HOW TOM WAS TATTOOED.
My companion was a short and thick-set sailor, about forty years of
age, and whose figure was suggestive of great muscular strength; his
hair was cut short, but his whiskers were of the most voluminous
description, as he was anxious to conceal as much as possible of the
strange circles, stripes, and grotesque designs with which his
sun-burned face was covered, and which by their form and blackness,
imparted a hideous aspect to features that otherwise were rather good
and pleasing.
He was an intelligent man, and well read, for the humble class to
which he belonged.
"Aye, Master Rodney," said he, on perceiving that I was still
surveying him with something of wonder (and his face was a point on
which he was particularly sensitive); "you see what a precious
figure-head those 'tarnal niggers on the coast of Africa made for me."
"How did this happen, Tom?" said I, filling his drinking-horn.
"About twenty years ago, Master Rodney, I belonged to the _Arrow_, a
smart Liverpool bark of two hundred and twenty tons register. I made
many voyages in her to South America, but at last, as bad luck, or my
destiny (as men say in the play) would have it, she was chartered for
the West Coast of Africa, to trade with the natives, but _not_ in
black cattle, for slavery was never our line of business.
"We sailed from the Mersey in June, and early in August found
ourselves at the mouth of the Congo river, after a prosperous voyage;
but on the night we made the land, a heavy gale came on, and it
veered round all the points of the compass in an hour. The sea and
sky were as black as they could be, and every thing else was black
too, except the breakers on the shore to leeward, and heaven knows
they were white enough,--too white and too near to be pleasant.
"Our skipper handled the _Arrow_ well, and she obeyed every touch of
the helm as a horse might do its bridle; she was sharply built, but
heavily sparred, and no other square-rigged craft upon the sea could
beat her on a wind.
"I think I see her yet, Master Rodney, for she was the first vessel I
shipped on board of, and hang me if I didn't love her as if she had
been my old mother's house, near Deptford docks.
"Her hull was long and low, and sat like a swan in the water, only
that she was not white, like a swan, but as black as paint could make
her. Aloft, the masts tapered away like fishing-rods, crossed by the
square yards, while stays, shrouds, halyards, and hamper, were always
taut, as if made of cast-iron; but for all this, she failed to
weather that gale off the Congo river. She missed stays and got
sternway, so you see, sir, it was soon all over with her after that."
"How--I do not understand?"
"Don't you know what sternway is? What do they teach folks ashore?
She was taken aback in the hurricane--the most dangerous thing that
can happen to any vessel--a sudden shift of wind threw her on her
broadside in the trough of the sea, and with her deck _toward_ the
storm, so her hatches were soon beaten in,--all the sooner that she
was driven on a coral reef near the Shark's Nose, where the sea was
like a sheet of foam around her.
"Five poor fellows were washed away and drowned; but when day broke,
and the storm abated a little, the captain, six men and I, got ashore
in the long boat just as the poor _Arrow_ began to break up, for we
could see the waves beating into her and rending asunder the decks,
the inner and outer sheathing, as if they couldn't scatter the cargo
fast enough far and wide.
"Well, there we were, shipwrecked in a wild place on the West Coast
of Africa, at a part of the Congo river where the mangrove trees grow
into the water, and have their lower branches covered with oysters
and barnacles.
"We could see high blue hills in the distance when the sun came up
from the cane swamps and the wild woods which bordered the river, and
we sat on the beach for a while looking ruefully at the wreck, of
which little now remained but a few timbers, till the increase of the
morning heat drove us for shelter into a grove of oil-palms, and
there, Master Rodney, we found tulips, lilies, and hyacinths growing
wild, and six times larger than any you ever saw in England.
"Some of our men proposed that we should repair the longboat--she was
partly stove in--and put to sea, or creep in her along the coast
until we were picked up. We were without carpenter's tools; but the
captain had a case of surgical instruments, and the first use we made
of the saw was to cut into halves an iron buoy which had floated
ashore from the wreck.
"Thus we had two kettles, in which we boiled some seabirds and their
eggs, and made a mess whereon we breakfasted. Exhausted by the late
storm, the birds were easily knocked down by stones as they sat with
drooping wings upon the rocks near the sea; but scarcely was our
miserable meal over, when we heard loud yells, and attracted by the
smoke of our fire, down came a whole gang of ugly darkies, all
Mussolongos wild and naked, with rings or fishbones in their long
ears and flat noses,--all streaked with war-paint and all shouting
like madmen as they brandished their muskets and spears.
"They fired a volley which stretched on the earth the poor captain
and all my shipmates dead or dying. The latter they soon despatched
with their knives and spears, and left them to be eaten by wild
animals; but on finding that I had escaped their bullets, they
supposed that their Fetish had protected me, and so for a time I was
safe.
"For a whole week I was forced to help these savages in the work of
taking all that remained of the wreck to pieces, though hundreds came
from the interior, and they wrought hard, some men using even their
filed teeth, to get all the iron and copper bolts, which they prized
more than the cargo, sails, or spars, as they could fashion them into
weapons and the heads of spears and arrows. But with every thing
they could lay their dingy hands upon, myself included, they made off
inland, just as a vessel, which proved to be a King's ship, came
round the Shark's Nose, and thus, with help, protection, and liberty
at hand, I was more than ever a prisoner.
"I was in very low spirits, you may be sure, fearing they only
intended to fatten me up, like a stall-fed ox, or a turtle in a tub,
before cooking and eating me, or making me a sacrifice to some idol
carved of wood; for many times I saw the whole 'tarnal tribe on their
knees before the figure head of the _Arrow_, which had been washed
ashore, and was pronounced to be a great Fetish.
"For three days we travelled among deep and slimy-green swamps, thick
wild woods, and immense pathless canebrakes, where in an hour I saw
more tree-leopards and zebras, howling jackals and antelopes,
grinning monkeys and chattering paroquets, than ever were seen in all
the shows at Greenwich fair, till we arrived at a kraal of a hundred
huts, for all the world like pigsties, surrounded by a high palisade
of bamboos, and situated in a forest of palms.
"I was now the slave of a chief, whose rigging was rather queer, for
it consisted only of a deep fringe, or kilt, of unplaited grass, a
necklace of lion's teeth and fish-bones, and a cap of leopard's skin,
on which towered a plume of feathers, above a row of human teeth and
sea-shells.
"Being rope-ended by an inch-and-half colt--aye, or keelhauled once a
day from the foreyardarm--were jokes when compared to all this
African nigger made me undergo, while working for him under a blazing
sun, in pestilent swamps, where the very air choked me, as if I had
been in a ship with a foul hold, for the slime in these canebrakes
was as thick as tar and black as old bilge-water.
"One day he was soothing his excitement by beating me with a heavy
bamboo, till my back and arms were covered with blood. Close by were
a whole gang of the tribe squatted under a palm-tree, smoking
hubble-bubbles made of nut shells, looking on and laughing at the
torture was undergoing; but in the midst of their sport we heard a
roar that made our hearts tremble, and all ready to scamper off.
"There was a mighty crashing and swaying of the wild canes in the
adjacent brake, and then a great square-headed and tawny-haired lion,
as large as a good-sized pony, and with a tuft like a swab at the end
of his switching tail, came plunging forward, with eyes flashing and
his red mouth open.
"Souse as a sheet anchor goes into the sea, he sprang upon my owner,
and in the time I take to turn this quid, Master Rodney, that
troublesome personage was borne off into the jungle a bruised mass of
bones and blood, dangling in his jaws.
"The whole thing passed like a flash of lightning!
"At first the niggers were about to pursue the lion, but upon
reflection they thought it less dangerous to fall upon me and kill me
outright, saying that my stupid cries had brought the wild animal
upon them. Then an old fellow, whose wool had become white with age,
who was coiled up in the root of a tree, where he generally berthed
himself, and who was considered a wise man, came forward and demanded
their attention. He had been a brave fellow in his time, for he wore
a row of human teeth at his neck, all strung on a lanyard, with a bit
of an old quart bottle which he had found upon the beach, and wore as
a 'great medicine,' or order of the Garter perhaps. He saved me by
saying, in their outlandish gibberish, that I was evidently under the
protection of the great Fetish, in honor of whom I should be made
like themselves, and handsomely tattooed.
"I might as well have hallooed to the wind in a tearing pampero or a
stiff reef-topsail breeze, Master Rodney, as have attempted to oppose
this piece of Congo kindness. In a minute I was hove down under the
nasty black paws of five-and-forty howling and jabbering niggers, all
smearing me with palm-oil out of calabashes and old gallipots, and
they persisted in rubbing it into me till all my skin was nearly
peeled off.
"Then the old Fetish-man who lived in the root of the tree, after
making three summersets and uttering six howls, ornamented all my
face, hands, and arms in this fashion, using a kind of knife, which
he dipped from time to time in some black stuff that he carried in a
cocoanut-shell. In ten minutes I was all over serpents and circles,
stripes, pothooks and hangers!
"It went to my heart to have my beauty spoiled, but I was far past
making any opposition, and so I have had to go through life in all
weathers, with a face like the clown's in a pantomime.
"They made me so like a nigger that they scarcely knew me from one of
themselves. This so favored my escape, that I soon found an
opportunity of giving the Mussolongos the slip in the night, and made
a shift, after many a break-heart adventure, to reach a British
settlement.
"I remember well when, from a wild forest, I saw before me a long
blue ridge. It was the Sierra Leona--or the Mountain of the Lioness,
as the niggers thereabout call it--the highest in North or South
Guinea. Glad was I, Master Rodney, to see the flag of Old England
waving on the fort and in the bay. There was a sloop of war at
anchor there, the _Active_; and when she fired the evening gun you
would have thought a whole fleet was saluting, there are so many
echoing caves and dens in the mountains and along the shore.
"I soon made my way home to England, but was more laughed at than
pitied for my queer figure-head, which frightened some folks, my old
mother especially, for she banged the door right in my face, and
called for the police when I went to her old bunk at Deptford.
"However, I got used to all that sort of thing; but as folks are so
ill-bred and uncharitable ashore, I have left Deptford forever, and
keep always afloat, to be out of harm's way. So that's the yarn of
how I became tattooed, Master Rodney."
"Finish the brandy-and-water, Tom," said I; "and now we shall make a
start for the brig--noon is past, and the atmosphere cooler than it
was."
"Your very good health. Next time we splice the main-brace ashore, I
hope it will be in Cuba," said Tom, finishing the contents of my
flask, and then becoming so jovial that he broke at once into an old
sea-song, the last two verses of which were somewhat to this purpose:
"I learned to splice, to reef, and clew,
To drink my grog with the best of the crew,
And tell a merry story;
And though I wasn't very big,
Aloft I'd climb; nor care a fig
To stand by my gun, or dance a jig,
And all for Britain's glory!
"When home I steered again, I found
My poor old mother run aground,
And doleful was her story;
She had been cheated by a lawyer elf,
Who married her for her old dad's pelf,
But spent it all, then hanged himself.
Hooray for Britain's glory."
Just as Tom concluded this remarkable ditty, with tones that made the
volcanic grotto echo to "glory," a voice that made us start,
exclaimed close by us--
"Bueno! Ha! ha! Los Inglesos borrachios!"
On hearing chis impertinent reflection on our sobriety, we both
looked up and saw--what the next chapter will tell you.