SAILING CRAFT: 'FIT TO GO FOREIGN'
We will suppose that the ship is complete in hull, successfully
launched, and properly rigged and masted. The two questions still
remaining are: what is her crew like, and how does she sail?
The typical British North American crew of the nineteenth-century
sailing ship is the Bluenose crew. Newfoundlanders were too busy
fishing in home waters, though some of them did ship to go foreign and
others sailed their catch to market. Quebeckers built ships, but
rarely sailed them; while the Pacific coast had no shipping to speak
of. Thus the Bluenoses had the field pretty well to themselves.
Bluenoses were so called because the fog along the Nova Scotian and New
Brunswick coast was supposed to make men's noses bluer than it did
elsewhere. The name was generally extended by outsiders to all sorts
of British North Americans; and, of course, was also applied {93} to
any vessel, as well as any crew, that hailed from any port in British
North America, because a vessel is commonly called by the name of the
people that sail her. 'There's a Bluenose,' 'that's a Yankee,' 'look
at that Dago,' or 'hail that Dutchman' apply to ships afloat as well as
to men ashore. And here it might be explained that 'Britisher'
includes anything from the British Isles, 'Yankee' anything flying the
Stars and Stripes, 'Frenchie' anything hailing from France, 'Dago'
anything from Italy, Spain, or Portugal, and 'Dutchman' anything manned
by Hollanders, Germans, Norsemen, or Finns, though Norwegians often get
their own name too. A 'chequer-board' crew is one that is half white,
half black, and works in colour watches.
[Illustration: SHIP _BATAVIA_, 2000 TONS. Built by F.-X. Marquis at
Quebec, 1877. Lost on Inaccessible Island, 1879. From a picture
belonging to Messrs Ross and Co., Quebec.]
Hard things have often been said of Bluenose crews. Like other general
sayings, some of them are true and some of them false. But, mostly,
each of them is partly true and partly false: and--'circumstances alter
cases.' The fact is, that life aboard a Bluenose was just what we
might expect from crews that lived a comparatively free-and-easy life
ashore in a sparsely settled colony, and a very strenuous life afloat
in ships which depended, like all ships, on disciplined effort for both
success {94} and safety. When national discipline is not very strong
ashore it has to be enforced by hook or by crook afloat. The general
public never bothered its head much about seamen's rights or wrongs in
a rather 'hard' new country managing its own maritime affairs. So
there certainly were occasional 'hell ships' among the Bluenoses,
though very rarely except when there were Bluenose officers with a
foreign crew.
This was quite in accordance with the practice all along the coast of
North America. Even aboard the famous Black Ball Line of Yankee
transatlantic packets in the forties there was plenty of 'handspike
hash' and 'belaying-pin soup' for shirkers or mutineers. The men
before the mast were mostly foreigners and riff-raff Britishers; very
few were Yankees or Bluenoses. Discipline had to be maintained; and it
was maintained by force. But these were not the real hell ships.
'Hell ships' were commonest among deepwatermen on long voyages round
the Horn, or among the whalers when the best class of foremast hands
were not to be had. Many of them are much more recent than is
generally known; and even now they are not quite extinct. 'Black
Taylor,' 'Devil Summers,' and 'Hell-fire {95} Slocum' are well within
living memory. Black Taylor came to a befitting end. Because the rope
surged at the capstan he kicked the nearest man down, and was jumping
to stamp his ribs in, when the man suddenly whipped out his knife and
ripped Black Taylor up with a New Orleans nigger trick-twist for which
he got six months, though really deserving none.
But such mates and skippers always were exceptions; and, as a general
rule, no better crews and vessels have ever sailed the sea than the
Yankees at their prime. Their splendid clippers successfully
challenged the slower Britishers on every trade route in the world. At
the very time that the _America_ was beating British yachts hull-down,
the old British East Indiamen were still wallowing along with eighty
hands to a thousand tons, while a Yankee thousand-tonner could sail
them out of sight with forty. The British excuse was that East
Indiamen required a fighting crew as well as a trading one, and that
British vessels were built to last, not simply put together to make one
flashy record. But after the Napoleonic wars the British Navy could
police the world of waters; so double numbers were no longer needed;
and if East {96} Indiamen were built to last, how was it they only went
an average of six times out and six times home before being broken up?
Nor was it only in speed that the Yankees were so far ahead. They paid
better wages, they gave immeasurably better food, they were smarter to
look at and smarter to go, their rigging was tauter, their sails better
cut and ever so much flatter on a wind, their cargo more quickly and
scientifically stowed, and, most important point of all, their
discipline quite excellent. Woe betide the cook or steward whose
galley or saloon had a speck of dirt that would make a smudge on the
skipper's cleanest cambric handkerchief! It was the same all through,
from stem to stern and keel to truck, from foremast hand to skipper.
Aboard the best clippers the system was well-nigh perfect. Each man
had found, or had the chance of finding, the position for which he was
most fit. The best human combination of head and heart and hand was
sure to come to the top. The others would also find their own
appropriate levels. But shirkers, growlers, flinchers, and mutineers
were given short shrift. The officers were game to the death and never
hesitated to use handspikes, fists, or firearms whenever the occasion
required it. {97} As for sea-lawyers--the canting equivalent of
ranting demagogues ashore--they could hardly have got a hearing among
any first-rate crew. No admiralissimo ever was a greater hero to a
junior midshipman than the best Yankee skippers were to the men before
the mast. There's no equalitarian nonsense out at sea.
This digression springs from and returns to the main argument; because
the Yankee excellence is so little understood and sometimes so
grudgingly acknowledged by British and foreign landsmen, and because
Bluenose and Yankee circumstances and practice were so much alike.
Britishers were different in nearly all their natural circumstances,
while, to increase the difference, their practice became greatly
modified by a deal of good but sometimes rather lubberly legislation.
And yet all three--Britisher, Bluenose, and Yankee--are so inextricably
connected with each other that it is quite impossible to understand any
one of them without some reference to the other two.
Bluenose discipline was good, very good indeed. When the whole ship's
company was Bluenose discipline was partly instinctive and mostly went
well, as it generally did when Yankees and Bluenoses sailed together.
The whole population of the little home {98} port--men, women, and
children--knew every vessel's crew and all about them. The men were
farmers, fishermen, lumbermen, shipbuilders, and 'deepwatermen,' often
all in one. Among other peoples, only Scandinavians ever had such an
all-round lot as this. Even in the present century, with its
increasing multiformity of occupation, books full of nauticalities can
be read and understood in these countries by everybody, though such
books cannot be read elsewhere except by the seafaring few. Business
meant ships or shipping; so did politics, peace and war, adventure and
ambition.
But there is a different tale to tell when the tonnage outran the
Bluenose ability to man it, and Dutchmen, Dagos, miscellaneous
wharf-rats, and 'low-down' Britishers had to be taken on instead. If
the crew was mixed and the officers Bluenose there was sure to be
trouble of graduated kinds, all the way up from simple knock-downs to
the fiercest gun-play of a real hell ship. The food was inferior to
that aboard the Yankees. But in discipline there was nothing to
choose. An all-Bluenose or all-Yankee sometimes came as near the
perfection of seamanship and discipline as anything human possibly can.
But aboard a mixed Bluenose the rule of bend or break {99} was enforced
without the slightest reference to what was regarded as landlubber's
law. The Britisher's Board of Trade regulations were regarded with
contempt; and not without reason; for, excellent as they were, they
struck the Bluenose seamen as being an interference made solely in the
supposed interests of the men against the officers.
The mistake was that the old injustices were repeated in a new way.
Formerly the law either sided with the officers and owners or left them
alone; now it either sided with the men or left the officers and owners
in the lurch. The true balance was not restored. Here is a thoroughly
typical instance of the difference between a Britisher and a Bluenose
under the new dispensation. The second mate of a Britisher asked for
his discharge at Bombay because he could not manage the men, who had
shirked disgracefully the whole way out. The skipper got a good
Bluenose for his new second mate. The first day the Bluenose came
aboard one of the worst shirkers slung a bucket carelessly, cut the
deck, and then proceeded to curse the ship and all who sailed in her,
as he had been accustomed to do under the Britisher. The Bluenose mate
simply said, 'See here, just shut your head or I'll {100} shut it for
you,' on which the skulker answered by threatening to 'cut his chicken
liver out.' In a flash the Bluenose had him naped, slung, and flying
across the rail. A second man rushed in, only to be landed neatly on
the chin and knocked limp against the scuppers. The rest of the watch,
roused by this unwonted assertion of authority, came on, but stopped
short, snarling, when the Bluenose swung an iron bar from the windlass
in a way that showed he knew how to handle it effectively. The skipper
and mate now appeared, and, seeing a clear case of actual fight, at
once ranged themselves beside the capable Bluenose. The watch, a mixed
lot, then slunk off; and, from that day out, the whole tone of the ship
was changed, very much for the better.
It is pleasanter, however, to take our last look at a Bluenose vessel,
under sail, with Bluenose skipper, mates, and crew, and a Bluenose
cargo, all complete. But a word must first be said about other parts
and other craft, lest the Maritime-Province Bluenose might be thought
the only kind of any consequence. There were, and still are, swarms of
small craft in Canada and Newfoundland which belong mostly or entirely
to the fisheries, and which, therefore, will be noticed in another
{101} chapter. The schooners along the different coasts, up the lower
St Lawrence, and round the Lakes; the modern French-Canadian sailing
bateaux; the transatlantic English brigs that still come out to
Labrador; the many Britishers and Yankees that used to come to Bluenose
harbours and to Quebec; the foreigners that come there still; and the
host of various miscellaneous little vessels everywhere--all these are
by no means forgotten. But only one main thread of the whole historic
yarn can be followed here.
Before starting we might perhaps remember what a sailing vessel cannot
do, as well as what she can, when the proper men are there and
circumstances suit her. She is helpless in a calm. She needs a tow in
crowded modern harbours or canals. She can only work against the wind
in a laborious zigzag, and a very bad gale generally puts her
considerably off her course. But, on the other hand, she could beat
all her best records under perfect modern conditions of canvas,
scientific metal hull, and crew; and the historic records she actually
has made are quite as surprising as they are little known. Few people
realize that 'ocean records' are a very old affair, even in Canada,
where they begin with Champlain's voyage of {102} eighteen days from
Honfleur to Tadoussac and end with King George V's sixty-seven hours
from land to land, when he speeded home in H.M.S. _Indomitable_ from
Champlain's tercentenary at Quebec in 1908, handling his shovel in the
stokehole by the way.
Here are some purely sailing records worth remembering. A Newfoundland
schooner, the _Grace Carter_, has sailed across to Portugal, sold her
fish there, gone to Cadiz for all the salt that she could carry, and
then reported back in Newfoundland within the month. A Canadian
schooner yacht, the _Lasca_, has crossed easterly, the harder way, in
twelve days from the St Lawrence. In 1860 the Yankee _Dreadnought_
made the Atlantic record by going from Sandy Hook to Liverpool in nine
days and seventeen hours, most of the time on the rim of a hurricane.
Six years later the most wonderful sea race in history was run when
five famous clippers started, almost together, from the Pagoda
Anchorage at Fu-chau for the East India Docks in London. This race was
an all-British one, as the civil war, the progress of steam everywhere
except in the China trade, and the stimulus of competition, had now
given Britishers the lead in the East, while putting them on an even
footing with Yankees in the {103} West. The course was sixteen
thousand miles; the prize was the world's championship in
clipper-racing. Three ships dropped considerably astern. But the
_Ariel_ and _Taeping_ raced up the Channel side by side, took in their
pilots at the same time, and arrived within eight minutes of each
other. The _Ariel_ arrived first; but the _Taeping_ won, as she had
left twenty minutes later. The total time was ninety-nine days. A
very different, but still more striking, record is the longest daily
run ever made entirely under sail. This was, in one sense at least, an
Anglo-American record; for the ship, appropriately called the
_Lightning_, was built by that master craftsman, Donald M'Kay of
Boston, and sailed by a British crew. She made no less than 436 sea
miles, or 502 statute miles, within the twenty-four hours.
There are no individual Bluenose rivals of these mighty champions. But
the Bluenoses more than held their own, all round, in any company and
on any sea. So it is well worth our while to end this story of a
thousand years--from the Vikings till to-day--by going aboard a
Bluenose vessel with a Bluenose crew when both were at their prime.
The _Victoria_ is manned by the husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers
of the place where {104} she was built. Her owners are the leaders of
the little neighbourhood, and her cargo is home-grown. She carries no
special carpenter and sailmaker, like a Britisher, because a Bluenose
has an all-round crew, every man of which is smart enough, either with
the tools or with the fid and palm and needle, for ordinary work, while
some are sure to be equal to any special job. She of course carries
two suits of canvas, her new best and older second best. Each sail has
required more skill than tailors need to make a perfect fit in clothes,
because there is a constant strain on sails, exceeding, if possible,
the strains on every other part. But before sail is made her anchor is
hove short, that is, the ship is drawn along by her cable till her bows
are over it. 'Heave and she comes!' 'Heave and she must!' 'Heave and
bust her!' are grunted from the men straining at the longbars of the
capstan, which winds the tightening cable in. 'Click, click, clickety,
click' go the pawls, which drop every few inches into cavities that,
keeping them from slipping back, prevent the capstan from turning the
wrong way when the men pause to take breath. 'Break out the mud-hook!'
and a tremendous combined effort ensues. Presently a sudden welcome
slack {105} shows that the flukes have broken clear. The anchor is
then hove up, catted, and fished.
'All hands make sail!' sings out the mate. The wind is nicely on the
starboard quarter, that is, abaft the beam and forward of the stern,
which gives the best chance to every sail. A wind dead aft, blanketing
more than half the canvas, is called a lubber's wind. A soldier's wind
is one which comes square on the beam, and so makes equally plain
sailing out and back again. What sail a full-rigged ship can carry!
The Yankee _Great Republic_ could spread nearly one whole acre of
canvas to the breeze. Another Yankee, the _R. C. Rickmers_, the
largest sailing vessel in the world to-day, exceeds this. But her
tonnage is much greater, more than eleven thousand gross, and her rig
is entirely different. A full-rigged clipper ship might have
twenty-two square sails, though it was rare to see so many. In
addition she would have studding-sails to wing her square sails farther
out. Then, there were the triangular jibs forward and the triangular
staysails between the masts, with the quadrangular spanker like an
aerial rudder on the lower mizzenmast. All the nine staysails would
have the loose lower corner made fast to a handy place on deck by a
sheet {106} (or rope) and the fore and aft points connected by the
stays to the masts, the fore point low and the aft high. This is not
the nautical way of saying it. But 'points' and 'corners' and other
homely land terms sometimes save many explanations which, in their
turn, lead on to other explanations.
The heads of square sails are made fast to yards, which are at right
angles to the masts on which they pivot. Sails and yards are raised,
lowered, swung at the proper angle to catch the wind, and held in place
by halliards, lifts, braces, and sheets, which can be worked from the
deck. Sheets are ropes running from the lower corners of sails. All
upper sails have their sheets running through sheave-holes in the
yardarms next below, then through quarter-blocks underneath these yards
and beside the masts, and then down to the deck. Braces are the ropes
which swing the yards to the proper angle. Halliards are those which
hoist or lower both the yards and sails. The square sails themselves
are controlled by drawlines called clew-garnets running up from the
lower corners, leechlines running in diagonally from the middle of the
outside edges, buntlines running up from the foot, and spilling lines,
to spill the wind in heavy {107} weather. When the area of a sail has
to be reduced, it is reefed by gathering up the head, if a square sail,
or the foot, if triangular, and tying the gathered-up part securely by
reef points, that is, by crossing and knotting the short lines on
either side of this part. The square sails on the mainmast are called,
when eight are carried, the mainsail, lower and upper maintopsails,
lower and upper maintopgallants, main-royal, main-skysail, and the
moonsail. The standing rigging is the whole assemblage of ropes by
which the masts are supported.
These few words are very far from being a technically full, or even
quite precise, description. But, taken with what was previously said
about the hull, they will give a better general idea than if the reader
was asked to make a realizable whole out of a mazy bewilderment
embracing every single one of all the multitudinous parts.
'All hands make sail!' Up go some to loose the sails aloft, while
others stay on deck to haul the ropes that hoist the sails to the
utmost limit of the canvas. The jibs and spanker generally go up at
once, because they are useful as an aid to steering. The staysails
generally wait. The jibs and staysails are triangular, the spanker a
quadrangular {108} fore-and-after. The square sails made fast to
wide-spreading yards are the ones that take most hauling. But setting
the sails by no means ends the work at them. Trimming is quite as
important. Every time there is the slightest shift in the course or
wind there ought to be a corresponding shift of trim so as to catch
every breath the sail can hold. To effect this with the triangular
sails a sheet must be slacked away or hauled more in; while, in the
case of the square sails on the yards, a brace must be attended to.
Our Bluenose mate now thinks he can get more work from his canvas. His
voice rings out: 'Weather crossjack brace!' which means hauling the
lowest and aftermost square sail more to windward. 'Weather crossjack
brace!' sings out the timekeeper, whose duty it is to rouse the watch
as well as strike the bells that mark the hours and halves. The watch
tramp off and lay on to the weather brace, the A.B.'s (or able-bodied
seamen) leading and the O.S.'s (ordinary seamen) at the tail. Some one
slacks off the lee braces and sings out 'Haul away!' Then the watch
proceed to haul, with weird, wild cries in minor keys that rise and
fall and rise again, like the long-drawn soughing of the wind itself.
{109} _Eh--heigh--o--az_! _Eh--heigh--ee_! _Eh--hugh_! In comes the
brace till the trim suits the mate, when he calls out 'Turn the
crossjack brace!' which means making it fast on a belaying pin. The
other braces follow. By the time the topgallant braces are reached
only two hands are needed, as the higher yards are naturally much
lighter than the lower ones.
Sheets and braces are very dangerous things to handle in a gale of
wind. Every movement of the rope must be closely watched with one
vigilant eye, while the other must be looking out for washing seas.
The slightest inattention to the belaying of a mainsheet while men are
hanging on may mean that it breaks loose just as the men expect it to
be fast, when away it goes, with awful suddenness and force, dragging
them clean overboard before their instinctive grip can be let go. The
slightest inattention to the seas may mean an equally fatal result.
Not once, nor twice, but several times, a whole watch has been washed
away from the fore-braces by some gigantic wave, and every single man
in it been drowned.
Squalls need smart handling. Black squalls are nothing, even when the
ship lays over till the lee rail's under a sluicing rush of broken
water. But a really wicked white squall {110} requires luffing, that
is, bringing her head so close to the wind that it will strike her at
the acutest angle possible without losing its pressure in the right
direction altogether. The officer of the watch keeps one eye to
windward, makes up his mind what sail he'll shorten, and then yells an
order that pierces the wind like a shot, 'Stand by your royal
halliards!' As the squall swoops down and the ship heels over to it he
yells again, 'Let go your royal halliards, clew 'em up and make 'em
fast!' Down come the yards, with hoarse roaring from the thrashing
canvas. But then, if no second squall is coming, the mate will cut the
clewing short with a stentorian 'Masthead the yards again!' on which
the watch lay on to the halliards and haul--_Ahay_! _Aheigh_!
_Aho--oh_! Up she goes!
The labour is lightened, as hand labour always has been lightened, by
singing to the rhythm of the work. The seaman's working songs are
chanties, a kind of homespun poetry which, once heard to its rolling
music and the sound of wind and wave, will always bring back the very
savour of the sea wherever it is heard again. There are thousands of
chanties in scores of languages, which, like the men who sing them,
have met and mingled all round the {111} world. They are the folklore
of a class apart, which differs, as landsmen differ, in ways and speech
and racial ambition, but which is also drawn together, as landsmen
never have been, by that strange blend of strife and communing with man
and nature which is only known at sea. They will not bear quotation in
cold print, where they are as pitiably out of place as an albatross on
deck. No mere reader can feel the stir of that grand old chanty
Hurrah! my boys, we're homeward bound!
unless he has heard it when all hands make sail on leaving port, and
the deck begins pulsating with the first throb of the swell that sets
in landward across the bar. And what can this chorus really mean to
any one who has never heard it roared by strong male voices to the
running accompaniment of seething water overside?
What ho, Piper! watch her how she goes!
Give her sheet and let her rip.
We're the boys to pull her through.
You ought to see her rolling home;
For she's the gal to go
In the passage home in ninety days
From Cal-i-for-ni-o!
But though you can no more wrest a chanty from its surroundings and
then pass it off as a {112} seaman's folk-song than you can take the
blue from the water or the crimson from the sunset, yet, as some
chanties have become so well known ashore, as others so richly deserve
to be known there, and as all are now being threatened with extinction,
perhaps a few may be mentioned in passing. _Away for Rio_! with its
wild, queer wail in the middle of its full-toned chorus, has always
been a great favourite afloat:
For we're bound for Rio Grande,
And away Rio! ay Rio!
Sing fare-ye-well, my bonny young girl,
We're bound for Rio Grande.
The _Wide Missouri_ is a magnificent song for baritones and basses on
the water:
Oh, Shenando'h, I love your daughter,
'Way-ho, the rolling river!
Oh, Shenando'h, I long to hear you,
'Way-ho, we're bound away,
Down the broad Missouri.
A famous capstan chanty is well known on land, whence, indeed, it
originally came:
And it's hame, dearie, hame; oh! it's hame I want to be.
My topsails are hoisted and I must out to sea;
But the oak and the ash and the bonnie birchen tree,
They're all a-growin' green in the North Countree.
--which is quite as appropriate to the _Nova {113} Scotia_ as to the
one beyond the North Atlantic. A favourite sail-setting chanty is
_Solo_. Haul on the bowlin', the fore and maintop bowlin'--
_Chorus_. Haul on the bowlin', the bowlin' haul!
A good pumping-out chanty after a storm is
_Solo_. Old Storm has heard the angel call.
_Chorus_. To my ay! Old Storm along!
_Reuben Ranzo_ is a grand one for a good long haul. The chorus comes
after every line, striking like a squall, with a regular roar on the
first word, Ranzo.
_Solo_. Hurrah for Reuben Ranzo!
_Chorus_. Ranzo, boys, Ranzo!
Ranzo's progress from a lubberly tailor to a good smart sailor is then
related with infinite variations, but always with the same gusto.
_Ranzo_ is only really popular afloat. But _Blow the man down_ is a
universal favourite.
_Solo_. Blow the man down, blow the man down,
_Chorus_. 'Way-ho! Blow the man down.
_Solo_. Blow the man down from Liverpool town;
_Chorus_. Give us some wind to blow the man down.
When every sail is set and every stitch is drawing, there is no finer
sight the sea can show. The towering masts; the canvas gleaming white,
with its lines of curving {114} beauty drawn by the touch of the wind;
the whole ship bounding forward as if just slipped from her leash--all
this makes a scene to stir the beholder then and for ever after. The
breeze pipes up. She's doing ten knots now; eleven, twelve; and later
on, fifteen. This puts the lee rail under; for she lays over on her
side so far that her deck is at a slope of forty-five. Her forefoot
cuts through the water like the slash of a scimitar; while her bows
throw out two seething waves, the windward one of which breaks into
volleying spray a-top and rattles down like hailstones on the fore-deck.
But next day the wind has hauled ahead, and she has to make her way by
tacking. She loses as little as possible on her zigzag course by
sailing close to the wind, that is, by pointing as nearly into it as
she can while still 'keeping a full on' every working sail. Presently
the skipper, having gone as far to one side of his straight course as
he thinks proper, gives the caution; whereupon the braces are taken off
the pins and coiled down on deck, all clear for running, while the
spanker-boom is hauled in amidships so that the spanker may feel the
wind and press the stern a-lee, which helps the bow to windward. Then
the 'old man' (called {115} so whatever his age may be) sings out at
the top of his voice, 'Ready, oh!' The helm is eased down on his
signal, so as not to lose way suddenly. When it is quite down he
shouts again, 'Helm's a-lee!' on which the fore and head sheets
(holding the sails attached to the foremast and bowsprit) are let go
and overhauled. The vessel swings round, the spanker pressing her
stern in one direction and the sails at the bows offering very little
resistance now their sheets are let go. The skipper's eye is on the
mainsail, which is the point of pivoting. Directly the wind is out of
it and it begins to shiver he yells, 'Raise tacks and sheets!' when,
except that the foretack is held a bit to prevent the foresail from
bellying aback, all the remaining ropes that held the ship on her old
tack are loosed. A roar of wind-waves rushes through the sails, and a
tremor runs through the whole ship from stem to stern. The skipper
waits for the first decided breath on her new tack and then shouts,
'Mainsail haul!' when the yards come swinging round so quickly that the
men can hardly take in the slack of the braces fast enough. The scene
of orderly confusion is now at its height. Every one hauling sings out
at the very top of his pipes. The sails are struggling to find their
{116} new set home; while the headsheets forward thrash about like mad
and thump their blocks against the deck with force enough to dash your
brains out.
Mates and boatswain work furiously, for the skipper's eye is searching
everywhere, and the skipper's angry words cut the delinquent like the
lash of a well-aimed whip. The boatswain forward has the worst of it,
for the restive sheets and headsails won't come to trim without a fight
when it's breezing up and seas are running. But presently all the
yards get rightly trimmed, tacks boarded, and bowlines hauled out taut.
She's on a bowline taut enough to please the old man now; that is, the
ropes leading forward from the middle of the forward edge of every
square sail are so straight that she is sailing as near the wind as she
can go and keep a full on. 'Go below, the watch!' and the men off duty
tramp down, the cook and boatswain with their 'oilies' streaming from
their scuffle with the flying spray and slapping dollops at the bows.
When a quartering trade wind is picked up sailing is at its easiest;
for a well-balanced suit of canvas will keep her bowling along night
and day with just the lightest of touches at the wheel. Then is the
time to bend her old sails {117} on; for, unlike a man, a ship puts on
her old suit for fair weather and her new suit for foul. Then, too, is
the time for dog-watch yarning, when pipes are lit without any fear of
their having to be crammed half-smoked into the nearest pocket because
all hands are called. Landsmen generally think that most watches
aboard a wind-jammer are passed in yarns and smoking. But this is far
from being the case. The mates and skipper keep everybody busy with
the hundred-and-one things required to keep a vessel shipshape:
painting, graining, brightening, overhauling the weak spots in the
rigging, working the 'bear' to clean the deck with fine wet sand,
helping whomever is acting as 'Chips' the carpenter, or the equally
busy 'Sails'; or 'doing Peggy' for 'Slush' the cook, who much prefers
wet grub to dry, slumgullion coffee to any kind of tea, ready-made hard
bread to ship-baked soft, and any kind of stodge to the toothsome
delights of dandyfunk and crackerhash. And all this is extra to the
regular routine, with its lamp-lockers, binnacles, timekeeping,
incessant look-out, and trick at the wheel. Besides, every man has to
look after his own kit, which he has to buy with his own money, and his
quarters, for which he alone is responsible. {118} So there is never
much time to spare, with watch and watch about, all through the voyage;
especially when all the ills that badly fed flesh is heir to on board a
deepwaterman incapacitate some hands, while falls from aloft and
various accidents knock out others.
The skipper, boatswain, cook, steward, Chips, and Sails keep no
watches, and hence are called 'the idlers,' a most misleading term, for
they work a good deal harder than their counterparts ashore; though the
mates and seamen often work harder still. There are seven watches in a
day, reckoned from noon to noon: five of four hours each and two of two
hours each. These two, the dog watches, are from four to six and six
to eight each afternoon. The crew are divided into port and starboard
watches, each under a mate. In Bluenose vessels the port watch was
always called by the old name of larboard watch till only the other
day. The starboard and larboard got their names because the starboard
was the side on which the steering oar was hung before the rudder was
invented, and the larboard was the side where the lading or cargo came
in.
Bluenoses have no use for nippers, as Britishers call apprentices. But
if they had, {119} and the reader was a green one, he would just about
begin to know the ropes and find his sea legs by the time that our
_Victoria_ had run her southing down to within another day's sail of
the foul-weather zone in the roaring forties round the Horn, which
seamen call 'Old Stiff.' Sails are shifted again, and the best new
suit is bent; for the coming gales have a clear sweep from the
Antarctic to the stormiest coast of all America, and the enormous,
grey-backed Cape Horners are the biggest seas in the world.
The best helmsmen are on duty now. Not even every Bluenose can steer,
any more than every Englishman can box or every Frenchman fence. There
are a dozen different ways of mishandling a vessel under sail. Let
your attention wander, and she'll run up into the wind and perhaps get
in irons, so that she won't cast either way. Let her fall off when
you're running free, and she'll broach to and get taken aback. Or
simply let her yaw about a bit instead of holding true, and you'll lose
a knot or two an hour. But do none of these careless things, observe
all the rules as well, and even then you will never make a helmsman
unless it's born in you. Steering is blown into you by the wind and
soaked into you by the water. And you must also have {120} that inborn
faculty of touch which tells you instinctively how to meet a vessel's
vagaries--and no two vessels are alike--as well as how to make her fall
in with all the humours of a wayward ocean.
The hungry great Antarctic wind comes swooping down. The _Victoria_
lays over to it, her forefoot slashing, her lee side hissing, the
windward rigging strained and screaming, and every stitch of canvas
drawing full. Still the skipper carries on. He and his vessel have a
name to keep up; and he has carried on till all was blue ere this, and
left more than one steam kettle panting. Every timber, plank, mast,
yard, and tackle wakes to new life and thrills in response to the
sails. She answers her helm quickly, eagerly. She rides the galloping
waters now as you ride her. And as she rises to each fresh wave you
also rise, with the same exultant spring, and take the leap in your
stride.
The wind pipes up: a regular gale is evidently brewing; and most of the
canvas must come off her now or else she'll soon be stripped of it.
'Stand by your royal halliards!' yells the second mate. 'Let go your
royal halliards!' The royals are down for good. The skysails have
been taken in before. Another {121} tremendous blast lays her far
over, and the sea is a lather of foam to windward. The skipper comes
on deck, takes a quick look round, and shouts at the full pitch of his
lungs: 'All hands shorten sail!' Up come the other watch in their
oilskins, which they have carefully lashed round their wrists and above
their knees to keep the water out. Taking in sail is no easy matter
now. Every one tails on, puts his back into it, and joins the chorus
of the hard-breathed chanty. The human voices sound like fitful
screams of seabirds, heard in wild snatches between the volleying
gusts; while overhead the sails are booming like artillery, as the
spilling lines strain to get the grip. 'Now then, starboard watch, up
with your sail and give the larboard watch a dressing down!' _Yo--ho_!
_Yo--hay_! _Yo--ho--oh_! Up she goes! A hiss, a crash, a deafening
thud, and a gigantic wave curls overhead and batters down the toiling
men, who hang on for their lives and struggle for a foothold. 'Up with
you!' yells the mate, directly the tangled coil of yellow-clad humanity
emerges like a half-drowned rat, 'Up with you, boys, and give her
hell!' _Yo--ho_! _To--hay_! _Yo--ho--harrhh_! 'Turn that!' 'All
fast, sir!' 'Aloft and roll her up! Now then, starbowlines, show
{122} your spunk!' Away they go, the mate dashing ahead; while the
furious seas shoot up vindictive tongues at them and nearly wash two
men clean off the rigging on a level with the lower topsails. Out on
the swaying yard, standing on the foot-rope that is strung underneath,
they grasp at the hard, wet, struggling canvas till they can pass the
gaskets round the parts still bellying between the buntlines. 'One
hand for the ship and one for yourself' is the rule aloft. But
exceptions are more plentiful than rules on a day like this. Both
hands must be used, though the sail and foot-ropes rack your body and
try their best to shake you off. If they succeed, a sickening thud on
deck, or a smothered scream and a half-heard _plopp_! overside would be
the end of you.
All hands work like fury, for a full Antarctic hurricane is on them.
This great South Polar storm has swept a thousand leagues, almost
unchecked, before venting its utmost rage against the iron coasts all
round the Horn. The South Shetlands have only served to rouse its
temper. Its seas have grown bigger with every mile from the Pole, and
wilder with every mile towards the Horn. Now they are so enormous that
even the truck of the tall Yankee clipper staggering along to {123}
leeward cannot be seen except when both ships are topping the crest.
Wherever you look there seems to be an endless earthquake of
mountainous waves, with spuming volcanoes of their own, and vast,
abysmal craters yawning from the depths. The _Victoria_ begins to
labour. The wind and water seem to be gaining on her every minute.
She groans in every part of her sorely racked hull; while up aloft the
hurricane roars, rings, and screeches through the rigging.
But suddenly there is a new and far more awful sound, which seems to
still all others, as a stupendous mother wave rears its huge, engulfing
bulk astern. On it comes, faster and higher, its cavernous hollow
roaring and its overtopping crest snarling viciously as it turns
forward, high above the poop. 'Hold on for your lives!' shout the
mates and skipper. They are not a moment too soon. The sails are
blanketed, and the ship seems as if she was actually being drawn, stern
first, into the very jaws of the sea. A shuddering pause . . . and
then, with a stunning crash, the whole devouring mass bursts full on
deck. The stricken _Victoria_ reels under the terrific shock, and then
lies dead another anxious minute, utterly helpless, her {124} deck
awash with a smother of foaming water, and her crew apparently drowned.
But presently her stern emerges through the dark, green-grey
after-shoulder of the wave. She responds to the lift of the mighty
barrel with a gallant effort to shake herself free. She rises,
dripping from stem to stern. Her sails refill and draw her on again.
And when the next wave comes she is just able to take it--but no more.
The skipper has already decided to heave to and wait for the storm to
blow itself out. But there is still too much canvas on her. Even the
main lower topsail has to come in. The courses, or lowest square
sails, have all come in before. The little canvas required for lying
to must neither be too high nor yet too low. If it is too high, it
gives the wind a very dangerous degree of leverage. If it is too low,
it violently strains the whole vessel by being completely blanketed
when in the trough of the sea and then suddenly struck full when on the
crest. The main lower topsail is at just the proper height. But only
the fore and mizzen ones are wanted to balance the pressure aloft. So
in it has to come. And a dangerous bit of work it gives; for it has to
be hauled up from right amidships, where the deck is wetter than a
{125} half-tide rock. The yellow-oilskinned crew tail on and heave.
_Yo--ho_! _Yo--hay_! 'Hitch it! Quick, for your lives, hang on,
all!' A mountainous wall of black water suddenly leaps up and crashes
through the windward rigging. The watch goes down to a man, some
hanging on to the rope as if suspended in the middle of a waterfall,
for the deck is nearly perpendicular, while others wash off altogether
and fetch up with a dazing, underwater thud against the lee side. Inch
by inch the men haul in, waist-deep most of the time and often
completely under. _Yo--ho_! _Yo--hay_! _harrhh_, and they all hold
breath till they can get their heads out again. _Yo--ho_! _Yo--hay_!
'In with her!' _Heigh--o--oh_! 'Turn that!' 'All fast!'
''Way aloft and roll her up quick!' The tossing crests are blown into
spindrift against the weather yardarm, while a pelting hailstorm stings
the wet, cold hands and faces. The men tear at the sail with their
numb fingers till their nails are bleeding. They hit it, pull it,
clutch at it for support. Certain death would follow a fall from
aloft; for the whole deck is hidden under a surging, seething mass of
water. You would swear the water's boiling if it wasn't icy cold. The
skipper's at the wheel, watching his {126} chance. There is no such
thing as a good chance now. But he sees one of some kind, just as the
men get the sail on the yard and are trying to make it fast. Down goes
the helm, and her head comes slowly up to the wind. 'She's doing
it---- No! Hang on, all! Great snakes, here comes a sea!' Struck
full, straight on her beam, by wind and sea together, the _Victoria_
lays over as if she would never stop. Over she heels to it--over,
over, over! A second is a long suspense at such a time as this. The
sea breaks in thunder along her whole length, and pours in a sweeping
cataract across her deck, smashing the boats and dragging all loose
gear to leeward. Over she heels--over, over, over! The yards are
nearly up and down. The men cling desperately, as if to an inverted
mast. And well they may, especially on the leeward arm that dips them
far under a surge of water which seems likely to snap the whole thing
off. But the _Victoria's_ cargo and ballast never shift an inch. Her
stability is excellent. And as the heaving shoulder eases down she
holds her keel in, just before another lurch would send her turning
turtle. A pause . . . a quiver . . . and she begins to right. 'Now
then,' roars the indomitable mate, the moment his dripping {127}
yardarm comes from under, 'turn to, there--d' y' think we 're going to
hang on here the whole damn' day?' Whereupon the men turn to again
with twice the confidence and hearty goodwill that any other form of
reassurance could possibly have given them.
As she comes back towards an even keel the wind catches the sails. The
skipper is still at the wheel, to which he and the two men whose trick
it is are clinging. 'Hard-a-lee!' and round she goes this time, till
she snuggles into a good lie-to, which keeps her alternately coming up
and falling off a little, by the counteraction of the sails and helm.
Here she rides out the storm, dipping her lee rail under, climbing the
wild, gigantic seas, and working off her course on the cyclone-driven
waters; but giving watch and watch about a chance to rest before she
squares away again.
Next morning the skipper hardly puts his head out before he yells the
welcome order to set the main lower topsail--from the lee yardarm of
which a dozen men had nearly gone to Davy Jones's locker only
yesterday. He takes a look round; then orders up reefed foresail and
the three upper topsails, also reefed. Up goes the watch aloft and
lays out on the yard. 'Ready?' comes the shouted {128} query from the
bunt. 'Ay, ay, sir!' 'Haul out to windward!' _Eh--hai, o--ho,
o--ho--oh_! 'Far enough, sir?' 'Haul out to leeward!' _Eh--hai,
o--ho, o--ho--oh_! 'That'll do! Tie her up and don't miss any
points!' 'Right-oh! Lay down from aloft and set the sail!' _Yo--ho,
yo--hai, yo--ho--oh_! Then the chanty rises from the swaying men,
rises and falls, in wavering bursts of sound, as if the gale was
whirling it about:
Blow the man down, blow the man down,
'Way-ho! Blow the man down.
Blow the man down from Liverpool town;
Give us some wind to blow the man down.
And so the gallant ship goes outward-bound; and homeward-bound the
same. At last she's back in Halifax, after a series of adventures that
would set an ordinary landsman up for life. But the only thing the
Nova Scotian papers say of her is this: 'Arrived from sea with general
cargo--ship _Victoria_, John Smith, master, ninety days from
Valparaiso. All well.'
No mention of that terrible Antarctic hurricane? No 'heroes'? No
heroics?
It's all in the day's work there.
{129}