Part 23
As noted in an earlier page, some people are crying now that as soon as the Central American canal is cut through it will be the instantaneous death-knell of the long-voyage sailing vessel, but those who really understand the business of transportation by water do not agree to this by any means. Here are the words of Arthur Sewall, than whom few, if any, are more competent to speak on the matter: “As long as the wind blows and water flows there will be sailing ships built and business to keep them busy. There will always be a chance for them to compete against steam in traffic where time is not a factor, or where delay is actually a good thing. For instance, there is the wheat crop. In July or August it begins to be ready for delivery, and in a short time the whole year’s supply is ready for shipment. But the consumption of a crop stretches over a whole year. Shipping wheat in sailing vessels consumes several months’ time, which would otherwise require the storing of the wheat. Sailing freights are actually less than steam freights, plus storage charges. So, you see, here is business which sailing ships can hold. Then, again, take railroad materials, especially rails, which are manufactured faster than they can be used, and where the delay of sail over steam is better than storage. Of course, as in any other business, it is a case of the survival of the fittest, and as smaller ships are relatively more expensive than large ones, small ships cannot make money, and will have to make way for large ones.”
An excellent precedent in favor of the continuance of sailing vessels is that subject in connection with the Suez Canal. When this was a thing accomplished it was said that no more square-riggers would go out around Good Hope; yet consider the enormous amount of sail tonnage that is despatched every year to India, China, Australia, and Japan, for it is computed that eight hundred sailing vessels double Agulhas every year in both directions, and as but few of the ships in the Eastern trade have a carrying capacity of less than thirty-five hundred tons, the amount of merchandise that passes the southern extremity of Africa per annum foots up the imposing total of at least seven million tons.
Mr. Goggins appeared at dinner to-day in a frock-coat! Can one conceive the effect produced upon the mind by the contiguity of a frock-coat and a red-flannel shirt. Certainly not. No one could unless he had seen it. Goggins was monstrously proud of it, too, in spite of its being several sizes too small for him, and ostentatiously got up during the soup and officiated at the drawing of a pitcher of root-beer from the “kag” in the corner, during which evolution he suddenly became embarrassed at the unwonted attention centered upon himself, and in some way managed to upset the pitcher all over the floor; and when he sat down he was in such a state of excitement that his nasal whistlings and obligatos were more piercing than ever before. And just think of this creature’s name, Leander! Oh, heavens, it is too much! Latitude, 26° 54′ south; longitude, 84° 50′ west.
+August 9+
Ninety days at sea, and another month cannot take us in, nor do we desire it, in spite of our surroundings. The wind has freshened constantly, and, being to the eastward of southeast, it has sent us along at an eight-knot clip, steady and true, and we have done one hundred and ninety miles in the twenty-four hours by the log, for we have had no sights for three or four days. The temperature is almost perfect, about 65° day and night, and as there is no sun to dazzle one, reading on deck has once more become a joy.
Yesterday afternoon MacFoy returned Nansen’s “First Crossing of Greenland,” which he borrowed a few days ago; he is an intelligent man and knows all of Nordenskjold’s works pretty thoroughly. There is a notion, though, to which he clings with characteristic Scotch tenacity; in spite of everything, he insists that Nansen started upon his last great voyage in a steam whaler from San Francisco.
But if this fellow is well read, what can be said of old Kelly, in the mate’s watch. We pumped together yesterday afternoon and had much conversation, during which he said that he hailed from Charleston, but that his family had moved north to Troy when the war broke out, and that his parents had brought him up strictly and decently. He volunteered no reason for having turned sailor, but branched off into literature, beginning with a pertinent quotation from Burns and another from Moore. These led him on, and he expressed great admiration for ancient history, concluding with a well-turned eulogy on Gibbon’s “Rome,” with illustrations for preferring it to any other account of that great empire. At first it seems extraordinary to find so intelligent a man before the mast, living a beast’s life, and surrounded by men with whom he has but little in common. Yet such fellows are by no means uncommon at sea, for one often happens upon a man in a Cape Horner’s forecastle whom Nature did not intend should be there.
How different is old Kelly’s conversation from that of the mate, especially at dinner and supper, when he shouts out his witless jokes! To-day he burst in with the following silly story, and it was totally irrelevant to what we were talking about: “There was a hold feller I knoo onct that lived in the country, and when ’e saw the telegrapht wires put hup past ’is farm, ’e ’ung a pair ’o boots on ’em to send ’em to ’is son.” At the conclusion of such pleasantries his sense of humor is so agitated that he seems upon the brink of spasms, and his temporal arteries swell out as big as lead-pencils, while he chortles and wheezes and gasps like an old tattered bellows.
What quaint expressions sailors have, too! Mr. Rarx was talking about athletics last night, and incidentally asked who was now the greatest “hammer-heaver”; it must be remembered that objects at sea are never thrown, they are always hove.
As we approach the final quarter of the voyage we cannot help wishing that we were going to land at Calcutta as we did before. Oh, the incomparable delight, the unbounded pleasure of those two months in India which followed the termination of our voyage in the “Mandalore”! The memories of those nine weeks in British India carry with them a charm perfectly indescribable; and were it given us to visit but one more country on the globe during our lifetime, we would unhesitatingly choose another stay in the land of the Himalayas. Latitude, 24° 28′ south; longitude, 87° 5′ west.
+August 10+
Moderate southeasterly breezes, a smooth sea, and magnificent weather. He who would not be happy here now must needs be hard to please. At midnight we cut the circle of Capricorn, and have, happily, once more entered the torrid zone, after an absence of fifty days, for it was on June 20 that we passed Capricorn in the Atlantic. Verily, it doesn’t seem as though almost two months have elapsed since we first sighted the “Judas Dowes” that Sunday in the latitude of Rio. How time speeds on at sea! A week does not seem longer than twenty-four hours, and before we realize it they will be making ready the anchor. Our progress is very gratifying, though the perversity of the skipper will not allow him to believe or even to suppose that we have taken the Trades. He has surprised us much in the last few days by going down on the main-deck and assisting in the repair of the old sails. See how inconsistent he is! He considers himself so infinitely above the sailors that mere proximity to them under other circumstances, even for a moment, carries infection with it; yet now, down he stalks to the main-deck, off comes his coat, and down he drops flat, his short fat legs sticking wide out before him like a brownie’s, as he turns to in a cluster of the defiling sailors. For some days he sewed merrily away on top of the deck-house, which was a different affair altogether, and sail-making is a very agreeable pastime. But we were immeasurably astonished at the arrogant Scruggs’s consorting thus with the foe.
As the captain and I were pacing the poop at ten o’clock last evening, the sky at the time being cloudless and the moon almost full, suddenly, as we turned to go aft, we saw, over our shoulders, a dazzling glare of light from forward, like a very bright lightning-flash, and, turning quickly, we observed a ball of fire shoot by at right angles to our course and disappear behind the foretop-gallant-sail. “What was that?” said I. “Oh, that was just a meteor or whatever you call it,” answered the skipper; “you often see ’em hereabouts. Last voyage one bursted near the ship at night at the dark o’ the moon somewhere about 15° south, and most scared all hands to death.” Such exhibitions are met with in all parts of the world, even in cold, high latitudes. I remember the case of the large British ship “Cawdor,” Captain Jardella, during one of her recent voyages from Swansea to San Francisco. She made a very long passage on this occasion of one hundred and eighty-four days. She had a terrible battering in the Southern Ocean, and reported on arrival that off Cape Horn an enormous meteor plunged into the sea with a stunning explosion, so close as to flood the decks.
We learned last evening of a horrid accident that occurred on this ship six weeks before we sailed on the present voyage. The mate spun the yarn in these words: “We had just warped into the docks in Brooklyn to discharge, when a gang o’ stevedores came over the side to rig the gear for unloadin’. ‘Where’s the cargo pendant?’ says the boss stevedore. ‘There it is,’ says I, ‘and there’s a gantline, too,’ I says, pointin’ to a coil o’ brand-noo manila. Well, they began for to rig the falls, while I went into the cabin for dinner. I seen one o’ the fellers on the mainyard as I went in, but I didn’t think no more about it for maybe ten minutes, when I heard a sickenin’ crash, and out I jumped. Did you ever hear a man fall from aloft? Hit’s awful, sir. When I got out on deck there was a lot o’ stevedores standin’ around lookin’ at somethin’ on the main-’atch. I didn’t want to look at what I knew it was, but I had to; so I shoved my way through, and there lay the big, heavy man I’d seen on the mainyard. I didn’t see anythin’ wrong with him first off till I went round on t’other side, and there was his head cracked open just as if you’d dropped a mushmellon on the ground, and the hinsides was spattered all over the ’atch cover. Plenty o’ these here stevedores git hurt, and often it’s the fault o’ rotten gear, and then there’s a case ag’in’ the ship. But I’m too hold a bird to git took in like that, and I always gives ’em brand-noo rope.”
It is strange that more sailors are not killed by falling from aloft, for they not only appear to be, but really are, very careless, and two or three of our men have more than once just saved themselves from tremendous falls. Not long ago that handsome four-masted ship “Puritan” lost two men from the upper foretop-sail-yard, only two hundred miles from Sandy Hook, bound out to Hiogo; and it is a serious matter to start an eighteen-thousand-mile voyage short two hands, when ships are allowed to go to sea in these days with twenty seamen instead of thirty. Latitude 22° 19′ south; longitude, 89° 15′ west.
+August 11+
Still no change in anything but the thermometer, the instrument at mid-day showing 70° for the first time in many weeks. How superb, how glorious this weather surely is! There is not too much sun to render sitting anywhere on deck at all unpleasant, yet we have enough to give us all the necessary observations; the soft, rich southeast Trades come flowing smoothly over the quarter, while the ocean, the limitless South Pacific, lies motionless to the horizon, save for the brittle, little cat’s-paws that spangle the royal blue of this great but placid ocean. Oh, the enjoyment of these balmy days! Oh, the unutterable charm of the sea when for days together the ship moves serenely over its quiet surface with nothing to interrupt the profound peace to be obtained only in the solitude of the oceans!
“Oh! the sea, the sea, the open sea, The pure, the fresh, the ever free. Without a mark, without a bound, It runneth the earth’s wide regions round.”
Although everything in nature is so somnolent, not so the sailors; all day long both watches have wrought like bees unbending the heavy, new sails and sending aloft the old fine-weather ones. The mending was finished yesterday, and the old, brownish-gray canvas looks very dull after the glare of the new duck and changes the whole appearance of the ship. This is another point of usefulness in the donkey-engine, for steam was got up this morning, and the different sails were sent whizzing aloft like sacks of corn into a mill in a tenth of the time that would have been necessary in manual labor. Nor be it supposed that the sails of a two-thousand-ton ship are feather weights, for our main-sail alone would tip the balance at eight hundred pounds.
Last evening was the first occasion for at least two months on which we have been able to eat our 5.15 o’clock supper without lamplight; and it was a very grateful change to see the mellow rays of the setting sun streaming in at the open door, instead of the weak flicker of a very bad lantern. The cheerful air of the saloon was the cause of further very great volubility on the part of the mate, and he told the only humorous joke (is this tautology?) that he has uttered on the passage. He said that his wife once asked him why it was that a captain couldn’t keep tally of the size of his anchor so that he wouldn’t have to weigh it every time he left a harbor. This, for Goggins, wasn’t bad.
Some days ago we finished “Farthest North,” and so lucid and straightforward are his writings that we seem to know Fridjof Nansen personally. Three great characteristics stand forth pre-eminently in this book,--manliness, lack of affectation, and the total absence of the “I am.” Latitude, 20° 23′ south; longitude, 91° 20′ west.
+August 12+
Somewhat more cloudy to-day, and, since the morning watch, the Trades have been a good deal stronger, though last night the wind dropped to force 3, the average for the week having been force 4. A noticeable fact is that even though the weather is so cool for this latitude, 70° at noon, the Cape pigeons are still with us; I thought that they would have left us long since, for on the other voyage we saw our last pigeon in 30° south. One of the birds has been following us for weeks; we can always pick him out by the fact that two of his right-wing quills are broken, which renders him conspicuous at quite a distance.
The ship was pumped out with the donkey last night, after the sails were all bent, and having had no exercise for some days, the men having pumped only at four in the morning on account of sail-making, etc., I was constrained to take hold of the handle-bar and follow the wheel around, which afforded even more exercise than the ordinary way. If the men maintain constantly thirty strokes to the minute it is good work; whereas, with the donkey whirling the pumps around at more than sixty, the very exertion necessary to keep up with this speed is more than considerable. It is attended, too, with some danger of bodily harm; for if your foot should slip on the wet deck and you did not instantly let go the handle-bar, you would either be jerked over the wheel and slammed down on the other side, or at the next revolution the bar would catch you under the chin and knock your lower jaw into bone-dust. The captain conjectured later on that he, too, needed some exercise, for he went down and worked away with ferocious abandon for perhaps five minutes, standing forth in the bright moonlight a most ridiculous object. For his short, plump, little body was taxed to the very utmost to keep up with the machine, and when his coat-tails whisked wildly about and he staggered now and then to keep his balance, and his arms were jerked back and forth like shuttles, his coat up between his ears, he looked like John Gilpin in a cyclone. But funniest of all was his face. Whenever he exerts himself he always glares over at us to ascertain whether we are laughing at him or not; and last night, as he gazed up at us over the whizzing bar, with bursting cheeks and popping eyes, we thought we had never seen so ludicrous a sight; even more droll than the other day while he was “chinning” himself on the weather mizzen-sheerpole, when he peered over his shoulder at us with so distorted and writhing a countenance that we thought he was strangling. The skipper has a clipping-machine, with which he has almost denuded his head and face of their shaggy masses, and he insists that my own thick growth of hair and beard will be uncomfortable in hot weather, which is no doubt true; but when he offered to “run the machine over your whiskers,” as he expressed it, I thought it best to risk them as they are. Fancy reaping one’s beard with clippers!
Mention has not been made of a certain dish that was placed upon the supper-table a few nights after the last pig had been killed. In one of the compartments of the rack was a plate of cold salt beef; while in the other was something that we thought was mighty good, judging from the fragrance that rose from beneath the cover. When the latter was removed, though, there lay revealed some queer-looking, black fragments that might have been anything rather than meat. It turned out to be pig’s flesh right enough, but no one could guess what portions of his anatomy they were. Some of the objects were cylindrical; these were sections of the creature’s tongue. Others were very irregular and unusual-looking; these were the ears; while a villanous mass that stood aloof from the rest was recommended by the skipper as the heart. “I think you’ll like that,” he observed, “though some do say there’s too much muscle in it.”
The only really unsuccessful article manufactured by the merry little Cantonite is the pie-crust. It is very attractive and tempting to contemplate, which makes the reality harder to bear, for it is the only wholly indigestible article of food I ever came across; you can even feel your teeth gliding smoothly over flakes of sticky lard scattered freely through it. Nothing but hydrochloric acid could have the least solvent effect upon it. Oh, yes, there is something else,--the captain’s digestive organs. It will be recalled that when we first came on board he mentioned that he was a dyspeptic; but goodness, gracious me! it is a revelation to watch him denude meat or fruit pies of the armor-plate which invests them. He has another favorite dish, too, that he usually eats for breakfast; it looked familiar at first, and we tried some, but instantly desisted. It was like large grains of sand; the captain called it boiled hominy. Latitude, 18° 25′ south; longitude, 93° 55′ west.
+August 13+
Fresh Trades, moderate sea, and dazzling skies were ours during this day, and we made more than two degrees of latitude and only five miles less than three of longitude. It is glorious, and everything has assumed a tropical aspect: the sea, which undulates in swinging, dark-blue heaves, topped with sparkling froth; and the air, which sleepily fans one with its soft, drowsy breath. Even the men have begun to show the influence of warmer climes, and duck and dungaree garments, long buried in the noisome and impenetrable mysteries of a sailor’s chest, have suddenly bloomed forth like lilies in the spring. We have kept away a little to the westward of northwest so as to cross the line in about 116°.
The pumping took place last night at 7.30 as usual, and I took a hand in it, alongside of that villain, Tim Powers (he of the wounded arm), while opposite to us rose and fell the cadaverous countenance of Paddy. Neither of the mates was within hearing distance, but no one spoke till Jimmie Rumps, the little bosun, called out “Let her rest a minute,” and then Tim grew loquacious.
“I’m afeard this is too long a v’yage for the lady, sor; it’s a sight o’ sea.”
“Yes,” I answered, “but it’s not that that bothers us. We went out to Calcutta a couple of years ago and were at sea a hundred and twenty-seven days, so we knew it might be a hundred and fifty when we started.”
“Is thot so, sor,” said Tim, with immense energy and interest,--“to Calcutta? A grand place. If yez don’t mind, what was the name o’ the ship?”
“The ‘Mandalore.’”
“Oh,” with great satisfaction and relief, “an English ship. I’ll bet yez had a different----”
“Shake her up again, boys,” came from the main-hatch in Jimmie’s thin little voice, and we turned to in silence till the mate’s growl, “That’ll do the pumps,” put an end to the job. Then I asked Paddy how he was enjoying himself.
“To speak the truth,” he answered, wearily, “I’d rather be in me grave than where I am, and this is the first time I ever said such a thing aboard ship.”
“Why, what’s the matter?” I asked him. “You’re always skylarking with the cook and steward.”
“Well, what’s the good in tryin’ to make a row?” he philosophically demanded.
“Don’t you get enough to eat?”
“Ye-e-e-s, but it’s not what I’ve heard the mate tell you it’s like. It’s the drivin’ we mind. But even that’s not the worst of it; you can’t do a thing to please the mate or the old man. I dunno about Mr. Rarx; you know I ain’t in his watch, but I guess he’s no better than most second mates, and I guess you know what _that_ means. Work, work, work till you split yer finger-ends and then kicked around and thumped for a farmer. But I’m not makin’ a row,” he added, “only you asked me.”
Paddy, it must be said, is one of a rare species, a fair-minded sailor, which I discovered some time ago by his taking the mate’s part when telling me of some trifling incident that happened on board.
A couple of hours later, it being the second mate’s watch, I asked him to tell me honestly why he liked American ships better than others, knowing that he has sailed in English vessels.
“Well, the principal thing is the pay,” he replied. “It’s a good deal better in our ships than in foreigners; and the cabin table’s generally better, too. Now, there’s the British ship ‘Fulwood’ (a fine steel ship she is), I know they don’t have soft bread on the table but once a week.” It seemed to me that this would be quite a recommendation for the “Fulwood,” for we have yet to see soft bread aboard ship much better than a worn-out sponge. But as for the wages, he is certainly right. Take the wages out of Hamburg as an example. The chief officers of the largest and fastest express steamers receive an amount equivalent to only sixty dollars of our money! What sort of remuneration is that for a man of ability, in many cases a university graduate, a man second in authority aboard a ten-thousand-ton mail steamer rippling through the most crowded ocean in the world at twenty-one knots, with fifteen hundred souls below-decks? And it makes one positively angry to think of a human being like Goggins, a densely ignorant and practically worthless creature, a person who can’t work a traverse and get the same answer twice, receiving the same amount as mate of a wind-jammer! Why, our steward, a Malay and a man of low intellect, has a good deal more than half as much wages as the first officer of the “Normannia” or “Augusta Victoria”! It is positively incredible. Latitude, 16° 14′ south; longitude, 96° 30′ west.
+August 14+
Another day, beautiful beyond expression. We never remember one in all our sea experience that was as fine. The sun poured down from a sky without a shred of cloud, and the Trades, still as fresh as ever, came singing so sweetly and cheerfully over the starboard quarter, that you were moved to lean back in your chair and think, “Who is so happy as I?”