The sailing-ship, when I knew her in her days of perfection, was a
sensible creature. When I say her days of perfection, I mean perfection
of build, gear, seaworthy qualities and ease of handling, not the
perfection of speed. That quality has departed with the change of
building material. No iron ship of yesterday ever attained the marvels
of speed which the seamanship of men famous in their time had obtained
from their wooden, copper-sheeted predecessors. Everything had been done
to make the iron ship perfect, but no wit of man had managed to devise an
efficient coating composition to keep her bottom clean with the smooth
cleanness of yellow metal sheeting. After a spell of a few weeks at sea,
an iron ship begins to lag as if she had grown tired too soon. It is
only her bottom that is getting foul. A very little affects the speed of
an iron ship which is not driven on by a merciless propeller. Often it
is impossible to tell what inconsiderate trifle puts her off her stride.
A certain mysteriousness hangs around the quality of speed as it was
displayed by the old sailing-ships commanded by a competent seaman. In
those days the speed depended upon the seaman; therefore, apart from the
laws, rules, and regulations for the good preservation of his cargo, he
was careful of his loading,—or what is technically called the trim of his
ship. Some ships sailed fast on an even keel, others had to be trimmed
quite one foot by the stern, and I have heard of a ship that gave her
best speed on a wind when so loaded as to float a couple of inches by the
head.
I call to mind a winter landscape in Amsterdam—a flat foreground of waste
land, with here and there stacks of timber, like the huts of a camp of
some very miserable tribe; the long stretch of the Handelskade; cold,
stone-faced quays, with the snow-sprinkled ground and the hard, frozen
water of the canal, in which were set ships one behind another with their
frosty mooring-ropes hanging slack and their decks idle and deserted,
because, as the master stevedore (a gentle, pale person, with a few
golden hairs on his chin and a reddened nose) informed me, their cargoes
were frozen-in up-country on barges and schuyts. In the distance, beyond
the waste ground, and running parallel with the line of ships, a line of
brown, warm-toned houses seemed bowed under snow-laden roofs. From afar
at the end of Tsar Peter Straat, issued in the frosty air the tinkle of
bells of the horse tramcars, appearing and disappearing in the opening
between the buildings, like little toy carriages harnessed with toy
horses and played with by people that appeared no bigger than children.
I was, as the French say, biting my fists with impatience for that cargo
frozen up-country; with rage at that canal set fast, at the wintry and
deserted aspect of all those ships that seemed to decay in grim
depression for want of the open water. I was chief mate, and very much
alone. Directly I had joined I received from my owners instructions to
send all the ship’s apprentices away on leave together, because in such
weather there was nothing for anybody to do, unless to keep up a fire in
the cabin stove. That was attended to by a snuffy and mop-headed,
inconceivably dirty, and weirdly toothless Dutch ship-keeper, who could
hardly speak three words of English, but who must have had some
considerable knowledge of the language, since he managed invariably to
interpret in the contrary sense everything that was said to him.
Notwithstanding the little iron stove, the ink froze on the swing-table
in the cabin, and I found it more convenient to go ashore stumbling over
the arctic waste-land and shivering in glazed tramcars in order to write
my evening letter to my owners in a gorgeous café in the centre of the
town. It was an immense place, lofty and gilt, upholstered in red plush,
full of electric lights and so thoroughly warmed that even the marble
tables felt tepid to the touch. The waiter who brought me my cup of
coffee bore, by comparison with my utter isolation, the dear aspect of an
intimate friend. There, alone in a noisy crowd, I would write slowly a
letter addressed to Glasgow, of which the gist would be: There is no
cargo, and no prospect of any coming till late spring apparently. And
all the time I sat there the necessity of getting back to the ship bore
heavily on my already half-congealed spirits—the shivering in glazed
tramcars, the stumbling over the snow-sprinkled waste ground, the vision
of ships frozen in a row, appearing vaguely like corpses of black vessels
in a white world, so silent, so lifeless, so soulless they seemed to be.
With precaution I would go up the side of my own particular corpse, and
would feel her as cold as ice itself and as slippery under my feet. My
cold berth would swallow up like a chilly burial niche my bodily shivers
and my mental excitement. It was a cruel winter. The very air seemed as
hard and trenchant as steel; but it would have taken much more than this
to extinguish my sacred fire for the exercise of my craft. No young man
of twenty-four appointed chief mate for the first time in his life would
have let that Dutch tenacious winter penetrate into his heart. I think
that in those days I never forgot the fact of my elevation for five
consecutive minutes. I fancy it kept me warm, even in my slumbers,
better than the high pile of blankets, which positively crackled with
frost as I threw them off in the morning. And I would get up early for
no reason whatever except that I was in sole charge. The new captain had
not been appointed yet.
Almost each morning a letter from my owners would arrive, directing me to
go to the charterers and clamour for the ship’s cargo; to threaten them
with the heaviest penalties of demurrage; to demand that this assortment
of varied merchandise, set fast in a landscape of ice and windmills
somewhere up-country, should be put on rail instantly, and fed up to the
ship in regular quantities every day. After drinking some hot coffee,
like an Arctic explorer setting off on a sledge journey towards the North
Pole, I would go ashore and roll shivering in a tramcar into the very
heart of the town, past clean-faced houses, past thousands of brass
knockers upon a thousand painted doors glimmering behind rows of trees of
the pavement species, leafless, gaunt, seemingly dead for ever.
That part of the expedition was easy enough, though the horses were
painfully glistening with icicles, and the aspect of the tram-conductors’
faces presented a repulsive blending of crimson and purple. But as to
frightening or bullying, or even wheedling some sort of answer out of Mr.
Hudig, that was another matter altogether. He was a big, swarthy
Netherlander, with black moustaches and a bold glance. He always began
by shoving me into a chair before I had time to open my mouth, gave me
cordially a large cigar, and in excellent English would start to talk
everlastingly about the phenomenal severity of the weather. It was
impossible to threaten a man who, though he possessed the language
perfectly, seemed incapable of understanding any phrase pronounced in a
tone of remonstrance or discontent. As to quarrelling with him, it would
have been stupid. The weather was too bitter for that. His office was
so warm, his fire so bright, his sides shook so heartily with laughter,
that I experienced always a great difficulty in making up my mind to
reach for my hat.
At last the cargo did come. At first it came dribbling in by rail in
trucks, till the thaw set in; and then fast, in a multitude of barges,
with a great rush of unbound waters. The gentle master stevedore had his
hands very full at last; and the chief mate became worried in his mind as
to the proper distribution of the weight of his first cargo in a ship he
did not personally know before.
Ships do want humouring. They want humouring in handling; and if you
mean to handle them well, they must have been humoured in the
distribution of the weight which you ask them to carry through the good
and evil fortune of a passage. Your ship is a tender creature, whose
idiosyncrasies must be attended to if you mean her to come with credit to
herself and you through the rough-and-tumble of her life.