Part 13

Not without a groan do I recall a passage in one of the handsomest composite barks I ever saw. Her name I shall not give, as she was owned in London, and may be running still, for all I know. My eye lingered lovingly over her graceful lines as she lay in dock, and I thought gleefully that a passage to New Zealand in her would be like a yachting-trip. An additional satisfaction was some patent steering-gear which I had always longed to handle, having been told that it was a dream of delight to take a trick with it. I admit that she was right down to her Plimsoll, and I will put it to her credit that she was only some dozen miles to leeward of the ill-fated _Eurydice_ when that terrible disaster occurred that extinguished so many bright young lives. But the water was smooth, and we had no long row of lower-deck ports open for the sea to rush in when the vessel heeled to a sudden squall. It is only her Majesty’s ships that are exposed to such dangers as that. In fact, for the first fortnight out she was on her extra-special behaviour, although none of us fellows for’ard liked a dirty habit she had of lifting heavy sprays over fore and aft in a whole-sail breeze. Presently along came a snifter from the south-west, and every man of us awoke to the fact that we were aboard of a hooker saturated with every vicious habit known to ships. There was no dryness in her. You never knew where or when she would bow down to a harmless-looking sea and allow it to lollop on board, or else, with a perversity almost incredible, fall up against it so clumsily that it would send a blinding sheet of spray as high as the clues of the upper topsails. Words fail me to tell of the patent atrocity with which we were condemned to steer. Men would stand at the wheel for their two hours’ trick, and imagine tortures for the inventor thereof, coming for’ard at four or eight bells, speechlessly congested with the volume of their imprecations upon him. Yet I have no doubt he, poor man, considered himself a benefactor to the genus seafarer. In any weather you could spin the wheel round from hard up to hard down without feeling the slightest pressure of the sea against the rudder. And as, to gain power, speed must be lost, two turns of the wheel were equal to only one with the old-fashioned gear. The result of these differences was to a sailor simply maddening. For all seamen steer as much by the _feel_ of the wheel as by anything else (I speak of sailing-ships throughout), a gentle increase of pressure warning you when she wants a little bit to meet her in her sidelong swing. Not only so, but there is a subtle sympathy (to a good helmsman) conveyed in those alterations of pressure which, while utterly unexplainable in words, make all the difference between good and bad steering. Then, none of us could get used to the doubling of the amount of helm necessary. We were always giving her too much or too little. As she was by no means an easy-steering ship, even had her gear been all right, the consequence of this diabolical impediment to her guidance was that the man who kept her within two points and a half, in anything like a breeze, felt that he deserved high praise.

Still, with all these unpleasantnesses, we worried along in fairly comfortable style, for we had a fresh mess and railway-duff (a plum at every station) every Sunday. Every upper bunk in the fo’c’s’le was leaky, and always remained so; but we rigged up water-sheds that kept us fairly dry during our slumbers. So we fared southward through the fine weather, forgetting, with the lax memory of the sailor for miserable weather, the sloppy days that had passed, and giving no thought to the coming struggle. Gradually we stole out of the trade area, until the paling blue of the sky and the accumulation of torn and feathery cloud-fields warned us of our approach to that stern region where the wild western wind reigns supreme. The trades wavered, fell, and died away. Out from the west, with a rush and a roar, came the cloud-compeller, and eastward we fled before it. An end now to all comfort fore and aft. For she wallowed and grovelled, allowing every sea, however kindly disposed, to leap on board, until the incessant roar of the water from port to starboard dominated our senses even in sleep. A massive breakwater of two-inch kauri planks was fitted across the deck in front of the saloon for the protection of the afterguard, who dwelt behind it as in a stockaded fort. As the weather grew worse, and the sea got into its gigantic stride, our condition became deplorable; for it was a task of great danger to get from the fo’c’s’le to the wheel, impossible to perform without a drenching, and always invested with the risk of being dashed to pieces. We “carried on” recklessly in order to keep her at least ahead of the sea; but at night, when no stars were to be seen, and the compass swung madly through all its thirty-two points, steering was mental and physical torture. In fact, it was only possible to steer at all by the feel of the wind at one’s back, and even then the best helmsman among us could not keep her within two points on each side of her course. We lived in hourly expectation of a catastrophe, and for weeks none of us forward ever left off oilskins and sea-boots even to sleep in. At last, on Easter Sunday, three seas swept on board simultaneously. One launched itself like a Niagara over the stern, and one rose on each side in the waist, until the two black hills of water towered above us for fully twenty feet. Then they leaned toward each other and fell, their enormous weight threatening to crush our decks in as if they had been paper. Nothing could be seen of the hull for a smother of white, except the forecastle-head. When, after what seemed an age, she slowly lifted out of that boiling, yeasty whirl, the breakwater was gone, and so was all the planking of the bulwarks on both sides from poop to forecastle break. Nothing was left but to heave to, and I, for one, firmly believed that we should never get her up into the wind. However, we were bound to try; and watching the smooth (between two sets of seas), the helm was put hard down and the mizen hauled out. Round she came swiftly enough, but just as she presented her broadside to the sea, up rose a monstrous wave. Over, over she went--over until the third ratline of the lee rigging was under water; that is to say, the lee rail was full six feet under the sea. One hideous tumult prevailed, one dazzling glare of foaming water surrounded us; but I doubt whether any of us thought of anything but how long we could hold our breath. Had she been less deeply loaded she must have capsized. As it was, she righted again, and came up into the wind still afloat. But never before or since have I seen a vessel behave like that hove to. We were black and blue with being banged about, our arms strained almost to uselessness by holding on. Beast as she was, the strength of her hull was amazing, or she would have been racked to splinters: for in that awful sea she rolled clean to windward until she filled herself, then canted back again until she lay nearly on her beam-ends; and this she did continually for three days and nights. At the first of the trouble the cabin had been gutted so that neither officers nor passengers had a dry thread, and of course all cooking was impossible. I saw the skipper chasing his sextant (in its box) around the saloon-table, which was just level with the water which was making havoc with everything. And not a man of us for’ard but had some pity to spare for the one woman passenger (going out with her little boy to join her husband), who, we knew, was crouching in the corner of an upper bunk in her cabin, hugging her child to her bosom, and watching with fascinated eyes the sullen wash of the dark water that plunged back and forth across the sodden strip of carpet.

In spite of all these defects in the ship, she reached Lyttelton in safety at last; and I, with more thankfulness than I knew how to express, was released from her, and took my place as an officer on board a grand old ship three times her size. Unfortunately for me, my sea experience of her extended only over one short passage to Adelaide, where she was laid up for sale; and of my next ship I have spoken at length elsewhere, so I may not enlarge upon her behaviour here. After that I had the good fortune to get a berth as second mate of the _Harbinger_, to my mind one of the noblest specimens of modern shipbuilding that ever floated. She was lofty--210 feet from water-line to skysail truck--and with all her white wings spread, thirty-one mighty sails, she looked like a mountain of snow. She was built of steel, and in every detail was as perfect as any sailor could wish. For all her huge bulk she was as easy to handle as any ten-ton yacht--far easier than some--and in any kind of weather her docility was amazing. No love-sick youth was ever more enamoured of his sweetheart than I of that splendid ship. For hours of my watch below I have sat perched upon the martingale guys under the jib-boom, watching with all a lover’s complacency the stately sheer of her stem through the sparkling sea, and dreamily noting the delicate play of rainbow tints through and through the long feather of spray that ran unceasingly up the stem, and, curling outward, fell in a diamond shower upon the blue surface below. She was so clean in the entrance that you never saw a foaming spread of broken water ahead, driven in front by the vast onset of the hull. She parted the waves before her pleasantly, as an arrow the air; graciously, as if loath to disturb their widespread solitude.

But it needed a tempest to show her “way” in its perfection. Like the _Wanderer_, but in a grand and gracious fashion, she seemed to claim affinity with the waves, and they in their wildest tumult met her as if they too knew and loved her. She was the only ship I ever knew or heard of that would “stay” under storm-staysails, reefed topsails, and a reefed foresail in a gale of wind. In fact, I never saw anything that she would not do that a ship should do. She was so truly a child of the ocean that even a bungler could hardly mishandle her; she _would_ work well in spite of him. And, lastly, she would _steer_ when you could hardly detect an air out of the heavens, with a sea like a mirror, and the sails hanging apparently motionless. The men used to say she would go a knot with only the quartermaster whistling at the wheel for a wind.

Then for my sins I shipped before the mast in an equally large iron ship bound for Calcutta. She was everything that the _Harbinger_ was not--an ugly abortion that the sea hated. When I first saw her (after I had shipped), I asked the cook whether she wasn’t a razeed steamboat--I had almost said an adapted loco-boiler. When he told me that this was only her second voyage I had to get proof before I could believe him. And as her hull was, so were her sails. They looked like a job lot scared up at ship-chandlers’ sales, and hung upon the yards like rags drying. Our contempt for her was too great for words. Of course she was under water while there was any wind to speak of, and her motions were as strange as those of a seasick pig. A dredger would have beaten her at sailing; a Medway barge, with her Plimsoll mark in the main-rigging, would have been ten times as comfortable. Somehow we buttocked her out in 190 days with 2500 tons of salt in her hold, and again my fortunate star intervened to get me out of her and into a better ship as second mate.

Of steamers I have no authority to speak, although they, too, have their ways, quite as non-understandable as sailing-ships, and complicated, too, by the additional entity of the engines within. But everything that floats and is built by man, from the three-log catamaran of the Malabar coast, or the balsa of Brazil, up to the latest leviathan, has a way of its own, and that way is certainly, in all its variations, past finding out.

SEA ETIQUETTE

Nothing is more loudly regretted by the praisers of old times than the gradual disappearance of etiquette under the stress and burden of these bustling days, and nowhere is the decay of etiquette more pronounced than at sea. Romance persists because until machinery can run itself humanity must do so, and where men and women live romance cannot die. But were it not for the Royal Navy, with its perfect discipline and unbroken traditions, etiquette at sea must without doubt perish entirely, and that soon. Such fragments of it as still survive in the Merchant Service are confined to sailing-ships, those beautiful visions that are slowly disappearing one by one from off the face of the deep. Take, for instance, the grand old custom so full of meaning of “saluting the deck.” The poop or raised after-deck of a ship over which floated the national flag was considered to be always pervaded by the presence of the Sovereign, and, as the worshipper of whatever rank removes his hat upon entering a church, so from the Admiral to the powder-monkey every member of the ship’s company as he set foot upon the poop “saluted the deck”--the invisible presence. As the division between men-of-war and merchantmen widened so the practice weakened in the latter, and only now survives in the rigidly enforced practice of every person below the rank of Captain or mate coming up on to the poop by the lee side. And among the officers the practice is also observed according to rank, for with the Captain on deck the chief mate takes the lee side. But since in steamers there is often no lee side, the custom in them has completely died out. To etiquette also belongs the strict observance of the rule in all vessels of tacking “Sir” on to every reply to an officer, or the accepted synonym for his position to a tradesman who is a petty officer, as “Boss” for boatswain, “Chips” for carpenter, “Sails” for sailmaker, and “Doctor” for cook. A woeful breach of etiquette is committed by the Captain who, coming on deck while one of his mates is carrying out some manœuvre, takes upon himself to give orders direct to the men. It is seldom resented by junior officers for obvious reasons, but the chief mate would probably retire to another part of the vessel at once with the remark that it was “only one man’s work.”

In many cases etiquette and discipline are so closely interwoven that it is hard to know where one leaves off and the other begins, but in all such cases observance is strictly enforced as being one of the few remaining means whereby even a simulacrum of discipline is maintained in undermanned and oversparred sailing-ships--such as the repetition of every order given by the hearer, the careful avoidance of any interference by one man with another’s work in the presence of an officer, and the preservation of each officer’s rightful attitude toward those under his charge and his superiors. Thus during the secular work of the day, work, that is, apart from handling the ship, the mate gives his orders to the boatswain, who sees them carried out. Serious friction always arises when during any operation the mate comes between the boatswain and his gang, unless, as sometimes happens, the boatswain be hopelessly incompetent.

In the private life of the ship every officer’s berth is his house, sacred, inviolable, wherein none may enter without his invitation. And in a case of serious dereliction of duty or disqualification it becomes his prison. “Go to your room, sir,” is a sentence generally equivalent to professional ruin, since a young officer’s future lies in the hollow of his Commander’s hand. The saloon is free to officers only at meal-times, not a common parlour wherein they may meet for chat and recreation, except in port with the Captain ashore. And as it is “aft” so in its degree is it “forrard.” In some ships the carpenter has a berth to himself and a workshop besides, into which none may enter under pain of instant wrath--and “Chips” is not a man to be lightly offended. But in most cases all the petty officers berth together in an apartment called by courtesy the “half-deck,” although it seldom resembles in a remote degree the dingy, fœtid hole that originally bore that name. Very dignified are the petty officers, gravely conscious of their dignity, and sternly set upon the due maintenance of their rightful status as the backbone of the ship’s company. Such a grave breach of etiquette as an “A.B.” entering their quarters, with or without invitation, is seldom heard of, and quite as infrequent are the occasions when an officer does so. In large ships, where six or seven apprentices are carried, an apartment in a house on deck is set apart for their sole occupation, and the general characteristic of such an abode is chaos--unless, indeed, there should be a senior apprentice of sufficient stability to preserve order, which there seldom is. These “boys’ houses” are bad places for a youngster fresh from school, unless a conscientious Captain or chief mate should happen to be at the head of affairs and make it his business to give an eye to the youngsters’ proceedings when off duty. Of course etiquette may be looked for in vain here, unless it be the etiquette of “fagging” in its worst sense.

The men’s quarters, always called the forecastle, even when a more humane shipowner than usual has relegated the forecastle proper to its rightful use as lockers for non-perishable stores and housed his men in a building on deck, is always divided longitudinally in half. The port or mate’s watch live on the port side, the starboard or second mate’s watch on the starboard side. To this rule there is no exception. And here we have etiquette _in excelsis_. Although the barrier between the two sides is usually of the flimsiest and often quite imaginary in effect, it is a wall of separation with gates guarded and barred. The visitor from one side to the other, whatever his excuse, approaches humbly, feeling ill at ease until made welcome. And from dock to dock it is an unheard-of thing for any officer save the Captain to so much as _look_ into the forecastle. Of course, exceptional circumstances do arise, such as a general outbreak of recalcitrancy, but the occasion must be abnormal for such a breach of etiquette to be made. Some Captains very wisely make it their duty to go the round of the ship each morning, seeing that everything is as it should be, and these enter the forecastle as a part of their examination. But this is quite the exception to the general rule, and is always felt to be more or less of an infringement of immemorial right.

In what must be called the social life of the forecastle, although it is commonly marked by an utter absence of social observances, there are several well-defined rules of etiquette which persist in spite of all other changes. One must not lock his chest at sea. As soon as the last landsman has left the ship, unlock the “donkey,” throw the key ostentatiously into the till, and, letting the lid fall, seat yourself upon it, and light your pipe. It is a Masonic sign of good-fellowship, known and read of all men, that you are a “Sou’ Spainer” indeed, at home again. The first time that the newly assembled crew sit down gipsy fashion to a meal (for tables are seldom supplied), there may be one, usually a boy, who fails to remove his cap. Then does the nearest man’s hand seek the “bread-barge” for a whole biscuit, generally of tile-like texture and consistency. Grasping it by spreading his fingers all over its circumference, the mentor brings it down crushingly upon the covered head of the offender, who is thus initiated, as it were, to the fact that he must “show respect to his grub,” as the term goes. But often when the commons have been exceptionally short or bad an old seaman will deliberately put on his cap again with the remark “’Tain’t wuth it.” If a man wants to smoke while a meal is in progress let him go outside, unless he desires deliberately to raise a storm. And when on the first day of serving out stores a man has been induced to undertake the onerous duty of dividing to each one his weekly portion--“whacking out”--gross indeed must be his carelessness or unfairness before any sufferer will raise a protest. It used to be the practice to load the boys or ordinary seamen (a grade between “A.B.” and boy) with all the menial service of the forecastle, such as food-fetching, washing up utensils, scrubbing, &c. But a juster and wiser plan has been borrowed from the Navy, whereby each man takes in rotation a week as “cook of the mess.” He cooks nothing, the “Doctor” will take care of that, but he is the servant of his house for that week, responsible for its due order and cleanliness. The boys are usually kept out of the forecastle altogether, and berthed with the petty officers, a plan which has with some advantages grave drawbacks. One curious old custom deserves passing notice. Upon a vessel’s arrival in ports where it is necessary to anchor, it is usual to set what is called an “anchor-watch” the first night. All hands take part in this for one hour each, or should do so, but that sometimes there are too few and sometimes too many. As soon as the order is given to “pick for anchor-watch” an old hand draws a rude circle on the deck, which he subdivides into as many sections as there are men. Then one man retires while all the rest come forward and make each man his private mark in a section. When all have contributed, the excluded one (whose mark has been made for him by deputy) is called in and solemnly rubs out mark after mark, the first to be rubbed out giving its owner the first hour’s watch, and so on.

Nothing has been said about etiquette in the Royal Navy, because there it is hardly ever to be distinguished from disciplinary rule. Nor has allusion been more than casually made to steamships, whose routine excludes etiquette, having no more room for it than it has for seamanship, except upon rare occasions.

WAVES

Beloved of the poet and the painter, appealing by the inimitable grace of their curves and marvel of their motion to all mankind, the waves of the sea take easily their high place with the stars and the mountains as some of the chief glories attendant upon the round world. Only an artist, perhaps, could do justice to the multiplicity of lovely lines into which the ruffled surface of the ocean enwreathes itself under the pressure of the storm. Yet any one with an eye for the beautiful will find it hard to leave a sight so fair, will watch unweariedly for hours the gliding, curling masses as they rise, apparently in defiance of law, subside and rise again and yet again.