Part 23
The Portuguese had a custom of their own on crossing the Line. It was curiously tinctured with the superstitions of that age. Those on board who had never “cut the Equator,” were compelled to give the sailors money, or provisions, or wine. No one was excused, “not even the Capuchins,” says the missionary Angelo of Gattina, writing in 1666, “of whom they take beads, _agnus Deis_, or such-like things; which being exposed to sale, what they yield is given to say masses for the souls in Purgatory.” If any one declined to give he was carried before a forecastle tribunal by sailors habited as officers. A seaman dressed as a judge, in a long gown, passed sentence, and the victim was straightway hoisted to the yard-arm and ducked. This custom was not confined to the Equator. “The same,” says Angelo, “is practised in passing the Straits of Gibraltar and the Cape of Good Hope.”
The Italian fashion was somewhat similar. Sailors apparelled as judges sat at a table, and those who had never before crossed the Line were brought before them. The judges reproached them contemptuously for daring to live so long in the world without passing the Equator, and fined them according to their condition. Ducking followed refusal to pay. Merolla, in his “Voyage to Congo” (1682), says: “From this punishment or a fine none are exempt, and it is said that with the latter they maintain a church.” A livelier, and certainly a less cruel custom, I find in Spanish ships, in the form of a bull-fight. This was contrived by a man dressing himself up so as to resemble a bull. He took care to equip himself with an ugly pair of horns. Another fellow, mounted upon two men, attacked the bull with a spear. The humour lay in the two men who formed the horse being tied back to back with a saddle between them, on which sat the rider. The bull, it may be supposed, usually had the best of it. I am reminded here of a stroke of original humour on the part of some midshipmen. It is illustrative of the reefer’s theory of wit. They got some hencoops and formed them into a cockpit, and, making a circle by coiling ropes, they pitted a couple of cocks. The cocks did their best to fight, but they staggered so oddly that they could scarce strike each other. It was at last admitted that they had been fed with barley soaked in rum. The midshipmen supposed that the spirit would fortify the hearts of the birds, but they had over-dosed them, and the creatures were too drunk to fight.
Drinking is a sea custom not yet dead—at least, if it is dead the fault is not Jack’s. But, even though the economical principles of owners had suffered perpetuation of the practice on shipboard, I question whether the most bibulous of the present race of sailors could carry it to the height to which it was formerly raised. I suppose the very biggest drink on record is that related by Dampier. He says that there came on board his ship one Captain Rawlins, the commander of a small New England vessel, along with a Mr. John Hooker. They were asked into the cabin to drink, and a bowl was made containing six quarts, “Mr. Hooker being drunk to by Captain Rawlins, who pledged Captain Hudswell, and, having the bowl in his hand, said that he was under an oath to drink but three draughts of strong liquor a day, and putting the bowl to his head turned it off at one draught, and so making himself drunk, disappointed us of our expectations till we made another bowl.” Six quarts at a draught! Twelve pints at a swallow, without a sigh between! But then hard drinking was the custom, not of the privateers only, but of the whole seafaring races of early times. They were educated to it by liberal doses of grog. The allowance sometimes rose to a pint of rum per man a day. In the French, Spanish, and Portuguese ships, and very often in the Dutch, the sailors’ courage before an action was nearly invariably helped with jacks of brandy, and the doses were repeated whilst the fight proceeded, a bumper being handed between the guns. The men, frenzied by drink, would mix gunpowder with the spirits, supposing that, thus prepared, there was no better liquor for heroes. I think it need not be doubted that more actions were lost than gained by this custom. How should a drunken gunner aim his piece? and what mischief—save to one another—could a mob of inebriated small-arms men do in the tops or along the quarter-deck?
But if privateersmen could be found able to swallow six quarts at a draught, they had customs besides that of drinking which must have tended to render them desperately hard and seasoned men. It was their practice to keep their ships clear, so that the deck was the only bed they had to lie upon. No hammocks were allowed, no chairs or tables; they took their meals upon the deck and lay upon it; preserving, in this direction, the old tradition of the buccaneers, who denied themselves every imaginable comfort and convenience that they might never be mistaken for anything else than the savage beasts they were.
It is in the superstitions of the sea that we must search for the beginning and history of many of the customs which, in modified forms, lingered down to the period of a late generation of seafarers. They veined the life with elements both of humour and romance, and I do not scruple to say that much of the poetry of the profession of the sea has perished with the extinction of the simple forecastle credulities of other ages. In the beginning of European navigation, in the times of Diaz, Cabot, Columbus,[80] De Gama, and earlier yet, the mariner was a Roman Catholic, devout, profoundly superstitious, perpetually invoking the protection of the Blessed Virgin and the Saints of Heaven, finding miracles in the common operations of Nature, peopling the deep with wondrous monsters, glorifying its blue breast with the gleam and colour of the enchanted island, gazing awe-struck about him as he sailed along, and willing to believe anything he was told. I could give you no better illustration of this than the remark of the Jesuit Anthony Sepp, in his account of a voyage from Spain to Paraguaná: “Towards the evening,” says he, “we saw an entire rainbow quite across the sky, resembling our rainbows.” _Resembling our rainbows!_ As though the worthy father supposed that rainbows in those unfamiliar seas were very different from the same radiant arches which span the showers of Italy, Spain, and Germany! They were prepared for all sorts of wonders, and their imaginations created what their eyes could not see. The lightning was not that of Europe; the thunder was the reverberation of some hellish conflict between armies formed of fiends of Satanic stature; the very rain was unnatural, being coloured. Religion, or superstition if you will, interposed to mitigate the horrors of a perfervid fancy, wrought familiar appearances into celestial expressions, and instructed poor Jack to calm his perturbed soul, to quell the tempest, to exorcise the mermaid, to smooth the waters, to disperse the horrid shadows of the electric storm with litanies, effigies of saints, and spells of many different sorts. Thus Pirard de Laval (in “Churchill’s Collection of Voyages,” Vol. i. p. 702) says, “We frequently saw great whirlwinds rising at a distance, called by the seamen _dragons_, which shatter and overturn any ship that falls in their way. When these appear the sailors have a superstitious custom of repairing to the prow, or the side that lies next the storm, and beating naked swords against one another crosswise.” This custom long prevailed. Scores of similar practices may be traced to the primitive superstitions of sailors. They unquestionably colour the old marine life, and their extinction leaves the calling uncomfortably bald, I think. The stars in those aged stories seem to glow the richer for the incense floating up to them from the little altar on the forecastle, and for the tender strains of a hundred voices rising in some solemn, melodious canticle. The glory of the setting sun makes cloth of gold of the sails of those castellated fabrics, and they look to float over faery seas of purple as we view them through that atmosphere of superstition, in the midst of which those young and awe-struck imaginations made their miraculous voyages to the Indies and to the mighty shores of Columbia.
Footnote 80:
Washington Irving gives several instances of Columbus’ superstitious nature. As an example: “Seeing all human skill baffled and confounded, Columbus endeavoured to propitiate heaven by solemn vows and acts of penance. By his orders, a number of beans, equal to the number of persons on board, were put into a cap, on one of which was the sign of the cross. Each of the crew made a vow that, should he draw forth the marked bean, he would make a pilgrimage to the shrine of Santa Maria de Guadalupe, bearing a wax taper of five pounds’ weight. The admiral was the first to put in his hand, and the lot fell upon him. From that moment he considered himself a pilgrim bound to perform the vow.” Other vows were made and solemn promises fervently addressed to heaven; but the storm continued to rage, and eventually the saints were quitted for seamanship and the ship saved.
_WHO IS VANDERDECKEN?_
A scientific American gentleman has been endeavouring to determine the paternity of the grisly and spectral commander of the _Flying Dutchman_. I wish he had been successful, for ever since I read the “Cruise of the _Bacchante_” I have been bewildering my brains with the same problem. The princely word of the Royal midshipmen must be taken, and it is plainly stated that at four o’clock a.m. on July 11, 1881, “the _Flying Dutchman_ crossed our bows.” Nothing can be clearer than that; and, besides, there is the additional testimony of the reverend gentleman who accompanied the Princes and edited their interesting observations. “A strange red light as of a phantom ship all aglow, in the midst of which light the masts, spars, and sails of a brig two hundred yards distant stood out in strong relief as she came up.” This appearance is in strict correspondence with the tradition, but I wish the vessel had not been a brig. I should not like to put my hand to it that such a rig as that of the brig was known in Vanderdecken’s days.[81] You had four-masted craft in plenty, the fourth mast being called the bonaventure; also abundance of three-masted vessels, the third mast rigged with a lateen sail; but no fabric answering to what we term a brig.
Footnote 81:
There was a kind of vessel called _brigandines_, but they carried the rig of neither the brig nor the brigantine as we understand the term.
That Vanderdecken ever shifts his flag is not to be supposed. Yet there could be no mistake, for mark what follows: “Thirteen persons altogether saw her, but whether it was _Van Dieman_ or the _Flying Dutchman_, or who else, must remain unknown.” The ships in company flashed to know if the people of the _Bacchante_ had seen the strange red light, so that probably no “shadowy being” was ever testified to by a greater number of eyewitnesses. But the thing is placed beyond dispute by what followed. “At 10.45 a.m. the ordinary seaman who had this morning reported the _Flying Dutchman_ fell from the fore-topmast-crosstrees, and was smashed to atoms.” And then, “at the next port we came to the admiral was also smitten down.” There was nothing less to expect, but indeed a very great deal more. An old sailor to whom I related this story said that certainly the appearance looked uncommonly like the _Flying Dutchman_, and for his part he was willing enough to believe it was; if he had a misgiving, it lay in the smallness of the trouble that followed. “The fallin’ of a young seaman from the masthead and the sarcumstance of a hadmiral being took wuss wasn’t consequences sufficient if that there wessel wur the genuine Phantom. The _Baykant_ (so he called her) herself oughter ha’ got lost. That’s what would have happened when I was fust goin’ to sea; but there’s bin a good many changes since then, and who’s agoin’ to say that that there curse ain’t growed weak like physic wot’s kept too long?”
But, be this as it may, there can be no doubt that Vanderdecken is still afloat, cruising about in a ship that glows at night, and whose rotten timbers are charged with the villainous quality of causing disaster and misery to vessels within the sphere of the horizon the ancient Batavian floats in.
This is a scientific age, and it is really time that we found out who this Dutchman is or was. Is there no man clever enough to devise a specific for the neutralization of the evil influence of an endevilled structure? Let such a medicine be discovered, and I’ll warrant no lack of able-bodied Jacks willing to embark in quest of the spectral pest. It would be a venture worth starting a company to undertake. “This company is intended to supply a want that has long been felt.” The object would be twofold: first, to render Britannia’s dominion of the sea more comfortable than it can be whilst Vanderdecken is suffered to sail aimlessly about with a freight of curses in his hold, and Death keeping a look-out at the masthead; and, secondly, to supply the public with an attraction. Well, it will be admitted that the _Flying Dutchman_ would prove a lucrative “draw.” Think of her moored just below London Bridge, and the charge a shilling a-head to view her, small boys half-price! We may take it that Vanderdecken is heartily sick of his hard-up and hard-down life off Agulhas, and would gladly settle down to an immortality of still water (and Hollands), without expecting an apology for the quality of the air of the Pool and the Isle of Dogs.
I think I see the ship in my mind’s eye; a true portrait of a craft of the seventeenth century—great round barricadoed tops, pink-sterned and crowned there with a poop-royal, of a faded yellow, a green-coated swivel or two aft, and a few rusty cannon lodged in wooden beds on her main deck. And what would a chat with Vanderdecken be worth, over a steaming bowl of punch, in his darksome cabin? Rip Van Winkle would be a mere youth—equal to a hornpipe or a waltz—alongside this Dutch skipper; and what yarns could he spin of the Amsterdam of his day, of old Schouten over at Hoorn, of Van this and Van that, of the Dutch Admirals, of the fights in the narrow seas, of their High Mightinesses’ opinion of Cromwell, and of the hydropathic treatment of the English at Amboyna!
Who is he? Marryat tells us that he was a sea captain, whose wife lived with her son Philip on the outskirts of the small but fortified town of Terneuse, situated on the right bank of the Scheldt. But he starts as a spectre, and remains undeterminable down to the last chapter, when he, along with his ship and his son, falls to pieces weeping tears of joy. I love the yarn, but doubt the man. If Marryat is right Vanderdecken is dead and gone. His curse endured long enough only to enable his son to become an old man—call it fifty years—for Philip was twenty or thereabouts when his father’s ghost flew through the window. Now, we know only too well that Vanderdecken is still alive. Besides taking a strictly nautical view of the question, I am disposed to question the accuracy of the novelist on such grounds for example, as these: he represents the _Flying Dutchman_ sailing along with royals and flying jib, when this canvas, as Marryat paints it, was not in use until the close of the last century;[82] also he depicts her as at one time being so extremely ethereal as to be able to sail through a ship, as though the phantom was formed of mist and snow, and at another time as being substantial enough to support the highly material form of Philip when he stands upon her deck with his father.
Footnote 82:
I do not find the “royal” in use much before Howe’s and Jervis’s time. The “flying gyb” of the beginning of the eighteenth century (at which date it first appears), was not the sail it now is.
Literature abounds in spectral ships; but there is only one Vanderdecken. And how consistently the old Dutchman fits in with the roughness and wildness of typical sea-fancies, one quickly sees when he is matched in his unearthly integrity with the refined but entirely faithless interpretations or reconstructions of the legend by the poet or the romancer. Take, for instance, Thomas Campbell’s “Spectre Boat,” where a certain “false Ferdinand,” having broken a maiden’s heart, is visited by her ghost at sea.
“’Twas now the dead watch of the night, the helm was lashed a lee, And the ship rode where Mount Etna lights the deep Levantine sea; When beneath its glare a boat came, row’d by a woman in her shroud, Who, with eyes that made our blood run cold, stood up and spoke aloud.”
What the wraith said was to this effect: That Ferdinand was a false traitor, for whom his sweetheart’s ghost wanders unforgiven, and that he was to come down—in other words jump overboard—to appease her indignation for his having forced her to break her peace with heaven. As in the case of Coleridge’s Mariner, the spectre has her will; and the last we hear of her and Ferdinand and the boat is—
“And round they went, and down they went, as the cock crew from the land.”
How poor is all this superfine business of broken vows and revengeful spectres, side by side with the rugged, schnapps’-smelling figure of old Vanderdecken viewing the horny moon with a curse in his eye, or stumping the weather side of his castellated poop with a speaking-trumpet under his arm! Campbell has also put into swinging, melodious verse an old Scandinavian legend, which he calls the “Death-boat of Heligoland.” In this poem he represents a boat furiously rowed by ghosts, whose shrouds were like plaids flying loose to the storm. The watchman sings out to know who they are; and is answered—
“‘We are dead; we are bound from our graves in the West, First to Hecla and then to’——unmeet was the rest For man’s ear,”
says Campbell.
All this is not Vanderdecken, but the poet finely refers to the old Dutchman when he sings of those curses which make horror more deep by the semblance of mirth, and which at “mid-sea appal the chill’d mariner’s glance.” Coleridge also sends a spectral ship to his Ancient Mariner in the vessel that approaches him without a breeze or without a tide, and whose sails glance in the sun, “like restless gossamers.” But, instead of Vanderdecken, we have Death playing at dice with a woman. How heartily the Ancient Mariner must have prayed that the woman would win! Certainly he could be no true sailor who would not so pray.
This gambling fancy may be found in old German legends relating to the death-ship. There is no lack of stories referring to miscreants of all shades who sail about in phantom-ships in company with Satan, who plays day and night with them for their souls. But, as though the artless yarn of Vanderdecken—simple in its elements as a tale by Defoe, and exquisitely in keeping with the stormy seas of that part of the world to which Jack has strictly confined it—were not strong and good enough, a number of monstrous perversions have been launched, and the tradition buried under a hill of absurdities. For example, there is the German notion of a ship whose portholes grin with skulls instead of cannons; she is commanded by a skeleton who holds an hour-glass, and she is manned by the ghosts of sinners. But even here the inventor is unable to manage without our old friend Vanderdecken, and so he affirms that any ship that encounters this horrid craft is doomed. Another version represents the _Flying Dutchman_ as being very nearly as big as the world. The masts are so lofty that when a boy goes up to furl a sail years elapse before he is again seen, and he then comes down an old, white-bearded man. The germ of this may perhaps be found in that wondrous fabric of which Sir Thomas Browne writes: “It had been a sight only second unto the Ark to have beheld the great _Syracusia_, or mighty ship of Hiero, described in Athenæus; and some have thought it a very large one, wherein were to be found ten stables for horses, eight towers, besides fish-ponds, gardens, tricliniums, and many fair rooms paved with agath and precious stones.” The enormous phantom ship takes seven years in tacking, whales tumble aboard of her when she rolls just as flying-fish dart into the portholes or channels of earthly vessels; her smallest sail is as big as Europe, and there is a public house, a “free-and-easy,” in every block.
One has to search elsewhere for Vanderdecken. That he was a Dutchman and that the story is Dutch ought to be presumed from the round, plain, bald, and salt character of the yarn. It is a thorough Dutch-cheese of a story. Spain may supply versions charged with spiritual elements and suggesting the Inquisition with the embellishments of silver flames and death’s heads; the French may make a purgatorial job of the fancy and ruin it by an importation of priestly conceptions widely remote from the sea inspirations; German imaginations may garnish it with unnecessary horrors; but it is in the Holland version that we find the true ocean tincture, and the only narrative likely to be accepted by such complete sea-dogs as fill the Dutch, the English, and the American forecastles.
Yet, who was Vanderdecken? An American writer, founding his presumption on a German publication, says that the master of the Phantom Ship was one Bernard Fokke, who lived in the seventeenth century. He was noted for his recklessness and daring, and cased his masts with iron to enable him to carry canvas. Having contrived to sail to the East Indies in ninety days, he was looked upon as a sorcerer. At last he and his ship disappeared, and everybody said he had been carried off by the Devil and forced to confine his navigation to the ocean between the two Southern Capes. Of his crew none remain but the boatswain, cook, and pilot. “He is still to be seen, and always hails ships and asks questions; but they should not be answered—and then his ship will disappear. Sometimes a boat is seen to approach his bark, but when it reaches her all vanish suddenly.” Others say he was a nobleman named Falkenberg, who murdered his brother and his wife and was condemned eternally to sail about the North Sea. On his arrival at the sea-shore he found a boat with a man in it awaiting him. The man said in Latin, “I have been expecting thee.” On which, accompanied by the ghosts of his murdered brother and wife, Falkenberg embarked, and was rowed over to a Phantom Ship that lay off the coast. This vessel is described as painted grey, with coloured sails, and a pale flag. She has no crew, and may be known at night by flames which issue from her masthead.