Part 9

For the first time that voyage an attempt was made to confine a portion of our farm-stock within a pen, instead of allowing them to roam at their own sweet will about the decks. For the skipper still cherished the idea that milk for tea and coffee might be obtained from the two goats that would be palatable, if only their habit of promiscuous grazing could be stopped. So the carpenter rigged up a tiny corral beneath the fo’c’s’le deck, and there, in penitential gloom, the goats were confined and fed, like all the rest of the animals, on last voyage’s biscuit and weevily pease. Under these depressing conditions there was, of course, only one thing left for self-respecting goats to do--refuse to secrete any more milk. They promptly did so; so promptly, in fact, that on the second morning the utmost energies of the steward only sufficed to squeeze out from the sardonic pair about half-a-dozen teaspoonfuls of doubtful-looking fluid. This sealed their fate, for we had far too much stock on board to waste any portion of our provender upon non-producers, and the fiat went forth--the drones must die. Some suggestion was made by a member of the after guard as to the possibility of the crew not objecting to goat as a change of diet; but with all the skipper’s boldness, he did not venture to make the attempt. The goats were slain, their hides were saved for chafing gear, sheaths for knives, &c., but, with the exception of a portion that was boiled down with much disgust by the cook and given to the fowls, most of the flesh was flung overboard. Then general complaints arose that while musk was a pleasant perfume taken in moderation, a little of it went a very long way, and that two musk deer might be relied upon to provide as much scent in one day as would suffice all hands for a year. I do not know how it was done, but two days after the demise of the goats the deer also vanished. Still we could not be said to enjoy much room to move about on deck yet. We had 200 fowls and forty ducks roaming at large, and although many of the former idiotic birds tried their wings, with the result of finding the outside of the ship a brief and uncertain abiding-place, the state of the ship’s decks was still utterly abominable. A week of uninterrupted fine weather under the blazing sun of the Bay of Bengal had made every one but the skipper heartily sick of sea-farming, and consequently it was with many pleasurable anticipations that we noted the first increase in the wind that necessitated a reduction of sail. It made the fellows quite gay to think of the clearance that would presently take place. The breeze freshened steadily all night, and in the morning it was blowing a moderate gale, with an ugly cross sea, which, with the _Belle’s_ well-known clumsiness, she was allowing to break aboard in all directions. By four bells there were many gaps in our company of fowls. Such a state of affairs robbed them of the tiny modicum of gumption they had ever possessed, and every little breaking sea that lolloped inboard drove some of them, with strident outcry, to seek refuge overboard. Presently came what we had been expecting all the morning--one huge mass of water extending from the break of the poop to the forecastle, which filled the decks rail high, fore and aft. Proceedings were exceedingly animated for a time. The ducks took very kindly to the new arrangement at first, sailing joyously about, and tasting the bitter brine as if they rather liked the flavour. But they were vastly puzzled by the incomprehensible motions of the whole mass of water under them; it was a phenomenon transcending all their previous aquatic experiences. The fowls gave the whole thing up, floating languidly about like worn-out feather brooms upon the seething flood of water, and hardly retaining enough energy to struggle when the men, splashing about like a crack team in a water-polo match, snatched at them and conveyed them in heaps to a place of security under the forecastle. That day’s breeze got rid of quite two-thirds of our feathered friends for us, what with the number that had flown or been washed overboard and those unfortunates who had died in wet heaps under the forecastle. The old man was much annoyed, and could by no means understand the unwonted cheerfulness of everybody else. But, economical to the last, he ordered the steward to slay as many of the survivors each day as would give every man one body apiece for dinner, in lieu of the usual rations of salt beef or pork. This royal command gave all hands great satisfaction, for it is a superstition on board ship that to feed upon chicken is the height of epicurean luxury. Dinner-time, therefore, was awaited with considerable impatience; in fact, a good deal of sleep was lost by the watch below over the prospect of such an unusual luxury. I went to the galley as usual, my mouth watering like the rest, but when I saw the dirty little Maltese cook harpooning the carcasses out of the coppers, my appetite began to fail me. He carefully counted into my kid one corpse to each man, and I silently bore them into the forecastle to the midst of the gaping crowd. Ah me! how was their joy turned into sorrow, their sorrow into rage, by the rapidest of transitions. She was a hungry ship at the best of times, but when things had been at their worst they had never quite reached the present sad level. It is hardly possible to imagine what that feast looked like. An East Indian jungle fowl is by no means a fleshy bird when at its best, but these poor wretches had been living upon what little flesh they wore when they came on board for about ten days, the scanty ration of paddy and broken biscuit having been insufficient to keep them alive. And then they had been scalded wholesale, the feathers roughly wiped off them, and plunged into a copper of furiously bubbling seawater, where they had remained until the wooden-headed Maltese judged it time to fish them out and send them to be eaten. They were just like ladies’ bustles covered with old parchment, and I have serious doubts whether more than half of them were drawn. I dare not attempt to reproduce the comments of my starving shipmates, unless I gave a row of dashes which would be suggestive but not enlightening. Old Nat the Yankee, who was the doyen of the forecastle, was the first to recover sufficiently from the shock to formulate a definite plan of action. “In my ’pinion,” he said, “thishyer’s ’bout reached th’ bottom notch. I kin stan’ bein’ starved; in these yer limejuicers a feller’s got ter stan’ that, but I be ’tarnally dod-gasted ef I kin see bein’ starved ’n’ insulted at the same time by the notion ov bein’ bloated with lugsury. I’m goin’ ter take thishyer kid full o’ bramley-kites aft an’ ask th’ ole man ef he don’t think it’s ’bout time somethin’ wuz said _an’_ done by th’ croo ov this hooker.” There was no dissentient voice heard, and solemnly as a funeral procession, Nat leading the way with the corpuses delicti, the whole watch tramped aft. I need not dwell upon the interview. Sufficient that there was a good deal of animated conversation, and much jeering on the skipper’s part at the well-known cussedness of sailors, who, as everybody knows (or think they know), will growl if fed on all the delicacies of the season served up on 18-carat plate. But we got no more poultry, thank Heaven. And I do not think the officers regretted the fact that before we got clear of the bay the last of that sad crowd of feathered bipeds had ceased to worry any of us, but had wisely given up the attempt to struggle against such a combination of trying circumstances.

The herd of swine, however, throve apace. To the manner born, nothing came amiss to them, and I believe they even enjoyed the many quaint tricks played upon them by the monkeys, and the ceaseless antagonism of the dogs. But the father of the family was a sore trial to our energetic carpenter. Chips had a sneaking regard for pigs, and knew more than anybody on board about them; but that big boar, he said, made him commit more sin with his tongue in one day than all the other trying details of his life put together. For Denis’s tusks grew amazingly, and his chief amusement consisted in rooting about until he found a splinter in the decks underneath which he could insert a tusk. Then he would lie down or crouch on his knees, and fidget away at that sliver of pine until he had succeeded in ripping a long streak up; and if left undisturbed for a few minutes, he would gouge quite a large hollow out of the deck. No ship’s decks that ever I saw were so full of patches as ours were, and despite all our watchfulness they were continually increasing. It became a regular part of the carpenter’s duties to capture Denis periodically by lassoing him, lash him up to the pin-rail by his snout, and with a huge pair of pincers snap off those fast-growing tusks as close down to the jaw as possible. In spite of this heroic treatment, Denis always seemed to find enough of tusk left to rip up a sliver of deck if ever he could find a quiet corner; and the carpenter was often heard to declare that the cunning beast was a lineal descendant of a survivor of the demon-possessed herd of Gadara.

In the case of the pigs, though, there were compensations. By the time we arrived off Mauritius, a rumour went round that on Friday a pig was to be killed, and great was the excitement. The steward swelled with importance as, armed with the cabin carving-knife, he strode forward and selected _two_ of the first litter of piglets, the Bombay born, for sacrifice. He had plenty of voluntary helpers from the watch below, who had no fears for the quality of this meat, and only trembled at the thought that perchance the old man might bear malice in the matter of the fowls and refuse to send any pork in our direction. Great was the uproar as the chosen ones were seized by violent hands, their legs tied with spun-yarn, and their throats exposed to the stern purpose of the steward. Unaware that the critical eye of Chips was upon him, he made a huge gash across the victim’s throat, and then plunged the knife in diagonally until the whole length of the blade disappeared. “Man alive,” said Chips, “ye’re sewerly daft. Thon’s nay wye to stick a pig. If ye haena shouldert the puir beastie A’am a hog mysel’.” “You mind your own business, Carpenter,” replied the steward, with dignity; “I don’t want anybody to show me how to do _my_ work.” “Gie _me_ nane o’ yer impidence, ye feckless loon,” shouted Chips. “A’am tellin’ ye thon’s spilin’ guide meat for want o’ juist a wee bit o’ knowin’ how. Hae! lat me show ye if ye’re thick heid’s able to tak’ onythin’ in ava.” And so speaking, he brushed the indignant steward aside, at the same time drawing his pocket-knife. The second pig was laid out, and Chips, as delicately as if performing tracheotomy, slit his weasand. The black puddings were not forgotten, but I got such a distaste for that particular delicacy from learning how they were made (I hadn’t the slightest idea before) that I have never been able to touch one since.

Chips now took upon himself the whole direction of affairs, and truly he was a past-master in the art and mystery of the pork-butcher. He knew just the temperature of the water, the happy medium between scalding the hair on and not scalding it off; knew, too, how to manipulate chitterlings and truss the carcass up till it looked just as if hanging in a first-class pork shop. But the steward was sore displeased. For it is a prime canon of sea etiquette not to interfere with another man’s work, and in the known incapacity of the cook, whose duty the pigkilling should ordinarily have been, the steward came next by prescriptive right. However, Chips, having undertaken the job, was not the man to give it up until it was finished, and by universal consent he had a right to be proud of his handiwork. That Sunday’s dinner was a landmark, a date to reckon from, although the smell from the galley at suppertime on Saturday and breakfast-time on Sunday made us all quite faint and weak from desire, as well as fiercely resentful of the chaffy biscuit and filthy fragments of beef that were a miserable substitute for a meal with us.

But thenceforward the joy of good living was ours every Sunday until we reached home. Ten golden epochs, to be looked forward to with feverish longing over the six hungry days between each. And when off the Western Islands, Chips tackled the wicked old Madrassee sow single-handed, in the pride of his prowess allowing no one to help him although she was nearly as large as himself--ah! that was the culminating point. Such a feast was never known to any of us before, for in spite of her age she was succulent and sapid, and, as the Irish say, there was “lashins and lavins.” When we arrived in the East India Docks, we still had, besides the two progenitors of our stock, eight fine young porkers, such a company as would have been considered a most liberal allowance on leaving home for any ship I have ever sailed in before or since. As for Denis and Jenny, I am afraid to estimate their giant proportions. They were not grossly fat, but enormously large--quite the largest pigs I have ever seen--and when they were lifted ashore by the hydraulic crane, and landed in the railway truck for conveyance to Cellardyke, to taste the joys of country life on Captain Smith’s farm, there was a rush of spectators from all parts of the dock to gaze open-mouthed upon these splendid specimens of ship-bred swine. But few could be got to believe that, eleven months before, the pair of them had been carried on board in one sack by an undersized man, and that their sole sustenance had been “hard-tack” and pea-soup.

III

Such an extensive collection of farm-stock as we carried in the _Belle_ was, like the method of dealing with it, probably unique. Certainly so in my experience, and in that of all the shipmates with whom I have ever discussed the matter. For this reason, a _dirty_ ship upon the high seas is an anomaly, something not to be imagined; that is, in the sense of loose dirt, of course, because sailors will call a ship dirty whose paint and varnish have been scrubbed or weathered off, and, through poverty or meanness, left unrenewed. The _Belle_ would no doubt have looked clean to the average landsman, but to a sailor she was offensively filthy, and the language used at night when handling the running gear (_i.e._ the ropes which regulate the sails, &c., aloft, and are, when disused, coiled on pins or on deck) was very wicked and plentiful. In fact, as Old Nat remarked casually one Sunday afternoon, when the watch had been roused to tack ship, and all the inhabitants of the farmery, disturbed from their roosting places or lairs, were unmusically seeking fresh quarters, “Ef thishyer---- old mud-scow’s out much longer we sh’ll hev’ ’nother cargo aboard when we du arrive. People ’ll think we cum fr’m the Chinchees with gooanner.”

But, as I have said, the _Belle_ was certainly an exception. I joined a magnificent steel clipper called the _Harbinger_ in Adelaide as second mate, and, on taking my first walk round her, discovered that she too was well provided in the matter of farm-stock, besides, to my amazement, for I had thought the day for such things long past, carrying a cow. But all the arrangements for the housing, feeding, and general comfort of the live-stock on board were on a most elaborate scale, as, indeed, was the ship’s equipment generally. The cow-house, for instance, was a massive erection of solid teak with brass fittings and fastenings, large enough to take two cows comfortably, and varnished outside till it looked like a huge cabinet. Its place when at sea was on the main hatch, where it was nearly two feet off the deck, and by means of ring-bolts was lashed so firmly that only a perfectly disastrous sea breaking on board could possibly move it. Its solidly-built doors opened in halves, of which the lower half only was kept fastened by day, so that Poley stood at her window gazing meditatively out at the blue expanse of the sea with a mild, abstracted air, which immediately vanished if any one inadvertently came too near her premises. She had a way of suddenly dabbing her big soapy muzzle into the back of one’s neck while the victim’s attention was taken up elsewhere that was disconcerting. And one night, in the middle watch, she created a veritable sensation by walking into the forecastle unseen by anybody on deck. The watch below were all sound asleep, of course, but the unusual footsteps, and long inquisitive breaths, like escaping steam, emitted by the visitor, soon roused them by their unfamiliarity. Voice called unto voice across the darkness (and a ship’s forecastle at night is a shade or so darker than a coal-cellar), “What is it? Light the lamp, somebody”; but with that vast mysterious monster floundering around, no one dared venture out of the present security of his bunk. It was really most alarming--waking up to such an invisible horror as that, and, as one of the fellows said to me afterwards, “All the creepy yarns I’d ever read in books come inter me head at once, until I was almost dotty with ’fraid.” This situation was relieved by one of the other watch, who, coming in to get something out of a chum’s chest, struck a match, and by its pale glimmer revealed the huge bulk of poor Poley, who, scared almost to drying up her milk, was endeavouring to bore her way through the bows in order to get out. The butcher was hurriedly roused from his quarters farther aft, and, muttering maledictions upon ships and all sailors, the sea and all cattle, slouched to the spot. His voice immediately reassured the wanderer, who turned round at its first angry words and deliberately marched out of the forecastle, leaving a lavish contribution in her wake as a memento of her visit.

Between the butcher and Poley a charming affection existed. She loved him most fondly, and the Cardigan jacket he wore was a proof thereof. For while engaged in grooming her, which he did most conscientiously every morning, she would reach round whenever possible and lick him wherever she could touch him. In consequence of this affectionate habit of hers his Cardigan was an object of derision to all on board until upon our arrival in Cape Town one of our departing passengers divided a case of extra special Scotch whisky among the crew. The butcher being of an absorbent turn, shifted a goodly quantity of the seductive fluid, and presently, feeling very tired, left the revellers and disappeared. Next morning he was nowhere to be found. A prolonged search was made, and at last the missing man was discovered peacefully slumbering by the side of the cow, all unconscious of the fact that she had licked away at him until nothing remained of his Cardigan but the sleeves, and in addition a great deal of his shirt was missing. It is only fair to suppose that, given time enough, she would have removed all his clothing. It was a depraved appetite certainly, but as I have before noticed, _that_ is not uncommon among animals at sea. It was her only lapse, however, from virtue in that direction. Truly her opportunities were small, being such a close prisoner, but the marvel to me was how, in the absence of what I should say was proper food, she kept up her supply of milk for practically the whole voyage. She never once set foot on shore from the time the vessel left London until she returned, and as green food was most difficult to obtain in Adelaide, she got a taste of it only about four times during our stay. Australian hay, too, is not what a dainty English cow would be likely to hanker after; yet with all these drawbacks it was not until we had crossed the Line on the homeward passage that her milk began to dwindle seriously in amount. Thenceforward it decreased, until in the Channel the butcher handed in to the steward one morning a contribution of about a gill, saying, “If you want any more, sir, you’ll have to put the suction hose on to her. I sh’d say her milkin’ days was done.” But for long previous to this the ingenious butcher had been raiding the cargo (of wheat) for his pet, and each day would present her with two bucketfuls of boiled wheat, which she seemed to relish amazingly. Partly because of this splendid feeding, and partly owing to the regular washing and groomings she received, I imagine she was such a picture of an animal when she stepped out of the ship in London as I have only seen at cattle shows or on advertisement cards. You could not see a bone; her sides were like a wall of meat, and her skin had a sheen on it like satin. As she was led away, I said to the butcher, who had been assisting at her debarkation, “I suppose you’ll have her again next voyage, won’t you, butcher?” “No fear,” he answered sagely. “She’s gone to be butchered. She’ll be prime beef in a day or two.” I looked at him with something like consternation. He seemed to think it was a grand idea, although even now the mournful call of his old favourite was ringing in his ears. At last I said, “I wonder you can bear to part with her; you’ve been such chums all the voyage.” “I don’t know what you mean, sir,” he replied. “I looked after her ’cause it’s my bisness, but I’d jest as leave slaughter her myself as not.” With that he left me to resume his duty.