By REV. ERNEST RICHARDS, B.D, author of “The Cruise of the Rattler” “In
a Deepwater Ship,” etc.
[_All rights reserved._]
Truth is stranger than fiction, and sometimes a sailor’s yarns are
stranger than them both, but there is nothing in this incident of my
seafaring experience which is untrue to simple fact.
I joined the two-masted fore-and-aft schooner _W. R. Chester_, of
Maine, in New York, and though not a devotee of St. Patrick it happened
to be St. Patrick’s Day when we sailed for the Port of Monte Christi,
in the Spanish West Indies, literally on the north coast of St.
Domingo, the island on which Columbus himself was buried. The mate and
skipper were genuine “Down Easters,” who are supposed to have no use
for a Britisher. The other seaman was a coloured man from Dixey.
The day we left was very cold; during the night more than six inches of
snow had covered the decks, and the bright March morning was cold and
piercing to a degree--surely a chilly introduction to St. Patrick.
Long before daylight we had swept the decks, and after a good meal of
fish, buckwheat cakes and the inevitable doughnuts, we got under weigh,
or to be more literally correct, we let go our moorings, hauled in our
warps, and passed out of the dock in tow of an East River tug, bearing
on her high pilot house the usual gilded spread-eagle, radiating in the
brilliant morning sun. The golden lines of the eagle afforded a marked
contrast to the white snow, which fairly shimmered in the sun’s rays
and dazzled one’s eyes as one caught it at a certain angle of vision.
In the same dock as ourselves was the famous American four-masted,
full-rigged ship _Shenandoah_, possibly the largest wooden
square-rigged vessel ever launched. Our cross-trees did not reach
above the dead eyes of her lower rigging, and one beheld, as one
looked up, one of the finest examples of the shipbuilder’s art. Her
lines were more than graceful, and her masts, yards and rigging were a
deftly-wrought combination of angles. Before I could loose the gaskets
I had to sweep the snow off the sails, and occasionally the hitches
or turns of the gaskets had swollen so much that it was necessary to
thump them before I could get them adrift. Brushing off the snow and
hammering gasket turns warmed my hands, and as the blood flowed to
the finger tips they ached so much that if I could have laid hold of
the man at that moment who wrote poetry about the sea I should have
been quite prepared to have shot him. Well indeed do I remember St.
Patrick’s Day.
Below Sandy Hook we dropped our pilot, and then our voyage of seventeen
hundred miles to the coral-fringed shores of the Spanish West Indies
began in reality--seventeen hundred miles in a schooner of little more
than a hundred tons register, with a deck load half-way up the rigging
lanyards. At noon I relieved the mate at the wheel whilst he went to
get his dinner; then the skipper relieved me and I went aloft to bend a
fore gaff topsail.
One, used to the slow evolutions of a big ship, does not take kindly to
the quick evolutions of a schooner. Clinging to the truck reeving the
halliards, or perched on the gaff end reeving the sheet as it bucks and
jumps like a broncho, fills one with many thoughts and feelings, which,
without the use of hyperbole, could hardly be described as poetry. In
the language of the show bills, it must be seen to be appreciated. As
one will readily imagine I was not sorry when the sail was bent and set
and I was enabled to return to the deck: I felt a bit squeamish.
The people who have formed their conception of sailors from certain
pictures should sign articles in a small vessel to have them dispelled.
Picturesque seamen, with nothing to do but pose as artists’ models,
may exist no doubt, but they are not common, at least, not in small
vessels. Honest work dispels most illusions and cures some diseases.
There is a very expressive American phrase about being “dog tired,”
which reminds me of that first watch on deck. I certainly was dog
tired. How ever I kept the schooner to her course I don’t know;
occasionally the kick of the rudder caused the wheel spokes to hit me
under the chin, and I awoke from a momentary doze to see the course
a point east or west of the lubber’s mark on the binnacle. Sometimes
on the deck load forrard, when keeping my look-out, I seemed to see
several stars running together. Just about eight bells I took a hand at
the pump, and when she sucked dry the other watch came to relieve us.
The mate and myself divided the wheel and look-out between us during
the watch.
Our passage down, of eighteen days, was the usual mixture of trade
winds, variables and tropical squalls. The squalls were sometimes
tremendous, and so frequent in the tropics that I formed the habit of
turning in all standing, like a trooper’s horse, ready for a call.
During a squall the lightning was most vivid, the peals of thunder
which followed would shake the ship from truck to keel. Yet we had no
bad weather until the passage home.
It is not my purpose to describe a heavy North Easter off Cape Hatteras
in a small vessel, sitting on the cabin deck eating soup in the giddy
intervals when the schooner is momentarily poised on the bosom of a
long swell, and then suddenly changing the angle of the soup-bowl as
the craft fairly leaps down the mountain of water into the valley, all
this time jammed hard and fast against the bulkhead and cabin locker.
But this is all in a day’s work for Jack, so one passes on to resume
the contrast between one vessel and another. Incidentally I may state
that the gale referred to occurred on the passage home.
At the outset it must be distinctly emphasized that steamship
passengers know nothing of the life at sea in a sailing
vessel. Life in a deepwater sailing ship is different from
a schooner; a tramp steamer is still further removed, and a
passenger liner is the furthest removed of them all.
The languid passenger, reading in a deck chair, sipping his forenoon
Bovril, may think he is less than comfortable, but if he were out on
the flying jibboom of a vessel in a snow squall, struggling to subdue
the mad chaotic gyrations of the flying jib, he might think he had
struck purgatory, except for the temperature.
After big ships, what strikes one about the atmosphere of a small one
is its loneliness. Five men shut up in a ship; discipline somewhat
relaxed, but not exactly easy-going familiarity; plenty of work in the
watch on deck, but little to do when below. All these tend to make the
passage healthy, though somewhat dull.
The mate and I had one watch, the skipper and the coloured ordinary
seaman the other; the cook, a Nova Scotia man, a genuine blue-nose,
gave us a hand to make sail, and tack ship; beyond that his evolutions
were confined to the culinary department.
The cook was not exactly a French chef, but he was a good cook, and as
we were scarcely epicureans he came in for little criticism. Though
only eighteen days out the cook vowed he’d never come another off-shore
voyage; cod schooners were his business, and to the fishing, he vowed,
he would return.
With such a small crew we did not suffer, during our watch on deck,
from ennui. But below, it was very tiresome to have no one with whom
to converse, except at meal times. Alone, to lie in your bunk and read
a six-months’-old magazine; alone, to gaze at the cabin ceiling and
stare at the crude pencil marks which some illiterate predecessor has
scrawled down to score off the days of the passage, or to indicate his
wages due; alone, to wonder what the people are doing at home; alone,
to make mental comparisons between the busy stable highways of the town
and the solitary undulating highways of the ocean.
Once, during the passage, I was rudely awakened from my reveries and
thrown out of my bunk; the _W. R. Chester_ had struck a coral reef.
But I did not know exactly what it was until I had helped to wear the
schooner partly round to drive her off; fortunately nothing serious
happened.
Our skipper was a passable navigator, but his watch and a clock did
duty for a chronometer, an old quadrant of Nelson’s time did duty for
a sextant, and of such instruments as azimuth finders he was possibly
quite ignorant: at least, I do not remember to have seen them.
During the dog watches, both he and the mate spent their time in
yarning about people “down home,” and as they had married sisters I
learnt the history of many members of their family as I stood at the
wheel.
The mate was a character in his way: a true fore and aft seaman with
little knowledge of square rig. In the West Indies we loaded logwood,
and the mate, having a brand new suit of store clothes, the colour
of which he despised, took it into his head to dye them. When the
dyeing process was complete he hung them on a line to dry. But the
purple-coloured liquid which he had obtained by boiling bits of
logwood in the galley saucepan refused to dry evenly, and the mate’s
suit presented an appearance very similar to an imitation marble
mantelpiece; the streaks were delightfully irregular, as was the mate’s
temper. After attempting to wash the dye out of the suit it dried the
colour of heliotrope; a second attempt at washing caused the suit to
shrink. As the mate was not a strict Sabbatarian, he never changed into
his Sunday suit the whole voyage, so I never knew exactly how it fitted
him.
In Monte Christi we stayed about four weeks with little time for the
shore, except when filling water casks and on Sundays. What Monte
Christi may be now the writer does not know, but in those days it was
a quaint spot. There was no railroad, and one solitary tramcar running
from the jetty to the town, drawn by a mule. The car was driven,
conducted and managed by one man.
Running a bit through the surf to the one jetty of the port was an art,
and except for the general sense of relief and freedom which one feels
on going ashore anywhere there was little in the way of sight-seeing to
reward one for the risk of landing. But to the observant and thoughtful
there were always some compensations.
Cock-fighting one of the chief sports.
In the first place, with the exception of our ship’s crew, there was
only one full-blooded white man in the whole town, a German, who
acted as American Consul. The natives were chiefly Latin Indians,
descendants of a mixture of Spanish and Indian, with a slight
proportion of negro blood. Except an occasional steamer the whole
of the communication between Monte Christi and the neighbouring
ports was carried on at the time by small island schooners. The
prevailing language was Spanish; the type of mind was Spanish; the
religion Roman Catholic; and one of the chief sports, I had almost
said industry, was cock-fighting. There was one jail, from which
one could escape by digging a passage under the wall; incidentally
I might add that I did not learn the latter fact experimentally.
There was one building which, far from picturesque, had a peculiar
charm for me. Walking along the water front one Sunday morning on
my way to church I gazed incidentally at an enamelled sign nailed
on to a corrugated sheet-iron warehouse. It bore the legend, “Peek,
Frean & Co., England,” and on looking closer I saw a stencil mark
on two or three of the sheets which read, “Wolverhampton Corrugated
Iron Co.” This was practically my native town, or nearly so, and I
was literally thrilled with a sensation of peculiar joy as I gazed
with rapt yet animated attention at the businesslike stencil mark,
which appealed to me in that out-of-the-world place like a veritable
romance. No one but those who have experienced the peculiar pleasure
of being so concretely reminded of home can appreciate the almost
magic-like change from the dull depressing effect which a sheet-iron
building usually has upon one in a tropical port, to the stimulating,
enthralling interest, not untouched by emotion, which comes to one
on reading a simple inscription of one’s native town.
Among the population of Monte Christi were many English-speaking
negroes and coloured persons. There were some Jamaicans and men from
the Bahamas, but the majority were from Turk’s Island, and we could
generally tell these latter by their speech. In the larger islands,
like Jamaica, the coloured people speak more of a negro dialect on
account of the diversity of social rank, which is more emphasized in
large communities than in small. On the other hand, the Turk’s Island
natives, though not gifted with perfect enunciation, approximate to a
more general level of good speaking; this on account of the smallness
of the colony, freer intercourse with the earlier white colonists, and
a more generally democratic life.
These Turk’s Island natives were the workers of the port. It is not
necessary to study political economy to prove that if the natives of a
port will not work, labour must be imported, and so these coloured men,
born and reared under the more stimulating influences of the British
flag, came to make up for the deficiency of the native industrial
stamina.
It was on my way to the little Methodist church, kept up by these
fellow British subjects, that I saw the sign on the building.
At the church I was shown into a pew and handed a Wesleyan Hymn Book
bearing the usual inscription of the Methodist Book Room, Castle Road,
London. The minister or preacher was the sailmaker and pilot of the
port, and though it was his boast that he had piloted many king’s ships
into the port of Monte Christi, he had also the humble boast that he
had piloted many souls to glory, or in other words, brought many to
Christ, which, after all, is the chief business of the minister or
preacher. He read one of Spurgeon’s sermons and made some suitable
remarks of his own. The first part of the service was conducted with
decorum and the singing was good, and it does not need extraordinary
piety to enjoy the worship of Almighty God in the name of Jesus
Christ in a humble Methodist church after being shut up in a ship for
several weeks, notwithstanding that I was the only white man in the
congregation. Indeed the service was very inspiring to one who had
enough of sentiment to subdue carping criticism. Here, near the blue
waters of the trade wind-swept bay, was a little company of coloured
people gathered in their own church, worshipping God in all sincerity
so near to one of Columbus’s early settlements, and on a coast once
almost strewn with the blood of gallant seamen, the carnage of pirates,
and the orgies of buccaneers.
Among many characters in the port, including a son of the leader of the
Cuban rebellion, then active, was our little dwarf stevedore; a man of
good countenance, strong body, but, like Zacheus, short in stature. His
business was to stow logwood. He had once heard a Liverpool sailor sing
songs from a cheap copy of sentimental ballads, and the one promise
which he extracted from me was to send him a copy of a song book. “Many
moons have waxed and waned” since then, but I regret that I have not
kept my promise; like the Spanish natives, I fell foul of an eternal
manana, which has never dawned; now I have forgotten the stevedore’s
name, and perhaps his “soul has gone aloft.” To the pilot preacher,
a veritable sky pilot indeed, I also made a promise to send a parcel
of periodicals, but alas! I fear the old man has passed into his last
harbour, his sheet anchor down, and my promise unfulfilled.
After about a month in Monte Christi, we sailed for New York. We went
north, through the Crooked Islands passage, past Inagua, Crooked
Island, Watling Island, Castle Island, and San Salvador, names which
all suggest history and romance, and with the exception of the usual
tropical squalls and one real hard blow, a genuine North Easter already
alluded to, we sailed along the blue waters of the Gulf Stream into New
York without further adventure, except such as are incidental to every
sailing ship passage.