A BOOK FOR THE HAMMOCK
------------------------------------------------------------------------
WORKS BY W. CLARK RUSSELL.
Crown 8vo, cloth extra, 6s. each; post 8vo, illustrated boards, 2s.
each.
ROUND THE GALLEY FIRE.
ON THE FO’K’SLE HEAD: A Collection of Yarns and Sea Descriptions.
IN THE MIDDLE WATCH.
Crown 8vo, cloth extra, 6s. each.
A VOYAGE TO THE CAPE.
A BOOK FOR THE HAMMOCK.
--------------
THE FROZEN PIRATE, the New Serial Novel by W. CLARK RUSSELL, Author of
“The Wreck of the Grosvenor,” began in “Belgravia” for July, 1887,
and will be continued till January, 1888. One Shilling, Monthly.
Illustrated by P. Macnab.
LONDON: CHATTO AND WINDUS, PICCADILLY.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
A BOOK FOR THE HAMMOCK
BY
W. CLARK RUSSELL
AUTHOR OF “A VOYAGE TO THE CAPE,” “ROUND THE GALLEY FIRE,”
“IN THE MIDDLE WATCH,” ETC.
[Illustration]
London
CHATTO AND WINDUS, PICCADILLY
1887
[The right of translation is reserved]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PREFACE.
The reader will please regard these papers as the mere whiskings of a
petrel’s pinions skimming the blue surge of deep waters. The utmost hope
of the author goes no further than that here and there something may be
found to pleasantly lighten the tedium of a sleepless half-hour in the
bunk or hammock, or relieve the dulness of a spell of quarter-deck
lounging. The articles are reprinted from _The Daily Telegraph_, _The
Gentleman’s Magazine_, _The Contemporary Review_, and _Longman’s
Magazine_. It would have been troublesome to disturb the original text,
and some new matter, therefore, has been included in the form of notes.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS.
PAGE
A NAUTICAL LAMENT 1
SUPERSTITIONS OF THE SEA 24
OLD SEA ORDNANCE 53
THE HONOUR OF THE FLAG 63
THE NAVAL OFFICER’S SPIRIT 79
WOMEN AS SAILORS 91
FIGHTING SMUGGLERS 104
SEA PHRASES 115
THEN AND NOW 135
COSTLY SHIPWRECKS 146
CURIOSITIES OF DISASTERS AT SEA 157
INFERNAL MACHINES 168
QUEER FISH 179
STRANGE CRAFT 190
MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCES 200
RICH CAPTURES 219
PECULIARITIES OF RIG 230
HOW THE OLD NAVIGATORS MANAGED 243
PLATES AND RIVETS 254
FRENCH SMACKSMEN 273
OLD SEA CUSTOMS 284
WHO IS VANDERDECKEN? 294
------------------------------------------------------------------------
A BOOK FOR THE HAMMOCK.
_A NAUTICAL LAMENT._
I asked myself the question one day whilst standing on the bridge of one
of the handsomest and stoutest of the Union Company’s steamboats,
outward bound to the Cape of Good Hope, What has become of the old
romance of the sea?
“Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?”
It was a brilliant afternoon. The sunshine in the water seemed to hover
there like some flashful veil of silver, paling the azure so that it
showed through it in a most delicate dye of cerulean faintness. The
light breeze was abeam; yet the ship made a gale of her own that stormed
past my ears in a continuous shrill hooting, and the wake roared away
astern like the huddle of foaming waters at the foot of a high cataract.
On the confines of the airy cincture that marked the junction of sea and
sky gleamed the white pinions of a little barque. The fabric, made
fairy-like by distance, shone with a most exquisite dainty distinctness
in the lenses of the telescope I levelled at it. The vessel showed every
cloth she had spars and booms for, and leaned very lightly from the
wind, and hung like a star in the sky. But our tempestuous passage of
thirteen knots an hour speedily slided that effulgent elfin structure on
to our quarter, where she glanced a minute or two like a wreath of mist,
a shred of light vapour, and then dissolved. What has become, thought I,
of the old romance of the sea? The vanished barque and the resistless
power underneath my feet, shaking to the heart the vast metal mass that
it was impelling, symbolized one of the most startling realities of
modern progress. In sober truth, the propeller has sent the poetry of
the deep swirling astern. It is out of sight. Nay, the demon of steam
has possessed with its spirit the iron interior of the sailing ship, and
from the eyes of the nautical occupants of that combination of ore and
wire “the glory and the dream,” that ocean visionary life which was the
substance and the soul of the sea-calling of other days, has faded as
utterly as it has from the confined gaze of the sudorific fiends of the
engine-room.
To know the sea you must lie long upon its bosom; your ear must be at
its heart; you must catch and interpret its inarticulate speech; you
must make its moods your own, rise to the majesty of its wrath, taste to
the very inmost reaches of your vitality the sweetness of its reposeful
humour, bring to its astonishments the wonder of a child, and to its
power and might the love and reverence of a man. “Enough!” cries
Rasselas to Imlac, “thou hast convinced me that no human being can ever
be a poet.” And I have convinced myself that the conditions of the
sea-life in these times prohibit the most ardent of imaginative sailors
from the exercise of that sort of divination which is to be found in
perfection in the old narratives. The vocation is too tedious, the
stress of it too harassing, the despatch insisted upon too exacting, to
furnish opportunity for more than the most mechanical motions of the
mind. A man is hurried from port to port with railway punctuality. He is
swept headlong through calms and storms, and if there come a pause it
will be found perilous; and consternation takes the place of
observation. Nothing new is left. The monsters of the deep have sunk
into the ooze and blackness of time and lie foundered, waiting for the
resurrection that will not come until civilization has run its course
and man begins afresh. All seaboards are known; nothing less than an
earthquake can submit the unfamiliar in island or coast scenery. The
mermaid hugging her merman has shrunk, affrighted by the wild, fierce
light of science, and by the pitiless dredging of the deep-water
inquirer, into the dark vaults beneath her coral pavilions. Her songs
are heard no more, and her comb lies broken upon the sands. Old ocean
itself, soured by man’s triumphant domination of its forces, by his more
than Duke of Marlborough-like capacity of riding the whirlwind and
directing the storm, has silenced its teachings, sleeps or roars
blindly, an eyeless lion, and avenges its neglect and submission by
forcing the nautical mind to associate with the noblest, the most
romantic vocation in the world no higher ideas than tonnage, freeboard,
scantlings, well-decks, length of stroke, number of revolutions, the
managing owner, and the Board of Trade!
The early mariner was like the growing Boy whom Wordsworth sings of in
that divine ode from which I have already quoted—
“But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the East
Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended.”
Were I asked to deliver my sense of the highest poetical interpretation
of the deep, I should point into distant times, to some new and silent
ocean on whose surface, furrowed for the first time by a fabric of man’s
handiwork, floats some little bark with a deck-load of pensive,
wondering, reverential men. Yes! you would find the noblest and most
glorious divination of the true spirit of the deep in the thoughts which
fill the breasts of that company of quaintly apparelled souls. The very
ship herself fits the revelation of the sea to those simple hearts who
have hardily sailed down the gleaming slope behind the familiar horizon,
and penetrated the liquid fastnesses of the marine gods and demons. Mark
the singular structure swinging pendulum-like to the respirations of the
blue and foamless swell. Her yellow sides throw a golden lustre under
her. Little ordnance of brass and black iron sparkle on her bulwarks and
grin along her sides. Her poop and top-lanthorns flash and fade with the
swaying of her masts. Her pennons enrich the white sails with their
dyes, and how long those banners may be let us conceive from that
ancient account of the Armada in which it is written: “For the memory of
this exploit, the foresayd Captain Banderdness caused the banner of one
of these shippes to be set up in the great Church of Leiden in Holland,
which is of so great a length, that being fastened to the very roofe, it
reached down to the grounde.” Her men are children, albeit bearded, and
not yet upon them have the shades of the prison-house begun to close.
Are we not to be pitied that all the glories which enraptured them, the
wonders which held them marvelling, the terrors which sent them to their
devotions, should have disappeared for ever from our sight? We have
still indeed the magnificence of the sunset, the splendour of the
heavens by night, the Andean seas of the tempest, the tenderness of the
moonlighted calm; but these things are not to us as they were to them;
for a magic was in them that is gone; the mystery and fear and awe
begotten of intrusion into the obscure and unknown principalities of the
sea-king have vanished; our interpretation gathers nothing of those
qualities which rendered theirs as romantic and lovely as a Shakesperean
dream; and though we have the sunset and the stars and the towering
surge—what have we not? what is our loss? what our perceptions (staled
and pointed to commonplace issues by familiarity) compared with their
costly endowment of marine disclosure? You see, the world of old ocean
was before them; they had everything to enjoy. It was a virgin realm,
also, for them to furnish with the creations of their imagination. The
flying-fish! what object so familiar now? The house-sparrow wins as much
attention, to the full, in the street as does this fish from the sailor
or the passenger as it sparks out from the seething yeast of the blue
wave and vanishes like a little shaft of mother-o’-pearl. But in those
old times they found a wonder here; and prettily declared that they
quitted the sea in summer and became birds. Hear how an old voyager
discourses of these be-scaled fowls:
“There is another kind of fish as bigge almost as a herring, which hath
wings and flieth, and they are together in great number. These have two
enemies, the one in the sea, the other in the aire. In the sea the fish
which is called Albocore, as big as a salmon, followeth them with great
swiftnesse to take them. This poore fish not being able to swimme fast,
for he hath no finnes, but swimmeth with mooving of his taile, shutting
his wings, lifteth himselfe above the water, and flieth not very hie;
the Albocore seeing that, although he have no wings, yet he giveth a
great leape out of the water and sometimes catcheth the fish being weary
of the aire.”
It is wonderland to this man. He writes as of a thing never before
beheld and with a curious ambition of accuracy, clearly making little
doubt that in any case his story will not be credited, and that
therefore since the truth is astonishing enough, he may as well
carefully stick to it. And the barnacle? Does the barnacle hold any
poetry to us? One would as soon seek for the seed of romance in the
periwinkle or the crab. Taking up the first dictionary at hand, I find
barnacle described as a “shell-fish, commonly found on the bottom of
ships, rocks, and timber.” But those wonderful ancient mariners made a
goose of it; as may be observed in Mr. John Lok’s account of his ship
which arrived home “marvellously overgrowne with certaine shells” in
which he solemnly affirms “there groweth a certain slimie substance,
which at the length slipping out of the shell and falling in the sea,
becometh those foules which we call Barnacles.” Were not those high
times for Jack? A barnacle, whether by the sea-side brim or anywhere
else, is to us, alas! in this exhaustive age, a barnacle, and nothing
more. Or take the maelstrom—a gyration not quite so formidable as the
imagination of Edgar Allan Poe would have us believe, but by report
exactly one of those features of the ocean to alarm the primitive fancy
with frightful ideas: “Note,” says Mr. Anthonie Jenkinson in his voyage
to Russia, 1557, “that there is between the said Rost islands and Lofoot
a whirlepoole called Malestrand which ... maketh such a terrible noise,
that it shaketh the rings in the doores of the inhabitants’ houses of
the sayd islands tenne miles off. Also if there cometh any whale within
the current of the same, they make a pitiful crie.” And so on. How fine
as an artistic touch should we deem this introduction of the whale by
the hand of an imaginative writer! The detail to the contemporary
readers of Mr. Jenkinson’s yarn would make an enormous horror of that
“whirlepoole,” for what should be able to swallow leviathan short of
some such stupendous commotion as would be caused by the breaking up of
the fountains of the waters of the earth? Let it be remembered that
whales were fine specimens in that age of poetry. They were then big
enough to gorge a squadron of men-of-war, ay, and to digest the vessels.
We have had nothing like them since—the nearest approach to such
monsters being the shark in which, on its being ripped open, there was
found one full-rigged ship only, with the captain and the mate
quarrelling in the cabin over the reckoning.
The age of marine romance supplied the mariner with many extraordinary
privileges. We cannot control the winds as those old people did. There
are no longer gale-makers from whom Jack can buy a favourable blast. The
very saints have deserted us, since it is certain that—at sea—we now
pray to them in vain. Observe that in fifty directions, despite our
propellers, donkey-engines, steam-windlasses, and the like, the ancient
mariner was out and away better off than we are. Did he want wind? Then
he had nothing to do but apply to a Finn, who, for a few shillings,
would sell to him in the shape of a knotted handkerchief three sorts of
gale, all prosperous, but one harder than another, by which he could be
blown to his port without anxiety or delay. Did a whirlwind threaten
him? Then read in the Voyage of Pirard in Harris’ Collection how he
managed: “We frequently saw great Whirl-winds rising at a Distance,
called by the Seamen _Dragons_, which shatter and overturn any Ship that
falls in their way. When these appear the Sailors have a Custom of
repairing to the Prow or the Side that lies next the storm, and beating
naked swords against one another crosswise.” Purchas, in his “Pilgrims,”
repeats this, and adds that this easy remedy of the sword hinders the
storm from coming over their ship, “and turneth it aside.” Did human
skill and judgment fail him? There were the Saints. “Before the days of
insurance offices and political economy,” writes the author of
“Lusitanian Sketches,” “merchants frequently insured their ships at the
highly esteemed shrine of Mantozimbo, by presenting a sum equal to the
pay of captain or mate, and that, too, without stipulating for any
equivalent should the vessel be wrecked.” Was it not his custom to carry
the image of his patron saint to sea with him, to pray to it, to make it
responsible for the winds, and, if it proved obstinate, to force it into
an obliging posture of mind by flogging it? Consider what a powerful
marine battery of these saints he could bring to bear upon the vexed,
refractory ocean and the capricious storming of winds. St. Anthony, St.
Nicholas, whose consecrated loaves of bread quelled many a furious gale,
St. Roland, St. Cyric, St. Mark, St. George, St. Michael, St. Benedict,
St. Clement—the list is as long as my arm, the number great enough to
swell out a big ship’s company. Did pirates threaten him? There was no
occasion to see all clear for action. He had but to invoke St.
Hilarion—who once on a time by prayer arrested the progress of a
picaroon whilst chasing—and away would scuttle the black flag. Was
smooth water required for safely making a port? Then no matter how high
the sea ran, all that was needful was first to find a pious man on
board, light tapers (where they would burn), bring up the incense, erect
a crucifix, read prayers (this being done by the pious man), sprinkle
the decks with holy water, and straightway the sea under the vessel’s
forefoot would flatten into a level lane, smooth as oil, albeit the
surges on either hand continued to leap to the height of the maintop.
Who now regards, save with mild curiosity, the corposant—the St. Elmo’s
fire—the dimly burning meteoric exhalation at the yard-arm? It is no
more to modern and current imagination than the phosphoric flashes in
black intertropic waters. But the ancient mariner made an omen of it—a
saint—a joy to be blessed; he wrought it into a beneficent symbol, and
endowed it with such powers of salvation as comforted him exceedingly
whilst he kneeled on quivering knees in the pale illumination of that
mystic marine corpse-candle. Who now scratches the mast for a breeze?
Who fears the dead body as a storm-maker? What has become of the
damnatory qualities of the cat, and who now hears the dimmest echo of
comminatory power in her loudest mew? And most galling of all
reflections, into what ocean unknown to man has sailed the Flying
Dutchman?
Let it not be supposed, however, that the elimination of poetry from the
sea-life by the pounding steam engine and the swift voyage is deplorable
on no further grounds than these which I have named. The utilitarian
aspect is not the only one. There was romance and lustre outside those
mere conditions of poetic seamanship which enabled the mariner to direct
the wind by a knot, to control the tempest by a candle, to put the
pirate to flight by an invocation. Emerge with me from the darkness of
remote times into the light of the last—yes, and of the beginning of the
present—century. Ladies were then going to sea, as they had in remoter
times, dressed as men. They do so no longer. Who ever hears now of some
youthful mariner with blooming cheeks and long eyelashes exciting the
suspicions of his mahogany-cheeked mates by the shortness of his steps,
or the smallness of his hands and feet, or a certain unboyish luxuriance
of cropped hair? No, the blushing Pollies and Susans of the East End,
resolved by love, by betrayal, or by the press-gang, into the shipping
of breeks have had their day. No longer do we read of pretty ship-boys
standing confessed as girls. I mourn this departed romantic forecastle
feature. Even in fiction how the imagination is captivated by the clever
insinuations of the author in his treatment of the youth whose sex he
springs upon us presently to our glad surprise! The Edwins whom the
Angelinas followed were not indeed very engaging people; but even
attentive consideration of their rascalities will not neutralize the
pleasant poetic bouquet that haunts the old tales of fine-eyed women
going to sea for love or vengeance, living among the sailors, eating the
bitter bad provisions of the forecastle, fighting the guns, doing the
seamen’s work, and remaining for months undetected.
Again, whither has vanished a feature of the old sea-life even yet more
romantically interesting than the nautical masquerading of black-eyed
Susans and yellow-haired Molls—the flirtation of the long ocean passage?
What we call flirtation now at sea is a mere shadow of a shadow as
compared with the robust and solid reality of a period when it took a
ship four months to sail to Bombay or Calcutta. There is no time allowed
in this age for love-making. Before you can fairly consider yourself
acquainted with a girl some wretch on the forecastle is singing out
“land-ho!” I took particular notice of this matter on board the Union
steamer in which I made the passage home from Cape Town. It must
certainly have ended in a proposal in the case of one couple had the
propeller dropped off or a boiler burst and the ship been delayed. They
only wanted another week. But the steamer was impertinently punctual,
about eight hours before her time: the people went ashore at Plymouth,
and, for all I can tell, the young man, in the excitement of landing and
meeting his friends and seeing plenty of pretty women about, may have
abandoned his intention and ended for the girl a chance that would have
been a certainty in the old romantic poetical sea-days. Why, we all know
how the British matron used to ship her darlings off in the East
Indiamen for husbands in the country with which those vessels
trafficked, and how scores and scores of these unsophisticated young
ladies would land engaged, having affianced themselves to gentlemen on
board in calms on the Equator or in the tail of the south-east Trades,
or in a small swell with a moderate breeze off Agulhas, some possibly
hesitating as far as the Madagascar parallels. How many marriages
originate at sea in these times of thirteen knots an hour, I wonder? Out
of the several millions of passengers who are annually sea-borne, how
many pledge their vows on board ship, how many fall in love there, how
many become husband and wife in consequence of meeting on ship board?
But a few, I’ll warrant. But only think of the old East Indiaman; four
months for Captain Thunder and Miss Spooner to be together to start
with; four months, and perhaps longer, with possibly Lieutenant Griffin
to give a swift maturity to emotion by importing a neat and useful
element of jealousy. Oh, if moonlight and music and feeling are one
ashore, what are they at sea, on the deck of a sleeping fabric lifting
visionary wings to the lovely stars, when the sea-fire flashes like
sheet lightning to the soft surge of the ship’s bows or counter upon the
light fold of the invisible swell, when the westering moon, crimsoning
as she sinks, wastes her heart’s blood in the deep for love of what she
is painfully and ruefully leaving, when the dew upon the bulwarks
sparkles like some diamond encrustations to the starlight, when the
peace of the richly clad night presses like a sensible benediction upon
the breathless, enchanted, listening ship, subduing all sounds of
gear-creaking in blocks, of chains clanking to the stirring of the
rudder, to a tender music in sweetest harmony with the fountain-like
murmur at the bows as the vessel quietly lifts to the long-drawn heave
there—think of it! was there ever a bower by Bendemeer’s stream
comparable as a corner for the delicate whispers of passion, for the coy
reception of kisses, with some quiet nook on the white quarter-deck,
shadowed from the stars and protected from the dew by the awning? If you
thrill now it is because the whole ship shakes with the whirling and
thrashing of those mighty beams of steel below. Emotion must be blatant
or it cannot be heard. Not yet has a generation that knows I am speaking
the truth in all this passed away. Confirm me, ye scores of elderly
master-mariners enjoying your well-earned repose in spots hard by that
ocean ye loved and sailed for years! Confirm me too, ye many survivors
of a sea-going time, when the most blissful hours of your long and
respectable lives were passed under the shadow of the cross-jack-yard!
I lament the decay of the old nautical costumes. There was a poetry in
the dress of the people who had the handling of the big Indian ships
which you will not get out of the brass buttons and twopenny cuff-rings
of the contemporary skipper and mate. Nowadays it is almost impossible
to tell the difference between the rigs of the mercantile captain, the
dock master, the Customs man, and the harbour master. But what do you
say to a blue coat, black velvet lappels, cuffs and collar with a bright
gold embroidery, waistcoat and breeches of deep buff, the buttons of
yellow gilt, cocked hats, side arms, and so forth? What dress has done
for romance ashore we know. Pull off the feathered hats and high boots,
the magnificent doublets and diamond buckles of many of those gentlemen
of olden times, who show very stately in history, and button them up in
the plain frock-coat of to-day, and who knows but that you might not be
diverted with a procession of rather insignificant objects? In the
poetical days of the sea-profession the ships very honestly deserved the
dignity they got from the gilded and velveted figures that sparkled on
their quarter-decks. Over no nobler fabrics of wood did the red ensign
ever fly. They went manned like a line-of-battle ship. Observe this
resolution arrived at by the Court of Directors (Hon. E.I.C.) held the
19th of October, 1791:—“That a ship of 900 tons do carry 110 men; 1000
ditto, 120; 1100 ditto, 125; 1200 ditto, 130.”
Were not those fine times for Jack? How many of a crew goes to the
manning of a 1200-ton ship nowadays? And it is proper to note that of
these 130 men there were only ten servants, _i.e._ a captain’s steward,
ship’s steward, and men to attend to the mate, surgeon, boatswain,
gunner, and carpenter. Contrast these with the number of waiters who
swell the ship’s company of our 5000-ton mail boats. Those vessels went
armed too, as befitted the majesty of the bunting under which old Dance
had gloriously licked Johnny Crapeau.[1] The bigger among them carried
thirty-eight eighteen pounders; they were all furnished with
boarding-nettings half-mast high and close round the quarters. The chaps
in the tops were armed with swivels, musquetoons, and pole-axes. In
those romantic times the merchantman saw to himself. There were no
laminated plates formed of iron one remove only from the ore betwixt him
and the bottom of the ocean; he sailed in hearts-of-oak, and the naval
page of his day resounds with his thunder. The spirit of that romantic
period penetrated the ladies who were passengers. Relations of this kind
in the contemporary annals are common enough:
Footnote 1:
It is interesting to know that Sir John Franklin was in that
particular fight, and worked the signals for the Commodore.
“Mrs. Macdowall and Miss Mary Harley, who lately distinguished
themselves so much in the gallant defence of the ship _Planter_, of
Liverpool, against an enemy of very superior force off Dover, are now at
Whitehaven. These ladies were remarkable, not only for their solicitude
and tenderness for the wounded, but also for their contempt of personal
danger, serving the seamen with ammunition, and encouraging them by
their presence.”
Again: “I cannot omit mentioning that a lady (a sister of Captain
Skinner), who, with her maid, were the only female passengers, were both
employed in the bread-room during the action making up papers for
cartridges; for we had not a single four-pound cartridge remaining when
the action ceased.”[2]
Footnote 2:
Many similar notices may be found in the _Annual Register_, the _Naval
Chronicle_, and other publications of the kind.
The glory and the dream are gone. No doubt there are plenty of ladies
living who would manufacture cartridges during a sea-fight with
pleasure, and animate the crew by their example and presence. But the
heroine’s chance in this direction is dead and over. As dead and over as
the armed passenger ship, the privateer, the pirate, and the
plate-galleon. Would it interest anybody to know that the _Acapulco_
ship was once more on her way from Manila with a full hold? Dampier and
Shelvocke are dead, Anson’s tome is rarely looked into, the cutlass is
sheathed, the last of the slugs was fired out of yonder crazy old
blunderbuss ages ago; how should it concern us then to hear that the
castellated galleon, loaded with precious ore minted and in ingots, with
silk, tea, and gems of prodigious value, is under weigh again? Candish
took her in 1587, Rogers in 1709, Anson in 1742. Supposing her something
more substantial than a phantom, where lives the corsair that should
take her now? The extinction of that ship dealt a heavy wound to marine
romance. She was a vessel of about two thousand tons burden, and was
despatched every year from the port of Manila. She sailed in July and
the voyage lasted six months—six months of golden opportunity to the
gentlemen who styled themselves buccaneers! The long passage, says the
Abbé Raynal, “was due to the vessel being overstocked with men and
merchandise, and to all those on board being a set of timid navigators,
who never make but little way during the night time, and often, though
without necessity, make none at all.” Anson took 1,313,843 pieces of
eight and 35,682 oz. of virgin silver out of his galleon, raising the
value of his cruise to about £400,000 independent of the ships and
merchandise. They knew how to fillibuster in those days. How is it now?
It has been attempted of late and found a glorious termination in a
police court.
The buccaneer has made his exit and so has his fierce brother, the
pirate. That dreadful flag has long been hauled down and stowed away by
Davy Jones in one of his lockers. “The pirates,” says Commodore
Roggewein in 1721, “observing this disposition, immediately put
themselves in a fighting posture; and began by striking their red, and
hoisting a black flag, with a Death’s Head in the centre, a powder-horn
over it, and two bones across underneath.” Alas! even the sentiment of
Execution Deck has vanished with the disappearance of this romantic
flag, and there are no more skeletons of pirates slowly revolving in the
midnight breeze and emitting a dismal clanking sound to the stirring of
the damp black gusts from which to borrow a highly moving and
fascinating sort of marine poetry.
Again, though to be sure it is not a little comforting when in the
middle of a thousand leagues of ocean to feel that your ship is
navigated by men furnished with the exquisite sextant, the costly
chronometer, the wonderful appliances for an exact determination of
position, yet there is surely less poetry and romance in the nautical
scientific precision of the age, reconciling as it undoubtedly
is—particularly when you are afloat—than in the old shrewd half-blind
sniffing and smelling out of the right liquid path by those ancient
mariners who stumbled into unknown waters, and floundered against
unconjecturable continents with nothing better to ogle the sun with than
a kind of small gallows called a fore-staff.
“If,” writes Sir Thomas Browne to his sailor son in 1664, “you have a
globe, you may easily learne the starres as also by bookes. Waggoner[3]
you will not be without, which will teach the particular coasts, depths
of roades, and how the land riseth upon several poynts of the
compasse.... If they have quadrants, crosse-staffes, and other
instruments, learn the practicall use thereof; the names of all parts
and roupes about the shippe, what proportion the masts must hold to the
length and depth of a shippe, and also the sayles.”
Footnote 3:
Wagenar’s “Speculum Nauticum,” Englished in 1588.
Here we have pretty well the extent of a naval officer’s education in
navigation and seamanship in those rosy times. The longitude was as good
as an unknown quantity to them. How quaint and picturesque was the old
Dutch method of navigating a ship! They steered by the true compass, or
endeavoured to do so by means of a small central movable card, which
they adjusted to the meridian, and whenever they discovered that the
variation had altered to the extent of 22 degrees, they again corrected
the central card. In this manner they contrived to steer within a
quarter of a point, and were perfectly satisfied with this kind of
accuracy. They never used the log, though it was known to them. The
officer of the watch corrected the leeway by his own judgment before
marking it down. J. S. Stavorinus, writing so late as 1768–78, says,
“Their manner of computing their run is by means of a measured distance
of forty feet along the ship’s side. They take notice of any remarkable
patch of froth when it is abreast of the foremost end of the measured
distance, and count half seconds till the mark of froth is abreast of
the after end. With the number of half seconds thus obtained they divide
the number forty-eight, taking the product for the rate of sailing in
geographical miles in one hour, or the number of Dutch miles in four
hours. It is not difficult,” he adds, “to conceive the reason why the
Dutch are frequently above ten degrees out in their reckoning.” Here we
have such a form of Arcadian simplicity, if anything maritime can borrow
that pastoral word, as cannot fail to excite the enthusiasm of the
romancist. A like delightful and fascinating primitiveness of
sea-procedure you find in Mr. Thomas Stevens’ black-letter account of
his voyage; wherein he so clearly sets forth the manner of the
navigation of the ancient mariner, that I hope this further extract from
other people’s writings will be forgiven on the score of its
curiousness, and the information it supplies:—
You know that it is hard to saile from East to West or contrary,
because there is no fixed point in all the skie, whereby they
may direct their course, wherefore I shall tell you what helps
God provided for these men.[4] There is not a fowle that
appereth, or signe in the aire, or in the sea, which they have
not written, which have made the voyages heretofore. Wherefore,
partly by their own experience, and pondering withal what space
the ship was able to make with such a winde, and such direction,
and partly by the experience of others, whose books and
navigations they have, they gesse whereabouts they be, touching
degrees of longitude, for of latitude they be alwaies sure.
Footnote 4:
That is, for the mariners with whom he sailed.
“_Gesse whereabouts they be!_” The true signification of this sentence
is the revelation of the fairy world of the deep. It was this “gessing,”
this groping, this staring, the wondering expectation, that filled the
liquid realm with the amazements you read of in the early chronicles. It
would not be delightful to have to “gess” now. It could hardly mean much
more than an unromantic job of stranding, a bald prosaic shipwreck, with
some marine court of inquiry at the end of it, to depress the whole
business deeper yet in the quagmire of the commonplace. But attached to
the guesswork of old times was the delightful condition of the happening
of the unexpected. The fairy island inhabited by faultless shapes of
women; fish as terrible as Milton’s Satan; volcanic lands crimsoning a
hundred leagues of sky with the glare of the central fires of the earth,
against whose hellish effulgent background moved Titanic figures dark as
the storm-cloud—of such were the diversions which attended the one-eyed
navigation of the romantic days. Who envies not the Jack of that period?
Why should the poetic glories of the ocean have died out with those
long-bearded, hawk-eyed men? I can go now to the Cape of Good Hope—in a
peculiar degree the haunt of the right kind of marvels, and the headland
abhorred by Vanderdecken—I can steam there in twenty days, and not find
so much as the ghost of a poetical idea in about six thousand miles of
ocean. Everything is too comfortable, too safe, too smooth. There is the
same difference between my mail-boat and the jolly old carrack as there
is between a brand-new hotel making up eight hundred beds and an ancient
castle with a moated grange. What fine sights used to be witnessed
through the windows of that ancient castle! Ghosts in armour on
coal-black steeds, lunatic Scalds bursting into dirges, an ogre who came
out of the adjacent wood, dwarfs after the manner of George Cruikshank’s
fancies—in short, Enchantment that was substantial enough too. But the
brand-new hotel! Why, yes, certainly, I would rather dine there, and
most assuredly would rather sleep there, than in the moated-grange
arrangement. What I mean is: I wish all the wonders were not gone, so
that old ocean should not bare such a very naked breast.
Observe again how elegant and splendid those ancients were in their sea
notions. When they built a ship they embellished her with a more than
oriental splendour of gold and fancy work. Read old Stowe’s description
of the _Prince Royal_: how she was sumptuously adorned, within and
without, with all manner of curious carving, painting, and rich gilding.
They had great minds; when they lighted a candle it was a tall one. How
nobly they brought home the body of Sir Philip Sydney, “slaine with a
musket-shot in his thigh, and deceased at Arnim, beyond seas!” The
sails, masts, and yards of his “barke” were black, with black ancient
streamers of black silk, and the ship “was hanged all with black bayes,
and scorchions thereon on pastboard (with his and his wyfes in pale,
helm and crest); in the cabin where he lay was the corpse covered with a
pall of black velvet, escochions thereon, his helmet, armes, sword, and
gauntlette on the corpse.” In the regality of the names they gave their
ships there is a fine aroma of poetry: _Henri-Grace-a-Dieu_, the
_Soverayne-of-the-Seas_, the _Elizabeth-Jonah_, the _Jesus-of-Lubeck_,
the _Constant-Warwick_! The genius of Shakespeare might be thought to
have presided over these christenings if it were not for the
circumstance of numberless squadrons of sweetly or royally named ships
having been launched before the birth of the immortal bard; and a list
of them harmonised into blank verse would have the organ-sounds
delivered by his own great muse.
The visionary gleam has fled; the glory and the dream are over. Yes, and
the prosaics of the sea have entered into the sailor’s nature and made a
somewhat dull and steady fellow of him, though he will shovel you on
coals as well as another, and pull and haul as heartily as his
forefathers. For where be his old caper-cutting qualities? Where be the
old high jinks, the Saturday night’s carouse, the pretty forecastle
figment of wives and sweethearts, the grinning salts of the
theatre-gallery, the sky-larking of liberty days, the masquerading
humours, such, for example, as Anson’s men indulged themselves in after
the sacking of Paita, when the sailors took the clothes which the
Spaniards in their flight had left behind them, and put them on—a motley
crew!—wearing the glittering habits, covered with yellow embroidery and
silver lace, over their own dirty trousers and jackets, clapping tie and
bagwigs and laced hats on their heads; going to the length, indeed, of
equipping themselves in women’s gowns and petticoats; so that, we read,
when a party of them thus metamorphosed first appeared before their
lieutenant, “he was extremely surprised at the grotesque sight, and
could not immediately be satisfied they were his own people.” They were
a jolly, fearless, humorous, hearty lot, those old mariners, and their
like is not amongst us to-day. The sentiment that prevailed amongst them
was in the highest degree respectable.
“Yes, seamen, we know, are inured to hard gales;
Determined to stand by each other;
And the boast of the tar, wheresoever he sails,
Is the heart that can feel for another!”
And has not the passenger degenerated too? Is he as fine and enduring a
man as his grandfather? is she as stout-hearted as her grandmother? The
life of a voyager in the old days of the sailing-ship—I do not include
John Company’s Indiamen—was almost as hard as that of the mariner. He
had very often to fight, to lend a hand aloft, at the pumps, at the
running rigging. His fare was an unpleasant kind of preserved fresh
meat—I am speaking of fifty years ago—and such salt pork and beef as the
sailors ate. His pudding was a dark and heavy compound of coarse flour
and briny fat, and in the diary of a passenger at sea in 1820 it is told
how the puddings were cooked: “_July 16._ As a particular favour
obtained a piece of old canvas to make a pudding-bag, for all the
nightcaps had disappeared. The pudding being finished, away it went to
the coppers, and at two bells came to table smoking-hot. But a small
difficulty presented itself; for then, and not till then, did we
discover that the bag was smaller at top than at bottom, so that, in
spite of our various attempts to dislodge it, there it stuck like a cork
in a bottle, till every one in the mess had burnt his fingers, and then
we thought of cutting away the canvas and liberating the pudding.” Such
experiences as this made a hardy man of the passenger. There was no
coddling. Everything was rough and rude; yet read the typical
passenger’s writings and you will see he found such poetry and romance
in the ocean and the voyage as must be utterly undiscoverable by the
spoilt and languid traveller of to-day, sulkily perspiring over nap or
whist in the luxurious smoking-room, or reading the magazine—that
outruns its currency by a week only in a voyage to New Zealand—propped
up by soft cushions in a ladies’ saloon radiant with sunshine and full
of flowers. Like the early Jack, the early passenger came comparatively
new to the sea and enjoyed its wonders and revelled in its freedom and
drank in its inspirations. He was not to be daunted by food, by wet, by
delay, by sea-sickness, by coarse rough captains. Why, here before me,
in the same passenger’s diary in which the above extract occurs, I find
the writer distinctly noting the picturesque in that most hideous of
maritime calamities, want of water! “_July 2._ All hands employed
catching rain water, the fresh water having given out. ’Twas interesting
and romantic to see them running fore and aft with buckets, pitchers,
jars, bottles, pots, pans, and kegs, or anything that would hold water.
I was quietly enjoying the scene, when the clew of the mainsail above me
gave way from the weight of water that had collected there, and I
received the whole contents on my devoted head.” _Quietly enjoying the
scene!_ Is not this a very sublimation of the heroic capacity of
extracting the Beautiful—not in the Bulwerian sense—out of the Dreadful!
But enough! Just as you seek for the romance and poetry of the ocean in
the old books, so must you look there for the jovial tar, the jigging
fellow, with his hat on nine hairs and a nose like a carbuncle; for the
resolved and manly passenger, for the unaffected heroine, for the pretty
masquerading lass, and for a hundred lovely gilded dreams of a delighted
imagination roving wild in mid-ocean. The volume is closed; we now carry
our helm amidships; it is no longer the captain but the head engineer
that we think of and address ourselves to when, disordered by some
inward perturbation, we sing:—
“O, pilot, ’tis a fearful night,
There’s danger on the deep.”
But _Philosophia stemma non inspicit_; and we must take it that in these
days she knows what she is about.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_SUPERSTITIONS OF THE SEA._
There is a story told of some English sailors who, passing by the French
Ambassador’s house, that was illuminated in celebration of a treaty of
peace between France and Great Britain, observed the word “Concord”
flaming in the midst of several devices. The men read it “Conquer’d,”
and one of them exclaiming, “_They_ conquer us! they be,” etc., they
knocked at the door and demanded to know why such a word was put up. The
reason was explained, but to no purpose, and the French Ambassador, in
order to get rid of these jolly tars, ordered “Concord” to be taken down
and replaced by the word “Amity.”
It is to illiteracy of this kind that we are indebted for much of the
romantic superstitions of the sea. In olden days the forecastle was
certainly very unlettered, and the wonderful imaginings of the early
navigators, whose imperfect gaze and enormous credulity coined marvels
and miracles out of things we now deem in the highest degree prosaic and
commonplace, descended without obstruction of learning or scepticism
through the marine generations. It is easily seen on reading the old
sea-chronicles how most of the superstitions had their birth, and it
needs but a very superficial acquaintance with the nautical character to
understand why they should have been perpetuated into comparatively
enlightened times. Two capital instances occur to me, and they are both
to be found in the narrative of Cowley’s voyage round the world in the
years 1683, ’84, ’85, and ’86. The first relates to the old practice of
choosing valentines.
“We came abreast with Cape Horn,” says the author, “on Feb. 14, 1684,
where we chusing of valentines, and discoursing of the intrigues of
women, there arose a prodigious storm, which did continue to the last
day of the month, driving us into the latitude of 60 deg. and 30 min.
south, which is further than any ship hath sailed before south; so that
we concluded the discoursing of women at sea very unlucky, and
occasioned the storm.” That such a superstition as this ever obtained a
footing among mariners I will not declare. Yet it is easily seen that
the conclusion the author arrived at, that the “discoursing of women at
sea” is very unlucky, might engender a superstition strong enough to
live through centuries. In the same book is recounted another strange
matter, of a true hair-stirring pattern. On June 29, 1686, there had
been great feasting on board Cowley’s ship, and when the commanders of
the other vessels departed they were saluted with some guns, which, on
arriving on board their ships, they returned. “But,” says the author,
“it is strangely observable that whilst they were loading their guns
they heard a voice in the sea crying out, ‘Come, help! come, help! A man
overboard!’ which made them forthwith bring their ships to, thinking to
take him up; but heard no more of him.” The captains were so puzzled
that they returned to Cowley’s ship to see if he had lost a man; but “we
nor the other ship had not a man wanting, for upon strict examination we
found that in all the three ships we had our complement of men, which
made them all to conjecture that it was the spirit of some man that had
been drowned in that latitude by accident.” Thus they resolved their
perplexity, braced up their yards, and pursued their course in a
composed posture of mind; and in this easy way I think was a large
number of the superstitions, which fluttered the forecastle and
perturbed the lonely look-out man, generated.