DOWN RIVER.
On the morning of November 21, 1837, the schooner _Mowbray_ lay at
anchor abreast of Greenwich. In the fresh westerly wind you found the
sun-white sparkle of winter. Buildings, ships, wharves, the further
bends of the Reach, stood out with the sharpness and delicacy of ivory
work. The movements of the drapery of bunting, the swelling and
breathing of passing canvas, were beautiful to see under the hard, blue
sky, with its frost-work of gleaming cloud high over Plaistow Level.
The schooner looked exceedingly handsome as she floated at her cable,
with the ripples of the blown stream twisting in slender lines of light
from the cut-water. These lines flashed in her glossy sides as they
trembled past, and her coppered hull was beautified by other lustres
than the light of day, as she sat motionless, courting the eye to the
tall heights of the delicate mastheads, each of them star-crowned with a
shining gilt truck.
She was handsomer than a yacht, because she lacked the summer precision
and fine-weather finish of that sort of craft. The nautical eye does not
love fine feathers. The _Mowbray_ was a sea-going boat. She had beam for
stability, a height of side which promised a dry ship, a spring of bow
smack-like with its promise of domination. Her copper shone; she was
sheathed to the bends; she carried little or no finery about her decks,
but the scantling of everything--the companion, the skylights, the
sailors' deck-house, nay, even the caboose forward--might have been that
of a ten-gun brig.
The hour was about half-past eleven. A number of seamen, apparelled with
some regard to uniformity of attire, lounged in the bows, staring
Greenwich way, or at the familiar scene of docks the other side of the
river. They looked a rough company of the genuine merchant-sailor
type--raggedly hairy, defiant in stare, in fold of arm, resolved in
their several postures. They wore round hats and jackets, and the
bell-ended, blue-cloth trousers of the Jacks of that day.
On the quarter-deck walked Captain Glew and the mate who had signed
articles for the run, Mr. Tweed. This was a short, hearty, plump man.
His grog-blossomed, jovial face suggested a suppressed boisterousness of
spirits; you felt that in him lay the voice for the back-parlour of the
Free and Easy. The owner of the vessel and party were expected on board
shortly, and Tweed had clothed himself with care, in a short, round
jacket, with a corner of red silk handkerchief carelessly straying from
one side-pocket. His trousers rippled as he walked, and the rest of him
consisted of a check shirt and pumps.
'I think he ought to be pleased,' said Captain Glew, coming to a stand
at the binnacle, and throwing a look over the little ship and then up
aloft; 'nothing handsomer sails out of the Thames this year.'
'She is sweet enough for a pennon,' said Tweed. 'I wish she was mine.
I'd like to go a-pirating in a vessel of this sort. No, I wouldn't,
either; I'd go a-slaving. A hundred and eighty tons. I reckon you could
stow away six hundred blacks in her 'tween decks.'
'I sometimes wish I'd been born a hundred years sooner,' said Captain
Glew. 'I would have been a pirate; the ocean was thick with booty, and
you got an estate with very little risk. The dogs came to the gibbet
because they never would be satisfied.'
'Piracy gave a sailor a good chance,' said the mate, with a groggy look
at the hands lounging forward.
'Here am I grateful for this £30 job,' growled the captain. 'The wife
and young uns may now eat and drink for three months, and for three
months the thought of to-morrow morning shan't keep me awake. Holy
Jemmy! But it's on the quarter-deck where the hearts of stone are
wanted. To those fellows forward the getting a ship's as easy as an
oath. Do you or I get ships as easily as we swear?'
'No, not by all that I'm worth!' answered Tweed. 'Captain, I have
followed the sea for twenty years, and I'll tell you how it stands with
me now: in my cabin you'll find a sea-chest; it's painted green--green
it should be; it's the colour of my life. In that sea-chest is all that
I own in the world, saving a matter of a few pounds stowed away ashore.
Twenty years of the sea, and nothing but a bloomed green sea-chest to
show for it!' exclaimed Tweed, with so much blood in his face that his
grog-blossoms made him look as if he had burst into a dangerous rash.
Thus these worthies discoursed, as they walked the quarter-deck,
awaiting the arrival of Mr. Vanderholt and party. They had been
shipmates in prior times, were in some fashion connected, had frequently
of late met ashore, and had grown intimate during the time occupied by
the refitting of the _Mowbray_. We are not to confound the discipline of
this little schooner with that of a great Indiaman. Men who had
commanded fruiters were not commonly distant to their mates when they
afterwards handled small vessels.
Forward the seamen growled in talk indistinguishable to the
quarter-deck walkers.
'What sort of boss is th' ole man going to turn out?' exclaimed one of
the seamen, staring aft. 'I don't like his looks. But when once I've
signed a vessel's articles I'm for outweathering the skipper, if he was
the devil himself. He'll get no change out of Joseph Dabb, and it's
extraordinary, bullies, that Joseph Dabb should be my name.'
'If there's no eddication in the fok'sle of this vessel, fired if there
oughtn't to be enough aft to enable all hands to spell the word "lush,"'
said a dark, heavy-browed man, gazing with a deep and surly smile at the
plump figure of Tweed, as he walked, rolling about like a butterbox in a
seaway, alongside the captain. 'I never see a face in all my time more
beautifully decorated. How many pints go to one of them blossoms? We
shall be hearing of him singing "We're all a-noddin'" in some middle
watch, when there's onusual need for a bright look-out.'
'I was spliced three weeks ago,' exclaimed a red-headed seaman. 'I'm
a-missing of Sally, my joys. I feel gallus like going home again.'
He eyed the land about the West India Docks, and extended his arms,
amidst a rumble of laughter and much spitting of yellow froth over the
bows.
'I don't expect to see my old 'oman again,' exclaimed a seaman, standing
upright with his arms folded. 'If she don't die, she'll make tracks,
and, foreseeing of that, I sold off my household furniture yesterday.'
'Ain't ye left her nothing to sit upon?' said the red-headed seaman.
'Yes; a carpenter's knee. D'ye think I'm to be hubbled?' he cried,
letting fall his arms, and turning fiercely upon the red-headed man. 'I
wondered to find her at home last voyage. She'd have found me a true
man. Bruised if I like ship's carpenters, anyhow. I never yet knew a
ship's carpenter yer could trust as a man.'
'Stow that!' exclaimed a seaman, leaning over the rail, and merely
turning his head to speak.
'_You're_ no ship's carpenter,' was the answer. 'This ain't no ship.
Present company's always excepted, too, in polite society;' and he
began to step the deck with temper.
'Where's this vessel bound to?' said another man.
'I signed for a cruise,' answered someone.
'Something was said about the Equator,' exclaimed another.
'The Equator's no coast,' said the red-headed man.
'The covey that owns this here craft,' exclaimed the carpenter, who was
also the boatswain, 'is a Dutchman. He ain't a Dutchman only--he's a
feenansure. Now, I've heard tell that when a Dutchman makes more money
than his mind's capable of weighing the idea of, his intellects go
wrong. Did ye ever hear of the prices they paid for toolips? I'm the son
of a sweep, lads, if some of 'em didn't pay as much as a £100 in good
money for a durned stalk not worth a cabbage! They was all rich men as
bought them bulbs, and they was all mad; and you lay your last
farden's-worth of silver spoons if this here scheme of a voyage to the
Equator ain't the caper of a blooming Dutchman who's made so much money
that his brains have given under the weight of the idea of his fortune!'
Just then a large white boat was seen to be approaching the _Mowbray_
from the direction of Greenwich, and in a few minutes she was
alongside--a boat full of ladies and gentlemen; and Captain Glew stood
at the open gangway, cap in hand. The party consisted of Mr. and Miss
Vanderholt and a few friends who had accompanied them to Greenwich to
see them off. Vanderholt shook hands with his captain, nodded to the
mate, and cast a look of approval in the direction of the forecastle. He
seemed in high spirits. His eyes smiled deep in their little sockets,
and the fresh and friendly wind blew his beard into twenty expressions
of kindly laughter. He was rigged out for the sea. No Minories slop-shop
could have furnished him with a salter aspect. The seamen on the
forecastle eyed him, and murmured one to another. They seemed to
recognise their own vocation in the man, yet viewed him doubtfully, as
dogs watch with suspicion the dog in Punch and Judy.
His daughter was handsomely draped in velvet and fur, and wore a
turban-shaped hat that was as good for the deck as for her looks. In a
minute there was a little crowd of well-dressed gentlemen and ladies
standing on the quarter-deck, gazing around them and aloft, with Mr.
Vanderholt laughing with the wind in his beard, and Miss Vi gazing
somewhat pensively at the full scene of the schooner.
It was the right sort of morning for a start for the ocean. The brisk
breeze covered the surface of the river with sliding shapes, coming and
going. A large Indiaman, newly arrived, with the rust of four months of
brine draining down her chain-plate bolts, her sheathing green as grass,
with a quivering of weeds here and there, lay off the Docks opposite.
Her house-flag blew stately from the lofty masthead; stately and proud,
too, she floated, tall and square. She seemed alive, and conscious of
victory. The lights of her cabin windows shook through the ripples in
long darts of silver. A chorus of thirty stormy throats swept down the
wind, and there came out of that inspiriting windlass-song of sailors
who had brought their lofty ship home the whole spirit of the ocean
into this living, brimming picture of river.
Mr. Vanderholt's friends walked about the decks of the _Mowbray_,
praising the schooner highly.
'He goes alone with his daughter,' said one gentleman to another, 'and
touches nowhere. I do not envy her.'
'Don't you remember,' said the other, 'what the German said? "I don't
see der use of being seek onless you makes your friends seek mit you."'
They both laughed.
Mr. Vanderholt led the whole party into the cabin, where they found the
table clothed for a cold lunch. A steward stood in a corner, waiting for
the hour to strike when he should summon the company by a bell. Some
baskets of champagne were beside him. It was a roomy cabin, with plenty
of accommodation for eight or nine people to sit at table; brightly
lighted, handsomely upholstered, painted and gilded as charmingly as a
drawing-room. Some little berths aft had been knocked into two, and
Violet was very well pleased with the size and comfort of her sea
bedroom. She would swing in a cot; the furniture provided her with many
more conveniences than she would get ashore in a friend's house.
Mr. Vanderholt's cabin was plainly equipped. He was going to sea as a
sailor; he was bent upon reviving old memories; and his guests laughed
when he pointed to a sea-chest, which he said contained nearly the whole
of his kit, which chest had also been the one he had used in the last
voyage he made as a sailor.
'Do you see those ragged marks?' said he, stooping to run his finger
along the edge of the chest, whilst he looked up into the face of a
fashionably-dressed lady. 'They were caused by my cutting up plug
tobacco. I would not have them filled in. On this chest I have sat and
blown strong Cavendish tobacco-smoke into an atmosphere composed almost
entirely of carbonic acid gas; I have watched the blue ring burning
round the flame of the lamp, and smoked on.'
'Would you be a sailor again?' asked the fashionably-dressed lady.
'Not for a million on _these_ terms,' answered Mr. Vanderholt, bringing
his fist down, in a sudden passion of recollection, upon the lid of his
chest.
Presently the little bell rang, and they seated themselves. The
champagne fizzed, knives and forks rattled on plates, the one steward
ran about. Mr. Vanderholt was in high spirits; he drank to his daughter
amongst others; no more cordial or hospitable gentleman ever sat at the
head of a cabin table.
'The hardest part of a sailor's life,' said a pretty young woman, with
black eyes, and a handsome white feather coiled round a large hat, 'must
be saying good-bye to the girls, as I think they call them,' exposing a
row of milk-white teeth. 'They are absent for months and years; how can
you expect constancy?'
'Ha!' exclaimed Mr. Vanderholt. 'But a man may be faithful, even though
he should be as much cut off from his girl as if he was buried. Don't
you remember what your Richard Steele says? I quote from memory: "The
poor fellow who lost his arm last siege will tell you that he feels the
fingers that are buried in Flanders ache every cold morning at
Chelsea."'
'I do not see the application,' said one of the gentlemen.
'It is perfectly plain,' said Violet, flushing.
'Vanderholt,' exclaimed one of the guests, 'tell me what has become of
that old sailor who used to take a month in making a pair of clews for
the captain's cot, or a fancy pair of beckets for the mate's
camphor-wood chest.'
'He belonged to the days of leisure,' answered Mr. Vanderholt. 'It is
all for speed now, cracking on, carrying away, four months to Bombay,
when in my time six months was looked upon as a good voyage.'
Captain Glew, at the invitation of Mr. Vanderholt, sat at the foot of
the table.
'The lady,' said he, with an inclination of his head in the direction of
the person referred to, 'was speaking just now of constancy amongst
sailors. I remember some years ago being aboard a ship in a collision.
The other vessel received us, and it turned out that the first seaman
who sprang into the ship was the husband of the wife of the captain.'
'Lor', what a complication!' said somebody.
'The seaman who sprang was supposed to be dead?' said Mr. Vanderholt.
Captain Glew looked at him without smiling. His face, however, was not
wanting in a certain arch expression.
'Sailors undergo very many more perils than are written down, or than
the world wots of,' said a gentleman. 'I once met a travelling show.
Part of it was a man in a cage. Nothing in this or the under world could
be more frightful to see than that man. And what had happened to him? He
had slept on a bale of cloves, and the cloves, by drawing all the
moisture out of him, had left him a skeleton, with a heart beating under
a loose coat of parchment.'
'Poor thing!' said a lady. 'And are cloves so drying? Really! How could
the poor creature while away the time in a cage?'
'By showing the crowd how to make clove-hitches, I expect,' said
Vanderholt.
Captain Glew rose, and, bowing to the company, went to his cabin, which
was a cupboard forward annexed to the pantry. Opposite was the mate's.
He reappeared in a minute or two, said something to Mr. Vanderholt, and
passed on deck.
'I wonder you do not touch at Madeira,' said a gentleman.
'I touch at the Line only.'
'Oh, but Miss Vanderholt,' exclaimed the gentleman, 'if you have not
seen Madeira, you should compel your father to stop at the island,
'"Where the virgins are soft as the roses they twine,
And all, save the spirit of man, is divine."'
'I know nothing about the virgins of that island,' said a gentleman;
'but the men who visit your ship, and the men who salute you when you
get ashore, are poisonously hideous. They cling like toads to a bed of
glorious growths. The spirit of man is not divine at Madeira.'
'I touch nowhere,' said Mr. Vanderholt. 'When our forefoot cuts the zero
of the chart, we shift helm for the homeward run.'
He glanced at a clock in the skylight, made a movement, and
simultaneously all stood up, and, standing, they drank a final glass of
champagne to the safety of the voyage, to Vanderholt's health, to the
return of the charming Violet Vanderholt; then, conducted by the owner
of the schooner, the guests went on deck, and in a few minutes took
their leave.
There was much hand-shaking--all the usual assurances of friendship
agitated by leave-taking. Nevertheless, when the company were in their
boat, going ashore, one of the gentlemen exclaimed:
'I think Vanderholt must be a selfish old cuckoo to carry away his
daughter to the ocean, with no other company but his own grumbling self
and Captain Glew.'
'I would not be sailing to the Equator in that schooner for a thousand
pounds!' said a lady. 'I should have to be run away with to do such a
thing;' and she leered sweetly at a gentleman opposite her.
'They are flourishing their handkerchiefs to us,' cried someone.
All stood up in the boat to wave back.
'For Gord's sake, sit down, ladies and gents! You'll be capsizing of
us!' bawled the one-eyed bow oar.
On board the schooner they were getting under weigh. The name of the
boatswain--he was also the carpenter--who had shipped to act as second
mate whenever his services in this capacity should be required, was
Jones. No man blew the boatswain's silver pipe more sweetly. He had sent
his lark-like carol to the mastheads, and afar on either hand the
streaming river that pure music of the sea thrilled, whilst their guests
were making their way ashore.
The _Mowbray_ was a small ship, but her deep-water men dealt with her as
though she had been a thousand-ton Indiaman. The hearties, in their
round jackets, sprang, as an echo of the boatswain's roaring cry, to the
windlass handles, and in a moment a voice, broken by years of drink and
by hailing the deck from immense heights, broke into that most
melancholy chorus, 'Across the Plains of Mexico.'
The cherry-faced mate, Tweed, standing in the bows, soon reported the
cable up and down; then sail was made. The eager little ship herself
broke her anchor out of the London mud, and to the impulse of her
mounting standing jib, staysail, and gaff foresail, was, with a
clipper's restlessness of spirit in the whole length of her, swiftly
turning her head down-stream, whilst a few hands sang 'Old Stormy, he is
dead and gone' at the little windlass, lifting the anchor to the
cathead.
Before the length of Blackwall Reach had been measured, the schooner was
clothed, her seamen coiling down, some attending the sheets--everything
quiet and comfortable. The captain stood beside the tiller, conning the
little vessel. He was qualified as a pilot for the Thames, and boasted
that he could smell his way up and down in the dark--and truly perhaps
the nose, in some parts of this noble river, would be as good as the
lead, or a buoy, to tell a man where he was. Glew caught the eye of Mr.
Vanderholt, who, approaching him, said:
'I am very well pleased. You have chosen well. This is a good company of
seamen.'
Captain Glew touched his cap, and continued to watch the schooner. She
was square-rigged forward, carried topsail, top-gallant-sail, and royal;
but there was no good in humbugging with this sort of canvas in a
serpentine river that shifts your course for you every two miles by
three or four points.
Miss Vanderholt stood at the rail viewing the moving picture round
about, with a very pensive face. Her eyes often went to a large vessel
at anchor ahead. That full-rigged ship made her think of George. In much
such a ship, no doubt, George would return. When? In all probability
before her own arrival; and how maddening that would be! For, oddly
enough, though it was a long time since they had parted, Miss Violet
Vanderholt was quite as much in love with Captain George Parry as ever
she was on that day when she and her father saw him off in the East
India Docks, when she cried, and he hugged her, and when they had spent
half an hour up in a corner all alone in talk as impassioned as ever
passed between two lovers.
This must convince us that there was something Dutch and solid in the
girl's character, for she had had many opportunities to recollect
herself and transfer her affection. Though Vanderholt's wealth was not
of a size to lead to newspaper paragraphs and to editorial
exaggerations, it was, in a quiet way, known and talked about, and
people passing his house would look up and nod at it, and say:
'A rich old cock lives there.'
However, Miss Vi's meditations were presently to be interrupted by a
scene not very unfamiliar in the River Thames. The wind was west, and it
blew a fresh breeze. The ripples rushing to the whipping carried a
little edging of foam. Whatever was under canvas, unless it was a barge,
or something running in a mile or two of straight water, leaned in
shafts of light. You caught the glance of copper sheathing, the sunshine
showered in a rainbow glow upon flashes of brackish foam bursting
without the life of brine from shearing bows and gliding sides. The
smoke ashore blew away quickly, and the heavens remained a beautiful
blue, and the sky over the Plaistow Flats shone like the inside of an
oyster-shell with the prismatic hues of a setting of motionless,
finely-linked clouds.
Just as the _Mowbray_ passed down Bugsby's Reach, opening the long tract
of the Woolwich waters beyond, two collier brigs reaching up the river
swept into each other with crackling jibbooms. The schooner's road was
blocked; her helm was shifted swift as the swallow curves in flight, and
then followed a pause which enabled Miss Vanderholt to gain some little
insight into the ways of the deep, and the behaviour and speech of those
who go down to it for two or three pounds a month.
The two brigs came together with a crash that might have been heard at
London Bridge. They butted bow to bow, then, swinging to, locked
themselves helplessly broadside to broadside, and began to float
shorewards, with sails and heavy pieces of timber falling from aloft,
and men, two or three of them wearing tall hats, and shawls round their
throats, rushing about the decks in agonies of pantomime. It was a
saying that there was no better school than the North Country Geordie
for seamanship. Certainly there was no school in which a man learnt more
quickly to swear. The _Mowbray_ floated close past, and all could be
seen. Nothing is more helpless in this world than two ships thus yoked,
steering each other ashore, with an occasional drag, or jerk, or butt,
that brings a ton of top-hamper crashing about the ears of the profane
on deck.
'Let go your tawps'l brace, you blooming old fool! Don't you see it's
foul of my mainyard-arm?'
'What in flames are you keeping your jib hoisted for? You're paying her
right into me!'
'Jumped if we shan't both go ashore if yer don't starboard yer 'ellum.
Why don't you let go yer anchor, you rooting hogs?'
'Yes, and tear my smothered bows out because a crew of dairymen don't
know how to steer their ship!'
Then, in the midst of this--crash!--off short like a carrot would snap a
yard, or down, torn bodily out by its roots, would fall a gaff, amidst
yells of:
'You gutter-sots! You're all drunk this holy day! Suffocate yer, you
scabs! Let go yer taws'l halliards! Don't you see they're binding the
wessels together by my yard that's gone in the slings?'
But the _Mowbray_ was now on her course; the distance between her and
the embracing brigs was fast widening, and articulate oaths had faded
into a chorus of indistinguishable shouts. The vessels were doomed. They
both drifted ashore abreast of Woolwich, and next day a paper described
a fight that was bloody with knives between the two crews, and reported
the death of a foolhardy waterman who tried to make peace, clearly with
an eye to salvage.
'This,' said Mr. Vanderholt, as the _Mowbray_, rounding into Galleon's
Reach, put the brigs out of sight, 'is a sample of the poetry of the
sea, Vi. But very few poets have dealt with subjects of this sort. They
write of the splendours of the sunset and moon-rise at sea, and such
things. Yet, if I were a poet, I would rather choose a subject in those
two brigs in the Thames in a collision, going ashore, full of curses,
than in all the stars which shine upon the ocean.'
At five o'clock the _Mowbray_ let go her anchor off Gravesend.