Part 22

And her people? As I live to write it, all hands were overboard! They had jumped—men, women, and boys—over the rail when they saw that the steamer was bound to come, and the foaming eddies thrown along by the racing reversed wheels of the steamboat were full of revolving red caps, and earrings, and white handkerchiefs. It was wonderful to see them all in the water, supporting themselves with the utmost ease, half of them breast high, waiting until they should cease to rotate that they might “fix” their vessel and observe whether she meant to float or sink. Before any boat could put off to them they had made up their minds, and were swimming towards the smack, over whose sides they clambered, until her decks were once more filled with them, and there they stood, with the water streaming from their clothes, anathematizing the steamer in one voice, and with every contortion of figure it was possible for their ungovernable rage to fling them into. However, nobody was hurt, and the smack, throwing her sweeps out, was got alongside one of the wharves, where all hands promptly fell to drying themselves.

These vessels are very common objects in some of our English harbours; but, familiar as they are, there is a deal of amusement to be obtained by standing and looking down on their decks. If they hailed from a country ten thousand miles distant the manners, appearance, customs of the crews could not be more totally different from those of our own smacksmen. It makes one think of the Spaniards at Trafalgar hanging big wooden crosses on their spanker-boom ends before going into action, to see these poor fellows when they leave Boulogne—and may be the other ports they belong to for all I know—kneel down in their immense boots upon the deck and offer up a prayer to the cross on the church on the summit of the rocks. I have watched the English smacksman leave a good many harbours, but never observed him in a devotional posture. Perhaps on these occasions he withdraws into his little cabin, taking care to assemble the apprentices first. Be this as it may, the French smack’s deck in harbour is a real study, and one I never tire of watching. The craft is so crowded that she seems full of business. If it is summer time five or six brawny yellow-skinned lads are taking the diversion of a bath over the side, while the ladies of the extensive company go quietly on with their mending of nets or stockings. The men smoke, argue, grease their boots, peel potatoes, clean fish, and the gruff murmur of a wild _patois_ floats up, amid which the most accomplished French scholar can only now and again hear a word that reminds him of the French language. They and their ship make somehow—ugly as their vessel is—a prettier picture than an English smack to fit a summer day. It is no doubt the numerous crew, the oddness and wildness of their appearance, the dress of the women. Some of the boats are extraordinarily massive, perfect beds of timber with immensely round bows and enormously thick scantling. The vanes at their mastheads are often real marine curiosities; even the west country fishermen cannot beat them. You can always tell a Frenchman by his vane though he should lie in the middle of a whole forest of Dartmouth, Penzance, Brixham, Shoreham, and other spars. You may also know him by the smell of the smoke from his galley chimney—the little funnel that rises out of his deck, and discharges a fish-like vapour, made even worse than ancient to the British nostril by—what shall I say? what mystery of vegetable, seasoning, stirring, and peppering?

I suppose the _chasse-marée_ is the lineal descendant of those formidable French privateers, which in the old wars used to sneak about the Channel in search of our sugar-boxes and tea-waggons. But there is something in the sight of the French lug-rigged smack, with her two or three masts and decks crowded with men, that always recalls the old St. Malo, Ste. Brieux, Havre, Dieppe, and Boulogne picaroons—those pests of the sturdy old British merchantmen of other days. To see her pulling away out of harbour on a moonlit night, her long sweeps rising and falling like the fibrine limbs of some gigantic marine insect, is to bring up recollections of many a furious conflict under the very shadow of the white heights of this perfidious island. There is the stout high-pooped merchantman at rest, after a voyage of five months from the East Indies, under the lee of the towering North Foreland. At regular intervals the sound of her bell floats down upon the light air, blowing so softly that the shadows of the clouds upon the hazy stretch of moonlit water seem to be at rest. And now creeping round the huge point of land, urged by her sweeps and her dark sails goose-winged or boomed out on either side, comes a fac-simile of that French smack we have watched leaving the harbour. She is alongside the slumbering ship in a trice, lights flash, pistols explode, and in a few minutes behold! the cable is cut, and the ship, with her sails loosed, is standing south-by-west for Boulogne or the forts that way, the sneaking lugger ahead of her, black as ink against the silver splendour of the water in the south, and all hands keeping a breathless look-out for British cruisers.

But though there may be a deal of the poetry, or at least the romance, of history in the suggestions to be got from the form and rig of the French smack, there goes to the making of her every-day life as many hard, stern facts as ever a Gradgrind could desire. She sees as much weather of all kinds as our own fishermen experience; and suffers, having regard to proportion of numbers, as many disasters. The shipping reports are constantly mentioning her. One day she is stranded, and her crew burning flares and owing their lives to the lifeboat. Another day she is found abandoned, and towed into harbour with nothing standing save three or four feet of her mainmast. Or else a steamer plumps into her and drowns the whole of her company but two. As bad a wreck as ever I heard was that of _La Reine des Agnes_. The story was told by Adolphe Derevières, one of the crew, and it is worth repeating as a sample of the various misfortunes which follow in the wake of the French smacksman. Adolphe’s English was exceedingly good. He had learnt it, he told me, from intercourse with the English at Boulogne, and by constant visits and long detentions in harbour in this country.

“I sall hope,” he began, “to make you comprehend. I most speak slow, for dere is no language more difficult nor de Angleesh. De boat vas vhat you call a dandy—not a loggaire: you know vhat dandy means, hein? her name vas _La Reine des Agnes_; she vas forty-five torns; and ven ve left ze Nort Sea ve had vhat de Angleesh fishermen call twenty-tree last of herring in barrels, and loose in de bottaum. De veddaire had been very bad in de Nort Sea—mosh rain, heavee wind, and roff vaves. Ve had von boat only, and von day we lose her. She vas dragging behind ven soddenly a vave make de rope go and she go too. Dere vas too mosh vind to stop, so ve continue sailing for Boulogne. Eighteen men did form our companee. It vas four o’clock on de morning of de tirteenth of Septembre. Ve vas in a nasty part of de sea, off Yarmout, vid de Crosby and de Cross sands as we tink vell to de nor’, and ve to de souse, so as to bring de Newvarp light on our righthand. I say, dis vas as ve suppose. It vas veree dark, still mosh vind, and heavee vaves. Ve vas sailing fast, ven soddenly de vessel stop. Many of us tumble and cry out. Dere vas noting to be seen. Dem as tumble got up, and ve all ran about. De confusion was terrib. Eighteen men, you see, sare, de ship small, and her deck full of de herring barrels. Ve first take de barrels and trow dem overboard; ve had to feel, ve could not see, and all de time de vessel keep bomp, bomp, making us fall. Dere vas no telling de place vere ve vas wrecked—one say dis, anoder say dat, and everybody keep crying out. Dat is de worst of us Franchmen, sare. You Angleesh in dangaire are quiet; ve are as brave as you, but ve make too mosh noise, dere is not de ordaire, each man tink he know best, and, besides, de sea is not our province like it is yours. Some got pieces of vhat you call oakum and dipped dem in oil and made fires, and de rest, knowing dere vas no boats, made a raft composed of two spar and a lot of barrels. It vas a fearful sight—de red flame, de vataire vashing over, de sea all black around. Vell, juste vhen de raft vas ready, de vessel left de sand and began to sink. Mon Dieu! dat vas a horrib moment. Ve got pieces of rope, and tied ourselves to de raft, and put it into de sea, and den de vessel sank. It vas fearfullee cold. Ve vent op and down, op and down, and I feel de sea trying to tear me avay. It vas like an animal vid its claws dragging. Ve vere all on de raft ven de daylight came. Oh sare, tink of dat sight! eighteen men clinging to de barrels. Few could speak; ve vas all full of salt vataire, and I could not open my teeth—dey vas hard set vid de cold. De capitaine say it vas de Meedle Cross Sand de vessel strike. But it did not mattaire; she vas sunk: von sand vas as bad as anoder; and dere vas ve going op and down, op and down, noting in sight, no help coming—and all of us so seek, so veak, so miserable!

“Soon after it vas light a large vave came and covered us all; I did tink it had tore de raft to pieces; dere vas several dreadful cries, and vhen de vataire vas passed I look and see dat five of my comrades vas vashed avay. Sare, I envied dem. Oh, better to be drown, to know noting, to feel noting, dan to be on dat terrib raft vaiting each von his turn, and looking at von’s grave. Presentlee von of de men let go vid his hands, and de sea break his rope and vash him avay. Den anoder give op vid a fearful groan, and de sea take him too. Dis go on until five men vas perished, making ten, so dat dare vas only eight left. Ah, vhat a frightful time did follow! All day long ve did drift here and dere, here and dere upon dat raft. De land vas near—ve knew dat; dere vas Yarmout and dere vas Lowestoff vidin six mile, but had dey been Boulogne, had dey been Finisterre, dey could not have been farder off for us.

“Vell, sare, I do not know enough of your language to tell you all dat vas in my torts, de appearance of my companions, de cries and groans dat break from dem, de roff vaves, de cold, all de horrib pain and misery of dat incredib time. Vhen de evening came ve see a large steamboat. Ve all cry and cry to her vid our hands to our mouts, and she heard us, and came to vere ve vas. Oh, sare, vhat is dare in Angleesh, vhat is dare in Fransh, in any language dat is spoke by human creature, to express our joy ven de steamer lowered a boat, and ve did see it coming to us? I could have cried like a leetel girl, sare, but I vas too veak—all de tears vas vashed avay. Some of us tried to embrace de brave Angleeshmen dat saved us, but our legs at de joints gave vay—ve could not stan’. Vell, after ve had been in de steamboat a letell vile, a lifeboat come near, and dey told us dey had seen de flames ve made in de morning and gone to us, but dat ve had disappear, and dat dey had been looking and looking for us op to dis time! Ah, vhat a noble service—how estimable, how brave is de Angleesh lifeboat! Your countree, sare, has von a hundred battles on de ocean; but not von of dem for glory comes op to de solitary victoire of a lifeboat dat fights vid de terrib vaves and saves de poor sailor, no matter vedder he is Fransh, or Italian, or German. De steamer put us into de lifeboat, and ve vas taken to Yarmout, vere seven of us did go to de Sailors’ Home. But one—poor François Libert—vas so ill dat he vas carried to de hospital.”

Having arrived at this point poor Adolphe burst into French, and, regardless of my assurance that my knowledge of that useful tongue was growing every month more and more imperfect, he rattled himself into a violent fit of emotion, praising the English, lamenting his comrades, grieving over his past sufferings in the dialect any man may hear who will take a turn through the fish market at Boulogne, or linger on the quay there when a fleet of smacks is coming into the harbour. I was truly sorry not to get his story in his own tongue. How could he do justice to his terrible shipwreck in any other language than his? All his gesticulations went for little alongside his “dats” and “deys,” otherwise not a posture but would have helped the wild hoarse flow of recollection poured forth in French—the panic of the men rushing and stumbling upon the barrel-crowded deck; the horrible illumination of the oakum torches with the fires of the flaming paraffin oil streaming from them; the unspeakable anguish of the long twelve hours spent upon that raft, the land in sight, and the rough seas for ever trampling upon them. Is it because they go so heavily manned that disasters to French smacks rise to a height of tragedy that needs the loss of an English vessel of seven or eight hundred tons to parallel? Here was a vessel of forty-five tons furnished with a crew of eighteen souls. Why, a Blackwall liner would hardly need more seamen to work her, if, in calling over the muster-roll, you omit the “idlers.” And another feature that often makes disasters to French smacks peculiarly dreadful is their fashion of taking a number of women to sea with them. I cannot say whether or not they carry the ladies with them into the North Sea, but seldom a French fishing boat puts into an English harbour but half a dozen women and girls may be seen among the crowd of red and blue nightcap-shaped headgear worn by the men. One really cannot be surprised at the old British notion that one Englishman is equal to six Frenchmen when one compares a large Ramsgate, Grimsby, or Yarmouth dandy of fifty or sixty tons going for a six weeks’ cruise in the North Sea in winter manned by four or five men, with the lubbersome, apple-bowed, black-sided, heavily-timbered French three-masted lugger of forty tons, with her decks so crowded with fishermen and women that it seems impossible they can move without getting into one another’s road. Meanwhile, it is to be hoped that the long conference held at the Hague, the correspondence relative to which makes a volume of alarming dimensions, may be accepted as a preliminary to something like a good understanding subsisting among the smacks of various nationalities which drag their nets in the North Sea. Unquestionably the English fisherman has had a very great deal to complain of in the rough and cowardly treatment he has experienced at the hands of French, Dutch, and Belgian smacksmen. It is not only that his costly fishing gear has been irreparably ruined again and again by that mean and treacherous contrivance known as “the devil;” he has even been fired into, and his temper taxed so repeatedly by the basest professional treatment and the most studied insults, that the time was when those interested in the English fishermen expected day after day to hear of desperate battles at sea—small Trafalgars, Niles, and Copenhagens—between the fleets of Yarmouth, Grimsby, and the North and the allied squadrons of Belgium, France, and Holland.

_OLD SEA CUSTOMS._

The changes which have taken place in the sea-life cannot be wholly restricted to the transformations of the shipbuilding yard. There is a mighty difference indeed between the line-of-battle ship of fifty years ago and the armour-clad of to-day—between the Atlantic passenger clippers of which Fenimore Cooper wrote and the iron mail steamers which have succeeded them; but there are changes in other maritime directions fully as remarkable, though perhaps not so deeply accentuated to the shore gaze. Where are the old customs of the ocean? Whither has fled the traditionary character of the sailor? His canvas remains. He still has his topsails (albeit halved) to hoist, his topgallant sails to sheet home, his royals to set; spite of steam, there are still scores of the old-fashioned windlasses for him to bawl his hurricane songs over; still scores of the old-fashioned capstans for him to wind round, “drunk, monotonous, and melodious,” davits at which he may cat his anchor, as did his forefathers, forecastles as clammy as the most reeking of the holes in which the Jacks of other days lay snoring, with purple faces, in clouds of cockroaches.

But, for all that, it will not do to pretend that the sailor is what he was. I do not speak of the caricatures of the fictionist; the monstrous pig-tailed figures with lanthorn jaws, broken teeth, wooden legs, and bloodshot eyes, the race of Hatchways, Trunnions, and Pipses, who stagger, full of drink and oaths, in clamorous procession through the pages of the sea novelists, losing, to be sure, something of their inexpressible garnishings as they enter the truer oceanic atmosphere of the Coopers and the Marryats of the present century. I refer simply to the old sailor, to the plain man-o’-warsman and merchantman of bygone years, not to the Frankenstein in flowing breeches and hat on nine hairs who trod the stage and procured his circulation in one, two, and three volumes, in the respectable name of Jack, prior even to the days when Sir Launcelot Greaves found the irresponsible anatomy willing to ship

“The broad habergeon, Vant brace and greves and gauntlet.”

Let me be understood. The British or American mariner of to-day is as hearty, nimble, dexterous, determined a fellow as ever he was at any time during the choicest and most glorious period of his nation’s history. He needs but opportunity to test him. It is in his traditions, habits, superstitions, that he differs from his predecessors. I do not think it is the iron of his latter-day calling that has entered his soul and changed him. The very distinguishable difference is owing to a natural decay of marine sentiment. He is no longer superstitious—possibly because he is not without a tincture of education. Hard wear has attenuated his prejudices, and custom has lost its hold upon him. It would be difficult now, I should think, to find in any forecastle such a superstitious sea-dog as the old salt who, in Dana’s “Two Years Before the Mast,” agreed with the black cook as to the malignant and wizard qualities of the Finns. Familiarity with the grand liquid amphitheatre into which he descends and toils for his bread may have helped to rob the modern sailor of what I must call the romantic features of the seaman’s nature. In olden times the voyage was long, the art of navigation crude and halting; the wonders of the deep were many, at least they were found so; a man passed so long a while at sea that he was saturated with the spirit of it. Superstitions salt as the billow from which they were wrought begot peculiar forms of thought; customs grew out of the strange fancies and interpretations, and that they should now be dead means simply that they flourished for centuries, and that they died very hard at last.

How wide the difference is between the shipboard life of the mariners of the past and that of the present race of seamen may be collected by looking into a few of the customs which are now as extinct as the timbers of Noah’s ark. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was a practice on board Italian and Spanish, and possibly Portuguese ships, for the sailors on crossing the equator to erect a canopy on the forecastle, under which three seamen, absurdly dressed, seated themselves. One was called the president, the others judges. They started first with trying the captain, then the officers, finally the passengers. A sailor, dressed up as a clerk, read the indictments, after which the judges pronounced sentence of death. Careri, in his “Voyage Round the World,” explains the purpose of this tomfoolery. “The sentence of death,” says he, “was immediately bought off with money, chocolate, sugar, biscuit, flesh, sweetmeats, wine, and the like. The best of it was that he who did not pay immediately, or give good security, was laid on with a rope’s end, at the least sign given by the President Tarpaulin.” Apparently heavier punishments than rope’s-ending attended the poverty or contumacy of the convicted, for the same author tells of a passenger who was drowned on board a galleon through being keel-hauled for refusing to conform to this singular marine custom. The sport—if sport it can be called—lasted all day, and then at sundown the fines or forfeits were divided among the sailors.

It is possible that out of this old sea-joke rose the stupid and irritating practice of ducking men on their crossing the equator for the first time. This imbecile piece of horse-play was wonderfully popular among seamen down to quite recent days. I don’t think Jack ever saw much humour himself in the mere dressing up as Neptune and acting Jack Pudding in the waist; what he relished was the privilege, by prescription, of lording it over the captain and officers for a few hours, and tarring and soaking people to whom at other times he would have to pull his forelock, with the whole length of the ship between him and their nobility.

Another curious custom was to be found on board Dutch vessels. When a ship entered the 39th parallel “every one,” writes John Nieuhoff (1640), “of what quality or degree soever, that has not passed there before, is obliged to be baptized or redeem himself from it. He that is to be baptized has a rope tied round his middle, wherewith he is drawn up to the very top of the bowsprit, and from thence three times successively tumbled into the water.” A man was at liberty to get another to take his place by paying him. Plenty of money and other good things must have been earned by sailors out of this custom, for one may conceive that a nervous passenger would pay handsomely to escape so formidable a ducking as the tall bowsprits of those days promised, whilst, on the other hand, a seasoned mariner would look upon such sousings as mere child’s play—think no more of it than a man in a regatta now thinks of walking out upon a greasy boom to loose the pig in the sack at the end of it. The practice, however, eventually led to such riots, broils, and bloodshed, that it was forbidden by the Dutch Government.

It was long continued, however, in the British navy as a punishment. In the “Annual Register” for 1797 there is an account of four naval officers who were soused by a mutinous crew on board his Britannic Majesty’s ship _Sandwich_. The writer calls it a “curious ceremony.” The unhappy naval officers must have thought it so! “They tie the unfortunate victim’s feet together, and their hands together, and put their bed at their back, making it fast round them, at the same time adding an eighteen-pounder bar-shot to bring them down. They afterwards made them fast to a tackle suspended from the yard-arm, and hoisting them nearly up to the block all at once let go, and drop them souse into the sea, where they remain a minute, and then are again hoisted and let down alternately, till there are scarce any signs of life remaining.” When the miserable victims are ducked enough—according to the fancy of their judges—they are triced up by the heels that the water may run out of them, and then stowed away in their hammocks. This kindness was denied to the four naval officers, who, after having hung head down for some time, were tumbled into a boat and sent ashore.