means the strangest feature of Fielding’s voyage, in respect, I mean, of
the contrasts established by the great master’s narrative. A man
proposing a trip to Lisbon nowadays, can, if he likes, choose as a ship
a fabric of above three thousand tons, with a spacious and richly
decorated saloon illuminated by electric lights, a table as elegantly
and hospitably furnished as that of any first-rate hotel ashore,
numerous waiters to fly at his bidding, a comfortable bedroom fitted
with a wire-wove mattrass and a hair bed. He may quench his thirst with
choice of twenty refreshing drinks at a bar. The captain and officers
are as much distinguished for their courtesy as for their seafaring
qualities. The ship is despatched with the punctuality of a mail train;
there is nothing in head winds or boisterous weather to detain her, and
she commonly arrives at her destination before she is due. Fielding’s
ship was a vessel not at all unlike one of the scores of sailing
colliers which to this day go on staggering down the North Sea, laden
with coals from Newcastle or Sunderland. Her master was so great a
ruffian that Fielding has drawn the figure of no completer character of
that kind in any of his novels, not excepting “Jonathan Wild.” When the
novelist ventured mildly to complain of the long detention at
Rotherhithe, this brutal skipper, in whose mouth every other word was an
oath, declared that had he known Mr. and Mrs. Fielding were not to be
pleased he would not have carried them for five hundred pounds. “He
added,” says Fielding, “many asseverations that he was a gentleman, and
despised money, not forgetting several hints of the presents which had
been made him for his cabin, of twenty, thirty, and forty guineas, by
several gentlemen, over and above the sum for which they had
contracted.” The size and comfort of the accommodation may be
conjectured from what Fielding says of the captain’s snoring: “he loved
to indulge himself in morning slumbers, which were attended with a
wind-music much more agreeable to the performer than to the hearers,
especially such as have, as I had, the privilege of sitting in the
orchestra.” The passage money was five pounds a head, and it was
expected that passengers fed themselves. Fielding provided tea and wine,
hams and tongues, and a number of live chickens and sheep; in truth,
says he, “treble the quantity of provisions which could have supported
the persons I took with me.” A sample is given of the captain’s
politeness. I omit the wicked words. Fielding had objected to his cabin
being littered with bottles. “Your cabin!” repeated he many times; “no,
’tis my cabin! Your cabin! I have brought my hogs to a fair market. I
suppose, indeed, you think it your cabin and your ship, by your
commanding in it! but I will command in it! I will show the world I am
the commander, and nobody but I! Did you think I sold you the command of
the ship for that pitiful thirty pounds? I wish I had not seen you nor
your thirty pounds aboard of her.” To appreciate all this it is
necessary the reader should imagine himself dying of dropsy as Fielding
was, seeking in poverty a brief prolongation of life in a more genial
climate than that of England, his wife prostrated with sea-sickness and
the agonies of tooth-ache! It is well that those days are dead and gone.
Hundreds of us are every year going abroad for health;—think of
embarking on that painful quest as the invalid of a century ago did—in a
ship of probably a hundred tons burden, commanded by a pitiless,
foul-mouthed bully, and worked by men who, to use Fielding’s own
expression, seemed “to glory in the language and behaviour of savages!”
It is fair to admit, however, that much of the misery endured by the
sea-borne passenger was, in those and later times, limited to the short
service ships. It is true that on the American route the vessels
continued small and wretched down to the present century. For instance,
you read of two hundred Highland emigrants embarking for Boston in a
snow—a kind of brig—of one hundred and forty tons. A few years ago I was
in company with an old gentleman who, pointing to a small barque lying
moored alongside a wharf, told me that he sailed to New York in her in
1836, and that she was esteemed a high-class commodious passenger-vessel
even in those days.[47] But it must be admitted that at the period of
Fielding’s voyage there were ships trading to the East and West Indies
of a bulk and beauty which might justly entitle them still to
admiration. The craft of both the Dutch and East India Companies were as
capacious and seaworthy as ships of the State: their forecastle
companies were abundantly and highly disciplined; their commanders of
the roughly polite type, excellently represented by the heroic old
Commodore Dance. Their round-houses, or great cabins, were exceedingly
handsome apartments, plentifully embellished with carpets, mirrors,
flowers, hand-painted panels, and in other ways richly decorated. Such
were the ships which carried Clive and Hastings, and such they remained
down to the time of the fine old Earl of Balcarres.
Footnote 47:
The following lines, published in 1832, and therefore referring to
shipboard life of a date comparatively recent, illustrate the
sufferings of passengers in the direction of the accommodation
supplied:
“Soon as the twilight closed and I was able,
I left the cuddy and the folks at table
Reading the news; and heard not what they read,
For all I wanted was to find my bed:
Which, after searching ’tween decks all around,
Under a pile of hammocks there I found
All my clean sheets were scattered ’mongst the boxes,
My blankets, too, that I had bought at Cox’s,
Laid in a corner where a dog had lain,
And, curse the dogs! they’d stole my counterpane.
I managed to obtain a berth that night
To sleep in, but they woke me ere ’twas light;
A noise above, and from below a groan,
I heard a voice say, ‘Hang that holy-stone!’”
It was reserved apparently for the days of the application of steam to
ships for owners of vessels to discover that passengers embarking on a
short voyage stood in as much need of comfort and security as passengers
embarking on a long voyage; and that more misery could be packed into
the run between Dover and Calais than could be found in a journey of
three years round the globe.[48] How much of suffering went to such a
trip as that from Rotherhithe to Lisbon may be read, very much at large,
in Fielding’s wonderful narrative—the more wonderful when we reflect
that the hand that penned it was a dying man’s. Nor is it hard to
collect similar experiences of the old passages to Ireland, to Scotland,
or to near ports, such as from London to Yarmouth or from Southampton to
Plymouth. The risks, the horrors, were increased by the character of the
people who had charge of the vessels. There were no Board of Trade
examinations in those days; no standards of excellence; no special
qualifications insisted upon. That the British mariner was always a good
seaman I should be the last to deny; but he swore, he drank, he was
rude, tempestuous, ruffianly, and little fitted—I am speaking of the
coasting trade—to do the honours of the cabin table, or to provide by
his attention and courtesy for the needs of ladies and children. Henry
Taylor, writing in 1811, says, “The ship in which I engaged belonged to
Hull. The captain was one who indulged himself in bed during night, in
every situation; the mate—a middle-aged man—was much addicted to strong
liquor. In the middle of the night, when the ship was in a perilous
place, the master went to bed, and the chief mate invited the crew into
the cabin to drink. In a short time he fell stupidly drunk down into the
steerage. The sailors dared not arouse the master, and so took their
chance of letting the ship run on until the watch was out.” On another
occasion Taylor was seaman in a ship in stormy weather. The captain went
below to his cabin and “turned in;” the mate, standing on the windlass
end, fell asleep; a young man at the helm suddenly cried out, “We are
running too far in!” Taylor seized the lead, found little more than
three fathoms, and sung out to the other to put the helm hard down. “So
stupidly drunk and asleep was the mate that we were hauling the head
yards about before he awoke.” Such mariners must stand as
representatives, and how passengers suffered when they took passage in
vessels commanded by men of this pattern is only too painfully told in
the relations of shipwrecks.
Footnote 48:
The duration of the Channel passage depended of course upon the wind.
Prince Charles and Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, sailed at six in the
morning and arrived at two in the afternoon. Sometimes the passage
occupied twelve hours, sometimes twenty-four. A fresh favourable
breeze made the journey a comparatively rapid one. There is a quaint
entry touching this passage in Dr. Ed. Browne’s Journal (1663–4).
“April 6. Betimes in the morning, wee set sayle for Calais in the
packet boat; wee gave five shillings a piece for our passage and
having a fair winde, wee got in four houres’ time, into Calais roade,
from whence a shallop fetch’d us to shoare. At our entryng of the port
wee pay’d threepence a piece for our heads; they searched my
portmantle at the gate and the custom house, for which I was to pay 5
sols.”
Take a single incident of a gale a century ago. A vessel was proceeding
on her voyage from Chester to Dublin. Her provisions, which at the start
had been all too scanty for “the vast number of souls she took out with
her”—as the record describes them—had been stowed on deck, to make room
below for the passengers. In a very short while the sea washed them
overboard. “What followed may be better imagined than expressed. The
wretches were crammed into the hold, without light or air, and all on
board the ship without bread or water, with scarce any other prospect of
seeing an end to their sufferings but by the ship’s foundering.” After
forty-eight hours of misery the captain made shift to enter a small
Welsh port, but the distress of the passengers continued, for the
village or hamlet was too small to afford them either provisions or
accommodation. What became of them is not told.
Contrast such an experience with the cabins and food of a Holyhead
boat—the swift journey, be the weather what it will, the brilliant,
hospitable, comfortable hotels on either side the water! Or read the
account of the loss of the _Union_, the regular packet between Dover and
Calais, in 1792, side by side with the description of the last steamer
built for the Chatham and Dover Railway Company: how, through
unnecessary delays, she had suffered the time of high tide to slip past;
how, in endeavouring to turn to windward, she had missed stays, fouled
the south pier, and lay beating there; how, by a miracle, the crew and
passengers were rescued, but after embarking next morning in the _Pitt_,
Captain Sharp, were wrecked afresh, “being driven on shore at the north
head, in a violent gale, but fortunately no person was lost.” One finds
in such narratives as this the reason why Frenchmen for ages lived in
ignorance of the true character of the English, and wrote fancifully of
boule-dogs, ros-bif, Smeetfield, and Goddam. The fact is, they _durst
not cross_.
Take another wreck of a Dublin boat—the _Charlemont_ packet—a memorable
item in the catalogue of maritime disasters. She sailed on a Wednesday,
and managed to reach Dublin Bay, but was driven back by the weather. She
started afresh on Friday, with the number of her passengers increased to
one hundred and twenty, and was again forced to put back. The people
implored the master to make for Holyhead, but he said he was ignorant of
the coast. After a while, however, he yielded; the mate, deceived by
some lights, mistook his course, the vessel struck and went to pieces.
Of the passengers, sixteen only escaped, one of them being Captain
Jones, a son of Lord Ranelagh. Think of an Irish “mimber” in these days,
thirsting to be in his place at Westminster at a given hour, forced to
take ship after the manner of his ancestors! A gale of wind would make a
large difference in the number of votes, and at times might prove
superior to the closure.
War-time also communicated a degree of discomfort to voyagers beyond all
capacity of realization in this age. It was common enough for an
Indiaman to be engaged by an enemy’s ship or a privateer which, if she
did not carry and seize the vessel, repeatedly succeeded in killing and
maiming the passengers amongst others. “Two gentlemen,” you may read in
an Annual Register of the beginning of this century, “passengers from
Holland, landed at Margate. They affirm they were in the evening boarded
in sight of the North Foreland by an English privateer cutter, whose
crew, in disguise, confined the captain and crew of the vessel in the
cabin, and then plundered it of goods to the value of £2000, demanded
the captain’s money, and took what the passengers had.”[49] This sort of
thing furnishes engaging reading to boys when told in story-books; but
how about the reality? To be tossed for days and days in sight of land;
to be horribly sea-sick and barbarously used by captains and mates: to
be battened down in foul weather in loathsome interiors, there to expire
after a little of suffocation; to be coarsely fed and often starved; to
be boarded and massacred and mutilated; to be plundered of the very coat
on one’s back—such were the pleasures of the short-voyage passengers in
the good old times, of the people who went to France, or sailed to the
kingdom of Ireland, or to the Scotch ports, or those of Flanders.
Footnote 49:
A striking example of this occurs in the narrative of the capture of
the _Kent_, East Indiaman, in 1801, by a French privateer off the Sand
Heads. A number of the passengers who were fighting on the
quarter-deck and poop were killed by the hand grenades of the corsair.
The Frenchmen boarded and a desperate fight ensued; but the enemy was
greatly superior in number and arms. “A dreadful carnage followed,
they showing no quarter to any one who came in their way, whether with
or without arms; and such was their savage cruelty that they even
stabbed some of the sick in bed.”
It is not pleasant, to be sure, to be delayed four and twenty hours by
the stranding of a steamer of 5000 tons. But all the same, I think we
have a good deal to be thankful for.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_COSTLY SHIPWRECKS._
In 1808, a shrewd and evidently a “highly-calculating” Yankee took the
trouble to express the loss suffered by the United States in consequence
of the then embargo, in a form very nicely designed to go straight home
to the businesses and bosoms of his compatriots. The sum amounted to
forty-eight millions of dollars, which, said the ingenious
arithmetician, at seventeen dollars to the pound weight, would weigh two
millions eight hundred and twenty-three pounds avoirdupois; and it would
require to carry it one thousand two hundred and sixty waggons, allowing
each waggon to carry one ton; and the distance the waggons would occupy,
allowing each waggon seventy-two feet, would be seventeen miles.
Forty-eight millions of dollars, placed edge to edge in a straight line,
would extend over a space of one thousand one hundred and thirty-four
miles. “The above sum,” added the computator, “would be sufficient to
furnish one hundred and twenty-one sail of the line, completely equipped
for a twelve months’ cruise.” So much for the length, weight, and worth
of an embargo in 1808.
Now, what sort of result, I wonder, would come of a calculation of the
weight, and the length, and the waggon-filling capacity of all the
money—in hard cash, in bars, and ingots—which will have been carried
into and out of this kingdom by ships flying the mercantile ensign
between January 1 and December 31 of this present year? I sometimes
fancy that it needs a shipwreck and a great foundering of specie to make
the “average” public realize the prodigious treasure which is at all
hours of the day and night, year after year, and year after year growing
vaster in bulk and in value, afloat under the colours flown by the ships
of the British merchant service. Let any one, during any six consecutive
days, take note of the published records of the bullion movements, and
he would be astounded by the results. “The _Bokhara_ has arrived at
Plymouth, from China, with £42,450 in gold.” “The _Khedive_ has taken
£81,598 in specie for the East, and the _Peshawur_ £65,600.” “The
_Pekin_ has brought £50,012 in specie.” “The _Sutlej_, £16,110 from
Bombay.” “The _Galicia_, from Valparaiso, £80,000 in silver.” “The
_Iberia_, from Australia, £58,000 in gold.” “The _Elbe_, from the River
Plate, £93,379 in specie.” “The _Kaisar-i-Hind_, £46,000 in bar silver,
and £15,000 in bar gold.” “The _Eider_, from New York, with £5920 in
specie.” “The _Trave_, from New York, £7941.” “The _Carthage_, with
50,000 sovereigns from Melbourne.” “The _Ruapehu_, from Wellington
(N.Z.), with £10,000.” And so on, and so on, day after day, month after
month. Think of a year of figures to which the contribution of a single
day may mean as much as half a million! But supplement this huge
floating pile of gold and silver with the value of the cargoes, with the
produce of the east and west and south, the tea, the silks, the cotton,
the tobacco—the hundreds and thousands of packages for which the
despairing cataloguist can find no better name than “sundries.” Where be
the old galleons, the old plate-ships, the monstrous castellated
egg-shells, with their millions of pieces of eight,[50] alongside the
Aladdin-like metal holds, stored with the mintage of the four corners of
the earth, which, in these days, the propeller is steadily threshing
through the billows of all the world’s seas?
Footnote 50:
A strange use was made of this coin by Sir John Kempthorne. He was
attacked by a large Spanish ship of war, and fought till all his
ammunition was spent: “Then,” says Campbell in his “Lives,”
“remembering that he had several large bags of pieces of eight on
board, he thought they might better serve to annoy than enrich the
enemy, and, therefore, ordered his men to load their guns with silver,
which did such execution on the Spanish rigging, that, if his own ship
had not been disabled by a lucky shot, he had in all probability got
clear.”
Yet my veneration for the past would make me very earnestly distinguish.
It is the number in our time that makes the wonder; the thought of
several hundreds of great ocean steamers—English, French, Italian,
Dutch—all afloat at once, heading along the thirty-two points, every one
of them carrying a fortune, small or great—£10,000 or £100,000—in money,
among the other commodities which form her freight; it is the fancy of
this aggregate wealth as compared with the cargoes of the treasure ships
of other times which gives to the sea-borne specie of this age its
prodigious numerical significance. But, ship for ship, our grandsires
beat us. You never hear in our time of a single steamer carrying the
load of gold, silver, plate, and treasure that was heaped into the hold
of the butter-box of the last and earlier centuries. Let me cite an
instance or two.
On February 28, 1769, there arrived at Lisbon a ship-of-war, named the
_Mother of God_, from Rio Janeiro, having made the voyage in one hundred
and twenty days. She had on board nine millions of crusades in gold, two
millions and a half of crusades in diamonds, and about a hundred
thousand “crowns tournois” in piastres, making in the whole twenty-nine
millions and fifty thousand livres tournois. So much for a single ship.
In 1774 two Spanish ships from Vera Cruz and the Havannah arrived with
twenty-two millions of crowns, exclusive of merchandize valued roundly
at twenty-seven millions of crowns. Such examples could be multiplied.
Of the cargo of an English Indiaman in 1771, one item alone—a diamond in
the rough—was valued at £100,000, “coming to be manufactured here on
account of one of the Asiatic Nabobs,” and on the private freight of
this vessel I read that policies of insurance were opened at Lloyd’s
Coffee House at a high premium, so costly were her contents and so
doubtful her safe arrival.[51]
Footnote 51:
In estimating the expressed worth of the early cargoes the relative
value of money must be borne in mind.
In those early days of extraordinary long voyages, clumsy ships, and of
a navigation rendered not a little insecure by the blunders or the
conjectures of the chart-makers, we should expect to meet with a great
number of costly disasters, the more since it was the custom to commit
to a single hold the treasure that would in this day be distributed
among eight or ten great and powerful steamers. Yet this sort of
shipwreck is not nearly so frequently occurring in marine annals as one
would suppose. When it happens it takes an historical significance much
more profound than that which attaches to loss of life. The memory of
the foundering of £200,000 of silver and gold will survive the drowning
of a thousand souls in a _coup_. The muse of history has much in her of
the philosophy of the cynic who declared that a man will forget his
wife, his children, yea, and his country; but he will never forget the
person who borrowed £5 from him and forgot to repay it. There was _La
Lutine_, for instance. When some time ago there was talk of a proposal
to recover the money that went down in her, everybody, somehow or other,
seemed to remember the loss of such a ship, though it happened above
eighty years ago. But suppose it had been the _Buckinghamshire_ or the
_Windsor Castle_?
Yet, as a costly shipwreck, _La Lutine_ deserves a reference. She was a
thirty-two gun vessel, commanded by Captain Skynner, and she went ashore
on the bank of the Fly Island Passage on the night of October 9, 1799.
At first she was reputed to have had £600,000 sterling in specie on
board. This was afterwards contradicted by a statement that “the return
from the Bullion Office makes the whole amount about £140,000 sterling.”
“If,” I find in a contemporary account, “the wreck of the unfortunate
_Lutine_ should be discovered, there may be reason to hope for the
recovery of the bullion on board of her. In the reign of James II. some
English adventurers fitted out a vessel to search for and weigh up the
cargo of a rich Spanish ship which had been lost on the coast of South
America. They succeeded, and brought home £300,000, which had been
forty-four years at the bottom of the sea. Captain Phipps, who
commanded, had £20,000 for his share, and the Duke of Albemarle £90,000.
A medal was struck in honour of this event in 1687.”[52]
Footnote 52:
The story is told at length in Beckmann’s “History of Inventions and
Discoveries.” The author speaks of William Phipps as the son of a
blacksmith, born in America. He was bred as a shipwright at Boston,
and formed a project for searching and unloading a rich Spanish ship
sunk on the coast of Hispaniola. Charles II. gave him a ship; he
sailed in 1683, but to no purpose. The Duke of Albemarle afterwards
backed him, and he started again in 1687, with the result as told
above. Much about this time several companies were formed and obtained
exclusive privileges for fishing up goods on certain coasts by means
of divers. At the head of one of these was the Earl of Argyle. The
divers of this company worked off the Isle of Mull, and descending to
a depth of sixty feet, remained there sometimes a whole hour, and then
brought up gold chains, money, etc. But the returns were trifling.