ON THE BANKS OF THE HUGLI.
The clocks of the city have struck two. Where can a man get food?
Calcutta is not rich in respect of dainty accommodation. You can stay
your stomach at Peliti's or Bonsard's, but their shops are not to be
found in Hastings Street, or in the places where brokers fly to and fro
in office-jauns, sweating and growing visibly rich. There must be some
sort of entertainment where sailors congregate. "Honest Bombay Jack"
supplies nothing but Burma cheroots and whisky in liqueur-glasses, but
in Lal Bazar, not far from "The Sailors' Coffee-rooms," a board gives
bold advertisement that "officers and seamen can find good quarters." In
evidence a row of neat officers and seamen are sitting on a bench by the
"hotel" door smoking. There is an almost military likeness in their
clothes. Perhaps "Honest Bombay Jack" only keeps one kind of felt hat
and one brand of suit. When Jack of the mercantile marine is sober, he
is very sober. When he is drunk he is--but ask the river police what a
lean, mad Yankee can do with his nails and teeth. These gentlemen
smoking on the bench are impassive almost as Red Indians. Their
attitudes are unrestrained, and they do not wear braces. Nor, it would
appear from the bill of fare, are they particular as to what they eat
when they attend _table d'hote_. The fare is substantial and the
regulation "peg"--every house has its own depth of peg if you will
refrain from stopping Ganymede--something to wonder at. Three fingers
and a trifle over seems to be the use of the officers and seamen who are
talking so quietly in the doorway. One says--he has evidently finished a
long story--"and so he shipped for four pound ten with a first mate's
certificate and all. And that was in a German barque." Another spits
with conviction and says genially, without raising his voice, "That was
a hell of a ship. Who knows her?" No answer from the assembly, but a
Dane or a German wants to know whether the _Myra_ is "up" yet. A dry,
red-haired man gives her exact position in the river--(How in the world
can he know?)--and the probable hour of her arrival. The grave debate
drifts into a discussion of a recent river accident, whereby a big
steamer was damaged, and had to put back and discharge cargo. A burly
gentleman who is taking a constitutional down Lal Bazar strolls up and
says: "I tell you she fouled her own chain with her own forefoot. Hev
you seen the plates?" "No." "Then how the ---- can any ---- like you
---- say what it ---- well was?" He passes on, having delivered his
highly flavored opinion without heat or passion. No one seems to resent
the garnish.
Let us get down to the river and see this stamp of men more thoroughly.
Clarke Russell has told us that their lives are hard enough in all
conscience. What are their pleasures and diversions? The Port Office,
where live the gentlemen who make improvements in the Port of Calcutta,
ought to supply information. It stands large and fair, and built in an
orientalised manner after the Italians at the corner of Fairlie Place
upon the great Strand Road, and a continual clamour of traffic by land
and by sea goes up throughout the day and far into the night against its
windows. This is a place to enter more reverently than the Bengal
Legislative Council, for it controls the direction of the uncertain
Hugli down to the Sandheads, owns enormous wealth, and spends huge sums
on the frontaging of river banks, the expansion of jetties, and the
manufacture of docks costing two hundred lakhs of rupees. Two million
tons of sea-going shippage yearly find their way up and down the river
by the guidance of the Port Office, and the men of the Port Office know
more than it is good for men to hold in their heads. They can without
reference to telegraphic bulletins give the position of all the big
steamers, coming up or going down, from the Hugli to the sea, day by
day, with their tonnage, the names of their captains and the nature of
their cargo. Looking out from the verandah of their office over a
lancer-regiment of masts, they can declare truthfully the name of every
ship within eye-scope, with the day and hour when she will depart.
In a room at the bottom of the building lounge big men, carefully
dressed. Now there is a type of face which belongs almost exclusively to
Bengal Cavalry officers--majors for choice. Everybody knows the bronzed,
black-moustached, clear-speaking Native Cavalry officer. He exists
unnaturally in novels, and naturally on the Frontier. These men in the
big room have his cast of face so strongly marked that one marvels what
officers are doing by the river. "Have they come to book passages for
home?" "Those men? They're pilots. Some of them draw between two and
three thousand rupees a month. They are responsible for half-a-million
pounds' worth of cargo sometimes." They certainly are men, and they
carry themselves as such. They confer together by twos and threes, and
appeal frequently to shipping lists.
"_Isn't_ a pilot a man who always wears a pea-jacket and shouts through
a speaking-trumpet?" "Well, you can ask those gentlemen if you like.
You've got your notions from Home pilots. Ours aren't that kind exactly.
They are a picked service, as carefully weeded as the Indian Civil. Some
of 'em have brothers in it, and some belong to the old Indian army
families." But they are not all equally well paid. The Calcutta papers
echo the groans of the junior pilots who are not allowed the handling of
ships over a certain tonnage. As it is yearly growing cheaper to build
one big steamer than two little ones, these juniors are crowded out,
and, while the seniors get their thousands, some of the youngsters make
at the end of one month exactly thirty rupees. This is a grievance with
them, and it seems well-founded.
In the flats above the pilot's room are hushed and chapel-like offices,
all sumptuously fitted, where Englishmen write and telephone and
telegraph, and deft Babus for ever draw maps of the shifting Hugli. Any
hope of understanding the work of the Port Commissioners is thoroughly
dashed by being taken through the Port maps of a quarter of a century
past. Men have played with the Hugli as children play with a
gutter-runnel, and, in return, the Hugli once rose and played with men
and ships till the Strand Road was littered with the raffle and the
carcasses of big ships. There are photos on the walls of the cyclone of
'64, when the _Thunder_ came inland and sat upon an American barque,
obstructing all the traffic. Very curious are these photos, and almost
impossible to believe. How can a big, strong steamer have her three
masts razed to deck level? How can a heavy, country boat be pitched on
to the poop of a high-walled liner? and how can the side be bodily torn
out of a ship? The photos say that all these things are possible, and
men aver that a cyclone may come again and scatter the craft like chaff.
Outside the Port Office are the export and import sheds, buildings that
can hold a ship's cargo apiece, all standing on reclaimed ground. Here
be several strong smells, a mass of railway lines, and a multitude of
men. "Do you see where that trolly is standing, behind the big P. and O.
berth? In that place as nearly as may be the _Govindpur_ went down about
twenty years ago, and began to shift out!" "But that is solid ground."
"She sank there, and the next tide made a scour-hole on one side of her.
The returning tide knocked her into it. Then the mud made up behind her.
Next tide the business was repeated--always the scour-hole in the mud
and the filling up behind her. So she rolled, and was pushed out and out
until she got in the way of the shipping right out yonder, and we had to
blow her up. When a ship sinks in mud or quicksand she regularly digs
her own grave and wriggles herself into it deeper and deeper till she
reaches moderately solid stuff. Then she sticks." Horrible idea, is it
not, to go down and down with each tide into the foul Hugli mud?
Close to the Port Offices is the Shipping Office, where the captains
engage their crews. The men must produce their discharges from their
last ships in the presence of the shipping master, or, as they call him,
"The Deputy Shipping." He passes them after having satisfied himself
that they are not deserters from other ships, and they then sign
articles for the voyage. This is the ceremony, beginning with the
"dearly beloved" of the crew-hunting captain down to the "amazement" of
the deserter. There is a dingy building, next door to the Sailors' Home,
at whose gate stand the cast-ups of all the seas in all manner of
raiment. There are the Seedee boys, Bombay _serangs_ and Madras
fishermen of the salt villages, Malays who insist upon marrying Calcutta
women, grow jealous and run _amok_; Malay-Hindus, Hindu-Malay-Whites,
Burmese, Burma-Whites, Burma-Native-Whites, Italians with gold earrings
and a thirst for gambling, Yankees of all the States, with Mulattoes and
pure buck-niggers, red and rough Danes, Cingalese, Cornish boys fresh
taken from the plough-tail, "corn-stalks" from colonial ships where they
got four pound ten a month as seamen, tun-bellied Germans, Cockney mates
keeping a little aloof from the crowd and talking in knots together,
unmistakable "Tommies" who have tumbled into seafaring life by some
mistake, cockatoo-tufted Welshmen spitting and swearing like cats,
broken-down loafers, grey-headed, penniless, and pitiful, swaggering
boys, and very quiet men with gashes and cuts on their faces. It is an
ethnological museum where all the specimens are playing comedies and
tragedies. The head of it all is the "Deputy Shipping," and he sits,
supported by an English policeman whose fists are knobby, in a great
Chair of State. The "Deputy Shipping" knows all the iniquity of the
river-side, all the ships, all the captains, and a fair amount of the
men. He is fenced off from the crowd by a strong wooden railing behind
which are gathered the unemployed of the mercantile marine. They have
had their spree--poor devils--and now they will go to sea again on as
low a wage as three pound ten a month, to fetch up at the end in some
Shanghai stew or San Francisco hell. They have turned their backs on the
seductions of the Howrah boarding-houses and the delights of
Colootollah. If Fate will, "Nightingale's" will know them no more for a
season. But what skipper will take some of these battered, shattered
wrecks whose hands shake and whose eyes are red?
Enter suddenly a bearded captain, who has made his selection from the
crowd on a previous day, and now wants to get his men passed. He is not
fastidious in his choice. His eleven seem a tough lot for such a
mild-eyed, civil-spoken man to manage. But the captain in the Shipping
Office and the captain on his ship are two different things. He brings
his crew up to the "Deputy Shipping's" bar, and hands in their greasy,
tattered discharges. But the heart of the "Deputy Shipping" is hot
within him, because, two days ago, a Howrah crimp stole a whole crew
from a down-dropping ship, insomuch that the captain had to come back
and whip up a new crew at one o'clock in the day. Evil will it be if the
"Deputy Shipping" finds one of these bounty-jumpers in the chosen crew
of the _Blenkindoon_.
The "Deputy Shipping" tells the story with heat. "I didn't know they did
such things in Calcutta," says the captain. "Do such things! They'd
steal the eye-teeth out of your head there, Captain." He picks up a
discharge and calls for Michael Donelly, a loose-knit, vicious-looking
Irish-American who chews. "Stand up, man, stand up!" Michael Donelly
wants to lean against the desk, and the English policeman won't have it.
"What was your last ship?" "_Fairy Queen._" "When did you leave her?"
"'Bout 'leven days." "Captain's name?" "Flahy." "That'll do. Next man:
Jules Anderson." Jules Anderson is a Dane. His statements tally with the
discharge-certificate of the United States, as the Eagle attesteth. He
is passed and falls back. Slivey, the Englishman, and David, a huge
plum-coloured negro who ships as cook, are also passed. Then comes
Bassompra, a little Italian, who speaks English. "What's your last
ship?" "_Ferdinand._" "No, after that?" "German barque." Bassompra does
not look happy. "When did she sail?" "About three weeks ago." "What's
her name?" "_Haidee._" "You deserted from her?" "Yes, but she's left
port." The "Deputy Shipping" runs rapidly through a shipping-list,
throws it down with a bang. "'Twon't do. No German barque _Haidee_ here
for three months. How do I know you don't belong to the _Jackson's_
crew? Cap'en, I'm afraid you'll have to ship another man. He must stand
over. Take the rest away and make 'em sign."
The bead-eyed Bassompra seems to have lost his chance of a voyage, and
his case will be inquired into. The captain departs with his men and
they sign articles for the voyage, while the "Deputy Shipping" tells
strange tales of the sailorman's life. "They'll quit a good ship for the
sake of a spree, and catch on again at three pound ten, and by Jove,
they'll let their skippers pay 'em at ten rupees to the sovereign--poor
beggars. As soon as the money's gone they'll ship, but not before. Every
one under rank of captain engages here. The competition makes
first-mates ship sometimes for five pounds or as low as four ten a
month." (The gentleman in the boarding-house was right, you see.) "A
first mate's wages are seven ten or eight, and foreign captains ship for
twelve pounds a month and bring their own small stores--everything, that
is to say, except beef, peas, flour, coffee, and molasses."
These things are not pleasant to listen to while the hungry-eyed men in
the bad clothes lounge and scratch and loaf behind the railing. What
comes to them in the end? They die, it seems, though that is not
altogether strange. They die at sea in strange and horrible ways; they
die, a few of them, in the Kintals, being lost and suffocated in the
great sink of Calcutta; they die, in strange places by the water-side,
and the Hugli takes them away under the mooring chains and the buoys,
and casts them up on the sands below, if the River Police have missed
the capture. They sail the sea because they must live; and there is no
end to their toil. Very, very few find haven of any kind, and the earth,
whose ways they do not understand, is cruel to them, when they walk upon
it to drink and be merry after the manner of beasts. Jack ashore is a
pretty thing when he is in a book or in the blue jacket of the Navy.
Mercantile Jack is not so lovely. Later on, we will see where his
"sprees" lead him.