_This tale is founded on something that happened a good many years ago
in the Port of Calcutta, before wireless telegraphy was used on ships,
and men and boys were less easy to catch when once they were in a ship.
It is not meant to show that anybody who thinks he would like to become
eminent in his business can do so at a moment’s notice; but it proves
the old saying that if you want anything badly enough and are willing to
pay the price for it, you generally get it. If you don’t get what you
want it is a sign either that you did not seriously want it, or that you
tried to bargain over the price._
Almost any pilot will tell you that his work is much more difficult than
you imagine; but the Pilots of the Hugli know that they have one hundred
miles of the most dangerous river on earth running through their
hands—the Hugli between Calcutta and the Bay of Bengal—and they say
nothing. Their service is picked and sifted as carefully as the bench of
the Supreme Court, for a judge can only hang the wrong man, or pass a
bad law; but a careless pilot can lose a ten-thousand-ton ship with crew
and cargo in less time than it takes to reverse her engines.
There is very little chance of anything getting off again when once she
touches in the furious Hugli current, loaded with all the fat silt of
the fields of Bengal, where the soundings change two feet between tides,
and new channels make and unmake themselves in one rainy season. Men
have fought the Hugli for two hundred years, till now the river owns a
huge building, with drawing, survey, and telegraph departments, devoted
to its private service, as well as a body of wardens, who are called the
Port Commissioners.
They and their officers govern everything that floats from the Hugli
Bridge to the last buoy at Pilots Ridge, one hundred and forty miles
away, far out in the Bay of Bengal, where the steamers first pick up the
pilots from the pilot brig.
A Hugli pilot does not kindly bring papers aboard for the passengers, or
scramble up the ship’s side by wet, swaying rope-ladders. He arrives in
his best clothes, with a native servant or an assistant pilot to wait on
him, and he behaves as a man should who can earn two or three thousand
pounds a year after twenty years’ apprenticeship. He has beautiful rooms
in the Port Office at Calcutta, and generally keeps himself to the
society of his own profession, for though the telegraph reports the more
important soundings of the river daily, there is much to be learned from
brother pilots between each trip.
Some million tons of shipping must find their way to and from Calcutta
each twelvemonth, and unless the Hugli were watched as closely as his
keeper watches an elephant, there is a fear that it might silt up, as it
has silted up round the old Dutch and Portuguese ports twenty and thirty
miles behind Calcutta.
So the Port Office sounds and scours and dredges the river, and builds
spurs and devices for coaxing currents, and labels all the buoys with
their proper letters, and attends to the semaphores and the lights and
the drum, ball and cone storm signals; and the pilots of the Hugli do
the rest; but, in spite of all care and the very best attention, the
Hugli swallows her ship or two every year. Even the coming of wireless
telegraphy does not spoil her appetite.
When Martin Trevor had waited on the river from his boyhood; when he had
risen to be a Senior Pilot, entitled to bring up to Calcutta the very
biggest ships; when he had thought and talked of nothing but Hugli
pilotage all his life to nobody except Hugli pilots, he was exceedingly
surprised and indignant that his only son should decide to follow his
father’s profession. Mrs. Trevor had died when the boy was a child, and
as he grew older, Trevor, in the intervals of his business, noticed that
the lad was very often by the river-side—no place, he said, for a nice
boy. But, as he was not often at home, and as the aunt who looked after
Jim naturally could not follow him to his chosen haunts, and as Jim had
not the faintest intention of giving up old friends there, nothing but
ineffectual growls came of the remark. Later, when Trevor once asked him
if he could make anything out of the shipping on the water, Jim replied
by reeling off the list of all the house-flags in sight at the moorings,
together with supplementary information about their tonnage and
captains.
“You’ll come to a bad end, Jim,” said Trevor. “Boys of your age haven’t
any business to waste their time on these things.”
“Oh, Pedro at the Sailors’ Home says you can’t begin too early.”
“At what, please?”
“Piloting. I’m nearly fourteen now, and—and I know where most of the
shipping in the river is, and I know what there was yesterday over the
Mayapur Bar, and I’ve been down to Diamond Harbour—oh, a hundred times
already, and I’ve——”
“You’ll go to school, son, and learn what they teach you, and you’ll
turn out something better than a pilot,” said his father, who wanted Jim
to enter the Subordinate Civil Service, but he might just as well have
told a shovel-nosed porpoise of the river to come ashore and begin life
as a hen. Jim held his tongue; he noticed that all the best pilots in
the Port Office did that; and devoted his young attention and all his
spare time to the river he loved. He had seen the nice young gentlemen
in the Subordinate Civil Service, and he called them a rude native name
for “clerks.”
He became as well known as the Bankshall itself; and the Port Police let
him inspect their launches, and the tug-boat captains had always a place
for him at their tables, and the mates of the big steam dredgers used to
show him how the machinery worked, and there were certain native
row-boats which Jim practically owned; and he extended his patronage to
the railway that runs to Diamond Harbour, forty miles down the river. In
the old days nearly all the East India Company’s ships used to discharge
at Diamond Harbour, on account of the shoals above, but now ships go
straight up to Calcutta, and they have only some moorings for vessels in
distress there, and a telegraph service, and a harbour-master, who was
one of Jim’s most intimate friends.
He would sit in the Office listening to the soundings of the shoals as
they were reported every day, and attending to the movements of the
steamers up and down (Jim always felt he had lost something
irretrievable if a boat got in or out of the river without his knowing
of it), and when the big liners with their rows of blazing portholes
tied up in Diamond Harbour for the night, Jim would row from one ship to
the other through the sticky hot air and the buzzing mosquitoes and
listen respectfully as the pilots conferred together about the habits of
steamers.
Once, for a treat, his father took him down clear out to the Sandheads
and the pilot brig there, and Jim was happily sea-sick as she tossed and
pitched in the Bay. The cream of life, though, was coming up in a tug or
a police boat from Diamond Harbour to Calcutta, over the “James and
Mary,” those terrible sands christened after a royal ship that they sunk
two hundred years before. They are made by two rivers that enter the
Hugli six miles apart and throw their own silt across the silt of the
main stream, so that with each turn of weather and tide the sands shift
and change under water like clouds in the sky. It was here (the tales
sound much worse when they are told in the rush and growl of the muddy
waters) that the _Countess of Stirling_, fifteen hundred tons, touched
and capsized in ten minutes, and a two-thousand-ton steamer in two, and
a pilgrim ship in five, and another steamer literally in one instant,
holding down her men with the masts and shrouds as she lashed over. When
a ship touches on the “James and Mary,” the river knocks her down and
buries her, and the sands quiver all around her and reach out under
water and take new shapes over the corpse.
Young Jim would lie up in the bows of the tug and watch the straining
buoys kick and choke in the coffee-coloured current, while the
semaphores and flags signalled from the bank how much water there was in
the channel, till he learned that men who deal with men can afford to be
careless, on the chance of their fellows being like them; but men who
deal with things dare not relax for an instant. “And that’s the very
reason,” old McEwan said to him once, “that the ‘James and Mary’ is the
safest part of the river,” and he shoved the big black _Bandoorah_, that
draws twenty-five feet, through the Eastern Gat, with a turban of white
foam wrapped round her forefoot and her screw beating as steadily as his
own heart.
If Jim could not get away to the river there was always the big, cool
Port Office, where the soundings were worked out and the maps drawn; or
the Pilots’ room, where he could lie in a long chair and listen quietly
to the talk about the Hugli; and there was the library, where if you had
money you could buy charts and books of directions against the time that
you would actually have to steam over the places themselves. It was
exceedingly hard for Jim to hold the list of Jewish Kings in his head,
and he was more than uncertain as to the end of the verb _audio_ if you
followed it far enough down the page, but he could keep the soundings of
three channels distinct in his head, and, what is more confusing, the
changes in the buoys from “Garden Reach” down to Saugor, as well as the
greater part of the _Calcutta Telegraph_, the only paper he ever read.
Unluckily, you cannot peruse about the Hugli without money, even though
you are the son of the best-known pilot on the river, and as soon as
Trevor understood how his son was spending his time, he cut down his
pocket money, of which Jim had a very generous allowance. In his
extremity he took counsel with Pedro, the plum-coloured mulatto at the
Sailors’ Home, and Pedro was a bad, designing man. He introduced Jim to
a Chinaman in Muchuatollah, an unpleasing place in itself, and the
Chinaman, who answered to the name of Erh-Tze, when he was not smoking
opium, talked business in pigeon-English to Jim for an hour. Every bit
of that business from first to last was flying in the face of every law
on the river, but it interested Jim.
“S’pose you takee. Can do?” Erh-Tze said at last.
Jim considered his chances. A junk, he knew, would draw about eleven
feet and the regular fee for a qualified pilot, outward to the
Sandheads, would be two hundred rupees. On the one hand he was not
qualified, so he dared not ask more than half. _But_, on the other hand,
he was fully certain of the thrashing of his life from his father for
piloting without license, let alone what the Port Authorities might do
to him. So he asked one hundred and seventy-five rupees, and Erh-Tze
beat him down to a hundred and twenty. The cargo of his junk was worth
anything from seventy to a hundred and fifty thousand rupees, some of
which he was getting as enormous freight on the coffins of thirty or
forty dead Chinamen, whom he was taking to be buried in their native
country.
Rich Chinamen will pay fancy prices for this service, and they have a
superstition that the iron of steamships is bad for the spiritual health
of their dead. Erh-Tze’s junk had crept up from Singapore, _via_ Penang
and Rangoon, to Calcutta, where Erh-Tze had been staggered by the Pilot
dues. This time he was going out at a reduction with Jim, who, as Pedro
kept telling him, was just as good as a pilot, and a heap cheaper.
Jim knew something of the manners of junks, but he was not prepared,
when he went down that night with his charts, for the confusion of cargo
and coolies and coffins and clay-cooking places, and other things that
littered her decks. He had sense enough to haul the rudder up a few
feet, for he knew that a junk’s rudder goes far below the bottom, and he
allowed a foot extra to Erh-Tze’s estimate of the junk’s depth. Then
they staggered out into midstream very early, and never had the city of
his birth looked so beautiful as when he feared he would not come back
to see it. Going down “Garden Reach” he discovered that the junk would
answer to her helm if you put it over far enough, and that she had a
fair, though Chinese, notion of sailing. He took charge of the tiller by
stationing three Chinese on each side of it, and standing a little
forward, gathered their pigtails into his hands, three right and three
left, as though they had been the yoke lines of a row-boat. Erh-Tze
almost smiled at this; he felt he was getting good care for his money
and took a neat little polished bamboo to keep the men attentive, for he
said this was no time to teach the crew pigeon-English. The more way
they could get on the junk the better would she steer, and as soon as he
felt a little confidence in her, Jim ordered the stiff, rustling sails
to be hauled up tighter and tighter. He did not know their names—at
least any name that would be likely to interest a Chinaman—but Erh-Tze
had not banged about the waters of the Malay Archipelago all his life
for nothing. He rolled forward with his bamboo, and the things rose like
Eastern incantations.
Early as they were on the river, a big American oil (but they called it
kerosene in those days) ship was ahead of them in tow, and when Jim saw
her through the lifted mist he was thankful. She would draw all of
seventeen feet, and if he could steer by her they would be safe. It is
easier to scurry up and down the “James and Mary” in a police boat that
someone else is handling than to cram a hard-mouthed old junk across the
same sands alone, with the certainty of a thrashing if you come out
alive.
Jim glued his eyes to the American, and saw that at Fultah she dropped
her tug and stood down the river under sail. He all but whooped aloud,
for he knew that the number of pilots who preferred to work a ship
through the “James and Mary” was strictly limited. “If it isn’t Father,
it’s Dearsley,” said Jim, “and Dearsley went down yesterday with the
_Bancoora_, so it’s Father. If I’d gone home last night instead of going
to Pedro, I’d have met him. He must have got his ship quick, but—Father
_is_ a very quick man.” Then Jim reflected that they kept a piece of
knotted rope on the pilot brig that stung like a wasp; but this thought
he dismissed as beneath the dignity of an officiating pilot, who needed
only to nod his head to set Erh-Tze’s bamboo to work.
As the American came round, just before the Fultah Sands, Jim raked her
with his spy-glass, and saw his father on the poop, an unlighted cigar
between his teeth. That cigar, Jim knew, would be smoked on the other
side of the “James and Mary,” and Jim felt so entirely safe and happy
that he lit a cigar on his own account. This kind of piloting was
child’s play. His father could not make a mistake if he tried; and Jim,
with his six obedient pigtails in his two hands, had leisure to admire
the perfect style in which the American was handled—how she would point
her bowsprit jeeringly at a hidden bank, as much as to say, “Not to-day,
thank you, dear,” and bow down lovingly to a buoy as much as to say,
“_You_’re a gentleman, at any rate,” and come round sharp on her heel
with a flutter and a rustle, and a slow, steady swing something like a
well-dressed woman staring all round the theatre through opera-glasses.
It was hard work to keep the junk near her, though Erh-Tze set
everything that was by any means settable, and used his bamboo most
generously. When they were nearly under her counter, and a little to her
left, Jim, hidden behind a sail, would feel warm and happy all over,
thinking of the thousand nautical and piloting things that he knew. When
they fell more than half a mile behind, he was cold and miserable
thinking of all the million things he did not know or was not quite sure
of. And so they went down, Jim steering by his father, turn for turn,
over the Mayapur Bar, with the semaphores on each bank duly signalling
the depth of water, through the Western Gat, and round Makoaputti Lumps,
and in and out of twenty places, each more exciting than the last, and
Jim nearly pulled the six pigtails out for pure joy when the last of the
“James and Mary” had gone astern, and they were walking through Diamond
Harbour.
From there to the mouth of the Hugli things are not so bad—at least,
that was what Jim thought, and held on till the swell from the Bay of
Bengal made the old junk heave and snort, and the river broadened into
the inland sea, with islands only a foot or two high scattered about it.
The American walked away from the junk as soon as they were beyond
Kedgeree, and the night came on and the river looked very big and
desolate, so Jim promptly anchored somewhere in grey water, with the
Saugor Light away off toward the east. He had a great respect for the
Hugli to the last yard of her, and had no desire whatever to find
himself on the Gasper Sand or any other little shoal. Erh-Tze and the
crew highly approved of this piece of seamanship. They set no watch, lit
no lights, and at once went to sleep.
Jim lay down between a red-and-black lacquer coffin and a little live
pig in a basket. As soon as it was light he began studying his chart of
the Hugli mouth, and trying to find out where in the river he might be.
He decided to be on the safe side and wait for another sailing-ship and
follow her out. So he made an enormous breakfast of rice and boiled
fish, while Erh-Tze lit firecrackers and burned gilt paper to the Joss
who had saved them so far. Then they heaved up their rough-and-tumble
anchor, and made after a big, fat, iron four-masted sailing-ship, heavy
as a hay-wain.
The junk, which was really a very weatherly boat, and might have begun
life as a private pirate in Annam forty years before, followed under
easy sail; for the four-master would run no risks. She was in old
McEwan’s hands, and she waddled about like a broody hen, giving each
shoal wide allowances. All this happened near the outer Floating Light,
some hundred and twenty miles from Calcutta, and apparently in the open
sea.
Jim knew old McEwan’s appetite, and often heard him pride himself on
getting his ship to the pilot brig close upon meal hours, so he argued
that if the pilot brig was get-at-able (and Jim himself had not the
ghost of a notion where she would lie), McEwan would find her before one
o’clock.
It was a blazing hot day, and McEwan fidgeted the four-master down to
“Pilots Ridge” with what little wind remained, and sure enough there lay
the pilot brig, and Jim felt shivers up his back as Erh-Tze paid him his
hundred and twenty rupees and he went over-side in the junk’s one crazy
dinghy. McEwan was leaving the four-master in a long, slashing
whale-boat that looked very spruce and pretty, and Jim could see that
there was a certain amount of excitement among the pilots on the brig.
There was his father too. The ragged Chinese boatmen gave way in a most
ragged fashion, and Jim felt very unwashen and disreputable when he
heard the click of McEwan’s oars alongside, and McEwan saying, “James
Trevor, I’ll trouble you to lay alongside me.”
Jim obeyed, and from the corner of one eye watched McEwan’s angry
whiskers stand up all round his face, which turned purple.
“An’ how is it you break the regulations o’ the Porrt o’ Calcutta? Are
ye aware o’ the penalties and impreesonments ye’ve laid yourself open
to?” McEwan began.
Jim said nothing. There was not very much to say just then; and McEwan
roared aloud: “Man, ye’ve perrsonated a Hugli pilot, an’ that’s as much
as to say ye’ve perrsonated _ME_! What did yon heathen give ye for
honorarium?”
“’Hundred and twenty,” said Jim.
“’An’ by what manner o’ means did ye get through the ‘James and Mary’?”
“Father,” was the answer. “He went down the same tide and I—we—steered
by him.”
McEwan whistled and choked, perhaps it was with anger. “Ye’ve made a
stalkin’-horse o’ your father, then? Jim, laddie, he’ll make an example
o’ you.”
The boat hooked on to the brig’s chains, and McEwan said, as he set foot
on deck before Jim could speak, “Yon’s an enterprising cub o’ yours,
Trevor. Ye’d better enter him in the regular business, or one o’ these
fine days he’ll be acting as pilot before he’s qualified, and sinkin’
junks in the Fairway. He fetched yon junk down last night. If ye’ve no
other designs I’m thinkin’ I’ll take him as my cub, for there’s no
denying he’s a resourceful lad—for all he’s an unlicked whelp.”
“That,” said Trevor, reaching for Jim’s left ear, “is something we can
remedy,” and he led him below.
The little knotted rope that they keep for general purposes on the pilot
brig did its duty, but when it was all over Jim was unlicked no longer.
He was McEwan’s property to be registered under the laws of the Port of
Calcutta, and a week later, when the _Ellora_ came along, he bundled
over the pilot brig’s side with McEwan’s enamelled leather hand-bag and
a roll of charts and a little bag of his own, and he dropped into the
sternsheets of the pilot gig with a very creditable imitation of
McEwan’s slow, swaying sit-down and hump of the shoulders.