim, as though muttering to
himself: ‘How the water gurgles about this window, and what a doocid
sickly green it is!’
But a very few of us assembled at the breakfast table. Colonel
Bannister was there, a very ramrod of a man, with a Bengal-tigerish
expression of face as he glared round about him from betwixt his white
wire-like whiskers. There were also present Mr. Emmett, an artist,
who was making the voyage to the East for the purpose of painting
Indian scenery, a man with long hair curling down his back, a ragged
beard and moustaches, a velvet coat, and Byronic collars, out of
which his long thin neck forked up like the head of a pole through a
scarecrow’s suit of clothes; Mr. Peter Hemskirk, who looked uncommonly
fat, pale, and unfinished in his attire this morning; two young Civil
Service fellows--as we should now call their trade--named Greenhew and
Fairthorne; and Mr. Sylvanus Johnson, a journalist, bound to Bombay
or Calcutta (I cannot be sure of the city), to edit a newspaper--a
bullet-headed man, with a sort of low-comedian face, very blue about
the cheeks where he shaved, and small keen restless black eyes, full
of intelligence, whose suggestion in that way was not to be impaired
or weakened by an expression in repose of singular self-complacency.
Captain Keeling, at the head of the table, sat skewered up in his
uniform frock-coat in stiff satin stock and collars. Mr. Prance
occupied the other end of the table. He, too, was attired in a uniform
resembling the dress worn by the skipper. He had a pleasant brown
sailorly face, with a floating pose of head upon his shoulders that
made one think of a soap-bubble poised on top of a pipe-stem. There
were no ladies. Once I caught a glimpse of Mrs. Colonel Bannister’s
Roman nose, and grey hair ornamented with a large black lace cap,
fitfully hovering for a moment or two in the wide hatch past the chief
officer’s chair, down which the steps led that went to the sleeping
berths. But the apparition vanished with almost startling suddenness,
as though the old lady had fallen or been violently pulled below. When,
later on, I inquired after her, I learnt that she had betaken herself
again to her bunk.
It was a mighty uncomfortable breakfast. The ship was rolling violently
and convulsively upon the short snappish Channel seas--the most
insufferable of all waters when in commotion, making even the seasoned
salt pine for the long regular rhythmic heave of the blue ocean billow.
The fiddles hindered the plates from sliding on to our laps; but their
contents were not to be so easily coaxed into keeping their place; an
unusually heavy lurch shot a large helping of liver and bacon on to
Mr. Hemskirk’s knees; and the ship’s surgeon, Dr. Hemmeridge, came
perilously near to being badly scalded by Mr. Johnson, the literary
man, who, in reaching for a cup of tea tilted the swinging tray. There
was not much talk, and what little was said chiefly concerned the
incident of the previous evening.
‘Captain,’ cried young Mr. Fairthorne in an effeminate voice--he was
the gentleman, it seems, who last night had been calling upon anybody
to smother the ayah--‘whath to become of thothe poor Frenchmen?’
‘Sir,’ answered Captain Keeling in a manner as stiff as a marline-spike
with his dislike of the subject, ‘I do not know.’
‘Frenchmen,’ cried Colonel Bannister in a loud voice, as though he were
directing the manœuvres of a company of Sepoys, ‘are the hereditary
enemies of our country, and it never can matter to a Briton what
becomes of them.’
‘Boot my tear sir,’ remarked Mr. Hemskirk, ‘you are a Briton, yes--and
you are a Christian too, und der Franchman iss your broder.’
‘My what?’ roared the colonel. ‘Tell ye what it is, Mr. Hemskirk: it is
a good job that you cannot pronounce our language, otherwise you might
happen sometimes, sir, to grow offensive.’
Mynheer, who seemed to have had some previous acquaintance with this
little bombshell of a man, dried the grease upon his lips with a
napkin, and cast a wink upon Mr. Greenhew, whose face of resentment
at this familiarity caused me to break into such an immoderate fit of
laughter that there was nothing for it but to bolt from the table.
I found a real Channel picture stretching round me when I gained the
deck; a grey sky, lightened in places with a kind of suffusion of
radiance that made one think of the rusty bronze lingering in the wake
of an expired sunset. Saving these flaws of dull light, there was no
break anywhere visible in the wide cold bald stare of heaven over our
mastheads. The strong wind was a dry one, yet the horizon was thick
with a look of rain all the way round; and out of the smother in
the south, the sea was rolling in heights of a dark green, rich with
creaming foam, that somehow seemed to satisfy the eye, as though each
frothing crest were a streak of sunshine. There was a smack half a
mile to windward of us staggering along and sinking and rising under a
fragment of red mainsail; but there was nothing else to be seen in that
way.
The wind was blowing free for us--almost dead abeam, indeed; and the
_Countess Ida_ was swarming through it in a manner to put a quicker
beat into the heart at the first sight of the picture she made. The
topgallant-sail was set over the single-reefed maintopsail; the whole
foresail was on her, and, with the other topsails and a staysail or
two, was tearing the great ship through the short savage heapings
of water with a power that made one think of steam as trifling by
comparison. The forecastle was wet with flying spray. The galley
chimney was smoking cheerily, and from all about the long-boat came
hearty farmyard sounds of the grunting of pigs and the bleating of
sheep and the cackling of hens. There was a gang of seamen at the
pumps, and as they plied the brakes with nervous sinewy arms, their
song chimed in with the gushing of the water flowing freely to the
scuppers, and washing back again to their feet with every roll to
windward. Other seamen were at work upon the carronades, or cleaning
paint-work with scrubbing-brushes, or coiling gear away upon pins,
and so on, and so on. It was after eight, and all hands were on deck,
and a fine set of livelies they looked, spite of most of them being
snugged up in black or yellow oil-skins. Ships went with full companies
in those days, and but for the slenderness of our ordnance, it might
have been easy to imagine one’s self on board a man-of-war when one ran
one’s eyes over the decks of the _Countess Ida_ and counted the crew,
and marked the butcher and butcher’s mates, the cook and _his_ mates,
the baker and _his_ mates, the carpenter and _his_ mates, coming and
going, and making a very fair of the neighbourhood of the galley.
The second mate warmly clad paced the weather side of the poop, sending
many a weatherly glance to seaward, with a frequent lifting of his
eyes to the rounded iron-hard canvas; whilst against the brilliant
white wake of the ship, roaring and boiling upwards as it seemed, to
the stoop of the Indiaman’s huge square counter, the figures of the
two sailors at the big wheel stood out clear-cut as cameos, with the
broad brass band upon the circle dully reflecting a space of copperish
light in the sky over the weather mizzen-topsail yard-arm, and the
newly polished hood of the binnacle gleaming as though sun-touched.
A couple of midshipmen in pea-coats and brass buttons, curly headed
young rogues, with a spirit of mischief bright in every glance they
sent, patrolled the lee side of the poop; and up in the mizzen top
were two more of them, with yet another long-legged fellow jockeying a
spur of the cross-trees, with his loose trousers rattling like a flag;
but what job he was upon I could not tell. The planks of this deck
were as white as the trunk of a tree newly stripped of its bark. Four
handsome quarter-boats swung at the davits. Along the rail on either
hand went a row of hencoops, through the bars of which the heads of
cocks and hens came and went in a winking sort of way, like a swift
showing and withdrawing of red rags. On the rail, for a considerable
distance, were stowed bundles of compressed hay, the scent of which
was a real puzzle to the nose, coming as it did through the hard sweep
of the salt wind. The white skylights glistened through the intricacies
of brass wire which shielded them. Abaft the wheel, on either side of
it, their tompioned muzzles eyed blindly by the closed ports meant to
receive them, were a couple of eighteen pounders; for in those days the
Indiamen still went armed; not heavily, indeed, as in the war-times of
an earlier period, but with artillery and small-arms enough to enable
her to dispute with some promise of success with the picaroon who was
still afloat, whose malignant flag the burnished waters of the Antilles
yet reflected, and whose amiable company of assassins were as often
to be met with under the African and South American heights as in the
Channel of the Mozambique, or eastward yet on the broad surface of the
Indian Ocean.
I crossed the deck to where Mr. Cocker was stumping, and asked him if
he could tell me off what part of the English coast our ship now was.
‘Drawing on to the Wight, sir,’ he answered, with a sort of groping
look in the little moist blue eyes he turned over the lee bow into the
thickness beyond.
‘Well, we’re blowing through it, anyway,’ said I. ‘I shouldn’t have
allowed these heels for any conceivable structure born with such bows
as the _Countess Ida_. What is it?’ I asked with a glance at the broad
dazzle of yeast dancing and whipping and slinging off the Indiaman’s
tall side against the hurl of the weather surge.
‘It’ll be all eight,’ answered the second officer: ‘it would be ten had
she worked herself loose of the grip of the stevedores. She wants the
mainsail and foreto’garn’sail. These old buckets are manufactured to
creak, and whilst they creak, they hold, it is said.’
His face crumpled up into a grin that made him look twenty years older
under the thatch of his sou’-wester curling to his eyebrows, with the
broad flaps over his ears like a nightcap for his sea-helmet to sit
upon.
‘Pray, Mr. Cocker,’ said I, ‘was any damage done to the ship by the
collision last night?’
‘There wasn’t so much as a rope-yarn parted,’ he answered. ‘I looked
to see the spritsail yard sprung, for it’ll have been that spar, I
reckon, which dragged the lugger’s masts overboard by the shrouds of
them. But it’s as sound as anything else aboard the ship.’
He shifted uneasily, as though to make off, and, turning my head, I
spied the captain looking into the binnacle. So, having had already
enough of the deck, I stepped below for a smoke in the cuddy recess,
where I found Mr. Emmett in a long cloak, such as mysterious assassins
and renegade noblemen used to wear at the Coburg Theatre, sucking at a
large curled meerschaum pipe, and arguing on the subject of longitude
with a little man almost a dwarf, an honest and highly intelligent
pigmy, with the head of a giant supported on the legs of a boy of
six, an amiable earnest little creature, with a trick of looking
up wistfully into your face. His name was Richard Saunders: and I
afterwards understood that he was proceeding to India on behalf of some
Pharmaceutical Society, to collect information on and examples of Hindu
and other medicines, drugs, charms, and so forth.
Well, all that day it continued to blow a very strong wind. The ship’s
plunging increased as the Channel opened under her bow and admitted
something of the weight of the Atlantic in the run of its seas. There
was a constant sharp-shooting of spray forward over the forecastle, and
the wet came sobbing along; the lee scuppers to where the cuddy front
checked it under the poop ladder. Very few of us assembled at lunch or
at dinner.
During the progress of this last meal, Colonel Bannister left the table
and went below, and after an interval, uprose through the hatch, with
his large distinguished-looking wife holding on to him. Mynheer Peter
Hemskirk, on seeing her, cried out: ‘Ah, Meestrees Bannister, boot dot
iss vot I call plooky!’ and Mr. Johnson came near to breaking his neck
whilst starting to his legs to stand as she passed. She took a chair
next her husband, and sat grimly staring around her, her lips pale with
the compression of them. She shook her head to every suggestion made by
the steward, and then, being unable to hold out any longer, seized hold
of her little ramrod of a husband and went staggering and rolling below
with him. When he returned, he tossed down a glass of wine with an
angry gesture and a fierce countenance, and looking at Hemskirk, cried
out: ‘I’ve a great respect for my wife, sir, and she’s a fine woman in
every sense of the word.’--The Dutchman nodded.--‘But,’ continued the
colonel, clenching his fist, ‘if ever I go to sea with a woman again,
be she wife, aunt, or grandmother, may I be poisoned for a lunatic, and
my remains committed to the deep. This is the fourth time I’ve sworn
it--my mind is now resolved!’
Out of all this sort of thing one could get a laugh here and there; but
on the whole it was desperately weary work, and continued so till we
had blown clear of soundings. Altogether, it was as ugly a down Channel
run as any man would pray to be preserved from; the atmosphere grey,
the seas a muddy green, the howling blast chill as a November morn,
often darkening to a squall, that would sweep between the masts in
horizontal lines of rain sparkling like steel, and with spite enough in
the lancing of them to compel the strongest to turn his back. Now and
again a lady passenger would show in the cuddy; but though there were
some twenty-eight of us in all, not reckoning a couple of ayahs, and
a Chinaman in the garb of his country, who acted as nurse to one Mrs.
Trevor’s baby, never once in those days did above seven of us, barring
the skipper and his mates, sit down to a meal.
The thick weather lay heavily upon the captain’s mind, held him in fits
of abstraction whilst at table, dismissed him after a brief sitting
to the deck, and kept him heedful and taciturn whilst there. He had
had one collision, and wanted no more; and you would notice how that
tragedy had served him, by observing him when in the cuddy to prick up
his ears to the least unusual noise on deck, to glance at the tell-tale
compass over his head, as though it were the sun which he had been
patiently waiting for a chance to ‘shoot,’ to swallow his food with
impatient motions to the steward to bear a hand, and to bolt up the
cabin steps without a smile or syllable of apology to us for quitting
the table.