Part 5

‘“Worse. Ha! ha!” (his laugh sounded like the booming of a gong). “I only wish my doom _was_ merely to be a mud-lark. No, no, I’m condemned to rush about from one evening party and public house to another. At the former I am bound for a certain term on each night to dance all the quadrilles, and a few of the polkas and waltzes with clumsy partners; and then I have to eat stale pastry and tough poultry before I am let off from _that_ place. After, I am bound to go to some cellar or singing place to listen to ‘Hail, smiling morn,’ ‘Mynheer Van Dunk,’ ‘The monks of old,’ ‘Happy land,’ imitations of the London actors, and to hear a whole canto of dreary extempore verses. I must also smoke a dozen of cigars, knowing—as in my present condition I must know,—what they are made of. The whole to end on each night with unlimited brandy (British) and water, and eternal intoxication. Oh, F. F., be warned! be warned! Take my advice; keep up your resolution, and don’t do it again. When afloat, drink nothing stronger than purser’s tea. When on shore be temperate in your pleasures; don’t turn night into day; don’t exchange wholesome amusements for rabid debauchery, robust health for disease and—well, I won’t mention it. When afloat, study your profession and don’t get cashiered and cold-shouldered as I was. Promise me—nay, you must swear!”

‘At this word I thought I heard a gurgling sound in the water.

‘“If I can get six solemn pledges before the season’s over, I’m only to go these horrid rounds during the meeting of Parliament.”

‘“_Will_ you swear?” again urged the voice, with persuasive agony.

‘I was just able to comply.

‘“Ten thousand thanks!” were the next words I heard; “I’m off, for there is an awful pint of pale ale, a chop, and a glass of brandy and water overdue yet, and I must devour them at the Shades.” (We were then close to London Bridge.) “Don’t let the waterman pull to shore; I can get there without troubling him.”

‘I remember no more. When sensation returned, I was in bed, in this very house, a shade worse than I had been from the previous attack.’

‘That,’ said Philip, who had left his tumbler untasted, ‘must have been when you had your head shaved for the second time.’

‘Exactly so.’

‘And you really believe it was Jovial James’s ghost,’ inquired Fid, earnestly.

‘Would it be rational to doubt it?’

Philip rose and paced the room in deep thought for several minutes. He cast two or three earnest looks at his brother, and a few longing ones at his glass. In the course of his cogitation, he groaned out more than once an apostrophe to poor ‘James Barber.’ At length he declared his mind was made up.

‘Ferd!’ he said, ‘I told you awhile ago to throw your lemonade over the side of the Ship. Don’t. Souse out my grog instead.’

The lieutenant did as he was bid.

‘And now,’ said Fid the elder, ‘ring for soda water; for one must drink _something_.’

* * * * *

Last year it was my own good fortune to sail with Mr. Philip Fid in the ‘Bombottle’ (74). He is not exactly a tee-totaller: but he never drinks spirits, and will not touch wine unmixed with water, for fear of its interfering with his studies, at which he is, with the assistance of the naval instructor (who is also our chaplain), assiduous. He is our first mate, and the smartest officer in the ship. Seton is our surgeon.

One day, after a cheerful ward-room dinner (of which Fid was a guest), while we were at anchor in the bay of Cadiz, the conversation happened to turn upon Jovial Jemmy’s apparition, which had become the best authenticated ghost story in Her Majesty’s Naval service. On that occasion Seton undertook to explain the mystery upon medical principles.

‘The fact is,’ he said, ‘what the commander of the “Arrow” saw (Ferdinand had by this time got commissioned in his old ship) was a spectrum, produced by that morbid condition of the brain, which is brought on by the immoderate use of stimulants, and by dissipation; we call it Transient Monomania. I could show you dozens of such ghosts in the books, if you only had patience while I turned them up.’

Everybody declared that was unnecessary. We would take the doctor’s word for it; though I feel convinced not a soul besides the chaplain and myself had one iota of his faith shaken in the real presence of Jovial Jemmy’s _post-mortem_ appearance to Fid the younger.

Ghost or no ghost, however, the story had had the effect of converting Philip Fid from one of the most intemperate and inattentive to one of the soberest and best of Her Majesty’s officers. May his promotion be speedy!

P. CLAY, LIEUT. R.M.

H.M.S. ‘BOMBOTTLE.’ _20th March, 1850._

THE TRUE STORY OF A COAL FIRE.

IN THREE CHAPTERS.—CHAPTER THE LAST.

The air blew freshly over the bright waving grass of a broad sloping field, on which the morning dews were sparkling and glancing in the sun. The clouds moved quickly over head, in clear grey and golden tints on their upper edges and foamy crests, with dark billows beneath, and their shadows chased each other down the green slopes of the field in rapid succession. Swiftly following them—now in the midst of them—now seeming to lead them on, a fine bay horse with flying mane, wild outspreading tail, and dilated nostrils, dashed onward exulting in his liberty, his strength, his speed, and all the early associations and influences of nature around him! He was a coal-mine horse, and had been just brought up the shaft for a holiday.

All this Flashley saw very distinctly, having been hastily landed at the top of the shaft, lifted into a tram-cart, and trundled off, he knew not by what enginery, till he was suddenly shot out on the top of a green embankment, and rolling down to the bottom, found himself lying in a fresh green field. He enjoyed the action, the spirit, and every motion of the horse. It was the exact embodiment in activity of his strongest present feelings and impulses. He jumped up to run after the horse, and mount him if he could, or if not, scamper about the field with him in the same fashion. But while he sought to advance, he felt as if he were retreating—in fact, he was sure of it;—the grass ran by him, instead of his running over it—the hedges ran through him, instead of his passing along them—the trees sped away before him into the distance, as he was carried backwards. He lost his legs—he sank upon the air—he was still carried backwards—all the landscape faded, and with a loud splash he fell into the sea!

Down he sank, and fancied he saw green watery fields rolling on all sides, and over him; and presently he heard a voice hoarsely calling as if from some bank above. He certainly had heard the voice before, and recognised it with considerable awe, though the words it uttered were homely and unromantic enough. It shouted out ‘Nancy, of Sunderland!—boat ahoy!’

By some inexplicable process—though he clearly distinguished a boat-hook in the performance—Flashley was picked up from beneath the waves, and lifted into a boat. It was a little, dirty, black, thick-gunnelled jollyboat, rowed by two men in short black over-shirts and smutty canvas trowsers. In the stern sat the captain with his arms folded. A broad-brimmed tarpaulin hat shaded his face. They pulled alongside a ship as black as death, but very lively; and a rope being lowered from the side, it was passed under Flashley’s arms in a noose, and the next moment he was hoisted on deck, and told to attend to his duty.

‘My duty!’ ejaculated Flashley, ‘Attend to my duty! Oh, what _is_ my duty?’ His eyes wandered round. Nothing but hard black planks and timbers, and masts with reefed sails, and rigging all covered with coal-dust, met his gaze. The sky, however, was visible above him—_that_ was a great comfort.

‘Scrape these carrots and parsnips,’ said the Captain solemnly, ‘very clean, d’ye mind!—and take them to the cook in the galley, who’ll let you know what’s next. When he has done with you, clean my sea-boots, and grease them with candle-ends; dry my peajacket, pilot-coat, and dreadnoughts; clean my pipe, and fill it—light, and take three whiffs to start it; mix me a glass of grog, and bring it with the lighted pipe; then, go and lend a hand in tarring the weather-rigging, and stand by, to go aloft and ease down the fore-top-gallant mast when the mate wants her on deck.’

‘Oh, heavens!’ thought Flashley, ‘are these then my duties! This hideous black ship must be a collier—and I am the cabinboy!’

A mixed impulse of equal curiosity and apprehension (it certainly was from no anxiety to commence his miscellaneous duties) caused him to ‘inquire his way’ to the cook’s galley. He was presently taken to a square enclosure, not unlike a great black rabbit-hutch, open at both sides, in which he was received by a man of large proportions, who was seated on an inverted iron saucepan, smoking. The black visage gave a grim smile and familiar wink. It could not be the miner who had acted as his guide and companion underground! And yet—

Flashley stepped back hastily, and cast an anxious look towards the after-part of the deck. There stood the Captain. A short yet very heavily-built figure,—a kind of stunted giant. He was not an Indian, nor a Mulatto, nor an African,—and yet his face was as black as a coal, in which several large veins rose prominently, and had a dull yellow tinge, as if they had been run with gold, or some metallic substance of that colour. Who could he be? Some demon _incog._? No, not that—but some one whom Flashley held in equal awe.

How long poor Flashley continued to perform his multifarious duties on board the ‘Nancy’ he had no idea, but they appeared at times very onerous, and he had to undergo many hardships. This was especially the case in the North Sea during the winter months, which are often of the severest kind on the coast between Sunderland and the mouth of the Thames. The rigging was all frozen, so that to lay hold of a rope seemed to take the skin off his hand; the cold went to the bone, and he hardly knew if his hands were struck through with frost, or by a hot iron. The decks were all slippery with ice, so were the ladders down to the cabins, and the cook’s galley was garnished all round with large icicles, from six inches to a foot and a half in length, which kept up a continual drip, drip, on all sides, by way of complimentary acknowledgment of the caboose-fire inside. Sometimes the wind burst the side-doors open—blew the fire clean out of the caboose, and scattered the live and dead coals all over the deck, or whirled them into the sea. One night the galley itself, with all its black and smutty paraphernalia, was torn up and blown overboard. It danced about on the tops of the waves—made deep curtseys—swept up the side of a long billow—was struck by a cross-wave, and disappeared in a hundred black planks and splinters. That same night Flashley was called up from his berth to go aloft and lend a hand to close-reef the main-topsail. The sail was all frozen, and so stiff that he could not raise it; but as he hauled on one of the points, the point broke, and something happened to him,—he did not know what, but he thought he fell backwards, and the wind flew away with him.

The next thing he remembered was that of lying in his berth with a bandage round one arm, and a large patch on one side of his head, while the cook sat on a sea-chest by his side reading to him.

A deep splashing plunge was now heard, followed by the rapid rumbling of an iron chain along the deck overhead. The collier had arrived off Rotherhithe, and cast anchor.

‘Up, Flashley!’ cried the cook; ‘on deck, my lad! to receive the whippers who are coming alongside.’

‘What for?’ exclaimed Flashley; ‘why am I to be whipped?’

‘It is not you,’ said the cook, laughing gruffly, as he ran up the ladder, ‘but the coal-baskets that are to be whipped up, and discharged into the lighter.’

The deck being cleared, and the main hatchway opened, a small iron wheel (called _gin_) was rigged out on a rope passing over the top of a spar (called _derrick_) at some 18 or 20 feet above the deck. Over this wheel a rope was passed, to which four other ropes were attached lower down. These were for the four whippers. At the other end of the wheel-rope was slung a basket. A second basket stood upon the coals, where four men also stood with shovels—two to fill each basket, one being always up and one down. The whippers had a stage raised above the deck, made of five rails, which they ascended for the pull, higher and higher as the coals got lower in the hold. The two baskets-full were the complement for one measure. The ‘measure’ was a black angular wooden box with its front placed close to the vessel’s side, just above a broad trough that slanted towards the lighter. Beside the measure stood the ‘meter,’ (an elderly personage with his head and jaws bound up in a bundle-handkerchief, to protect him from the draughts,) who had a piece of chalk in one hand, while with the other he was ready to raise a latch, and let all the coals burst out of the measure into the trough, by the fall of the front part of the box. The measure was suspended to one end of a balance, a weight being attached to the other, so that the weighing and measuring were performed by one process under the experienced, though rheumatic, eye of the meter.

The whippers continued at their laborious work all day; and as the coals were taken out of the hold, (the basket descending lower and lower as the depth increased,) the ‘whippers’ who hauled up, gave their weight to the pull, and all swung down from their ricketty rails with a leap upon the deck, as the basket ran up; ascending again to their position while the basket was being emptied into the trough.

The lighter had five compartments, called ‘rooms,’ each holding seven tons of coals; and when these were filled, the men sometimes heaped coals all over them from one end of the craft to the other, as high up as the combings, or side-ridges, would afford protection for the heap. By these means a lighter could carry forty-two tons, and upwards; and some of the craft having no separate ‘rooms,’ but an open hold, fore and aft, could carry between fifty and fifty-five tons.

A canal barge or monkey-boat (so called we presume from being very narrow in the loins) now came alongside, and having taken in her load of coals, the friendly cook of the ‘Nancy’ expressed an anxiety that Flashley should lose no opportunity of gaining all possible experience on the subject of coals, and the coal-trade generally, and therefore proposed to him a canal trip, having already spoken with the ‘captain of the barge’ on the subject. Before Flashley had time to object, or utter a demur, he was handed over the side, and pitched neatly on his legs on the after-part of the barge, close to a little crooked iron chimney, sticking blackly out of the deck, and sending forth a dense cloud of the dirtiest and most unsavoury smoke. The captain was standing on the ladder of the cabin, leaning on his great arms and elbows over the deck, and completely filling up the small square hatchway, so that all things being black alike, it seemed as if this brawny object were some live excrescence of the barge, or huge black mandrake whose roots were spread about beneath, and, perhaps, here and there, sending a speculative straggler through a chink into the water.

The mandrake’s eyes smiled, and he showed a very irregular set of large white and yellow teeth, as he scrunched down through the small square hole to enable the young passenger and tourist to descend.

Flashley, with a forlorn look up at the sky, and taking a good breath of fresh air to fortify him for what his nose already warned him he would have to encounter, managed to get down the four upright bars nailed close to the bulk-head, and called the ‘ladder.’

He found himself in a small aperture of no definite shape, and in which there was only room for one person to ‘turn’ at a time. Yet five living creatures were already there, and apparently enjoying themselves. There was the captain, and there was his wife, and there was a child in the wife’s right arm, and another of five years old packed against her left side, and there was the ‘crew’ of the barge, which consisted, for the present, of one boy of sixteen, of very stunted growth, and with one eye turning inwards to such a degree that sometimes the sight literally darted out, seeming to shoot beneath the bridge of his nose. They were all sitting, or rather hunched up, at ‘tea.’ The place had an overwhelming odour of coal-smoke, and tobacco smoke, and brown sugar, and onions, to say nothing of general ‘closeness,’ and the steam of a wet blanket-coat, which was lying in a heap to dry before the little iron stove. The door of this was open, and the fire shone brightly, and seemed to ‘_wink_’ at Flashley as he looked that way.

‘Here we are!’ said a strange voice.

Flashley looked earnestly into the stove. He thought the voice came from the fire. The coals certainly looked very glowing, and shot out what a German or other imaginative author would call _significant_ sparks.

‘Here we are!’ said the voice from another part of the cabin, and, turning in that direction, Flashley found that it proceeded from the ‘crew,’ who had contrived to stand up, and was endeavouring to give a close imitation of the ‘clown,’ on his first appearance after transformation. This, by the help of his odd eye, was very significant indeed.

And here they were, no doubt, and here they lived from day to day, and from night to night; and a pretty wretched, dirty, monotonous life it was. Having once got into a canal, with the horse at his long tug, the tediousness of the time was not easily to be surpassed. From canal to river, and from river to canal, there was scarcely any variety, except in the passage through the locks, the management of the rope in passing another barge-horse on the tow-path, and the means to be employed in taking the horse over a bridge. The duty of driving the horse along the tow-path, as may be conjectured, fell to the lot of our young tourist. Once or twice, ‘concealed by the murky shades of night,’ as a certain novelist would express it, he had ventured to mount the horse’s back; but the animal, not relishing this addition to his work, always took care, when they passed under a bridge, or near a wall, or hard embankment, to scrape his rider’s leg along the side, so that very little good was got in that way. And once, when Flashley had a ‘holiday,’ and was allowed to walk up and down the full length of the barge upon the top of the coals, a sudden bend in the river brought them close upon a very low wooden bridge, just when he was at the wrong end of the barge for making a dive to save his head. Flashley ran along the top as fast as he could, but the rascally horse seemed to quicken his pace, under the captain’s mischievous lash, so that finding the shadow of the bridge running at him before he could make his leap from the top of the coals, he was obliged to save himself from being violently knocked off, by jumping hastily into the canal, to the infinite amusement and delight of the captain, his wife, and the ‘crew.’ The horse being stopped, the captain came back and lugged him out of the bulrushes just as he had got thoroughly entangled, and immersed to the chin; knee-deep in mud, and with frogs and eels skeeling and striking out in all directions around him.

After a week or ten days passed in this delightful manner, Flashley found the barge was again on the Thames, no longer towed by a horse and rope, but by a little dirty steam-tug. They stopped on meeting a lighter on its way up with the tide, and Flashley being told to step on board, was received by his grim but good-natured companion and instructor, the cook of the ‘Nancy,’ now going up with a load to Bankside, and performing the feat of managing two black oars of enormous length and magnitude. They were worked in large grooves in each side of the lighter, one oar first receiving all the strength of this stupendous lighterman (late cook) with his feet firmly planted on a cross-beam in front, so as to add to the mighty pull of his arms, all the strength of his legs, as well as all the weight of his body. Having made this broad sweep and deep, he left the oar lying along the groove, and went to the one on the other side, with which he performed a similar sweep.

‘Here’s a brig with all sails set, close upon us!’ cried Flashley.

‘She’d best take care of herself;’ said our lighterman, as he went on deliberately to complete his long pull and strong.

Bump came the brig’s starboard bow against the lighter; and instantly heeling over with a lift and a lurch, the former reeled away to leeward, a row of alarmed but more enraged faces instantly appearing over the bulwarks—those ‘aft’ with eyes flashing on the lighterman, and those ‘for’ard,’ anxiously looking over to see if the bows had been stove in. A volley of anathemas followed our lighterman; who, however, continued slowly to rise and sink backward with his prodigious pull, apparently not hearing a word, or even aware of what had happened.

In this way they went up the river among sailing-vessels of all kinds, and between the merchants’ ‘forest of masts,’ like some huge antediluvian water-reptile deliberately winding its way up a broad river between the woods of a region unknown to man.

‘But here’s a steamer!’ shouted Flashley.—‘We shall be run down, or she’ll go slap over us!’

The man at the wheel, however, knew better. He had dealt with lightermen before to-day. He therefore turned off the sharp nose of the steamer, so as not merely to clear it, but dexterously to send the ‘swell’ in a long rolling swath up against the lighter, over which it completely ran, leaving the performer at the oars drenched up to the hips, and carrying Flashley clean overboard. He was swept away in the rolling wave, and might have been drowned, had not a coalheaver at one of the wharfs put off a skiff to his rescue.

So now behold Flashley at work among the wharfingers of Bankside.

Before the coals are put into the sack, they undergo a process called ‘screening.’ This consists in throwing them up against a slanting sieve of iron wire, through which the fine coal and coal-dust runs: all that falls on the outer side of the screen is then sacked. But many having found that the coals are often broken still more by this process, to their loss, (as few people will buy the small coal and dust, except at breweries and waterworks), they have adopted the plan of a round sieve held in the hand, and filled by a shovel. The delightful and lucrative appointment of holding the sieve was, of course, conferred upon Flashley. His shoulders and arms ached as though they would drop off long before his day’s work was done; but what he gained in especial, was the fine coal-dust which the wind carried into his face—often at one gust, filling his eyes, mouth, nostrils, and the windward ear.

In the condition to which this post soon brought his ‘personal appearance,’ Flashley was one morning called up at five to go with a waggon-load of coals a few miles into the country, in company with two coalheavers and a carman. Up he got. And off they went.