Part 2

It was a relief when one day, south of Trinidad, the air grew suddenly cooler, the flying-fish disappeared, and the first Cape-pigeon, and the first albatross, then Cape-geese, Cape-hens, and I know not what other birds, gave us hope that our voyage was half over, and that in ten days we might be in the longitude of the Cape. From hence till land was sighted some of these birds were always in sight of the ship. Sometimes four and five albatrosses at once were swooping about astern, some of them showing marks of having been struck with shot. It was useless to shoot at them, for they would have been lost; but we caught two with baited hooks, one measuring nine feet from wing to wing, and, unmindful of the ‘Ancient Mariner,’ slew and stuffed them.

I paid my footing on the forecastle, and hoped to see something of the crew. But one is apt to be in the way there, and it is difficult to know much of the sailors. Few realise—though it is a trite saying—how completely seafaring men are a race apart. Their habits, ideas, wants, dangers, and hardships are almost unknown to landsmen. Seeing with one’s own eyes how much hardship even now, and in the best appointed ships, occasionally falls to the lot of sailors, makes one aghast at the bare thought of what the miseries of a long voyage must have been in the old days before lime-juice and ventilation, and when the death or prostration of two-thirds of a crew from scurvy was quite a common occurrence. One begins to comprehend with amazement how the old discoverers must have had the souls of giants to sail month after month over unknown oceans and along unmapped coasts. Nor do landsmen realise how much loss of life there is at sea in merchant-ships, and how large a proportion of it is from preventable causes: how ships sail and are never heard of, and because there are no facts to make a story of, the papers scarcely mention it. Few but those in the merchant-service know how often, in order to save the expense of keeping ships idle in harbour, they are, after being fully insured, hurried to sea in utterly unseaworthy condition, with stores hastily put on board and so ill stowed that nothing is to be found when it is wanted, with crews engaged only the day before sailing, and consequently undisciplined, unknown to their officers, and frequently ill and useless from the effects of dissipation on shore, from the effects of which they have not had time to recover.[4] If the _London_ belonged (as I believe it did) to an exceptionally well-managed line of ships, how must it be with ships on ill-managed lines? It is true that a merchant-captain has it very much in its power to make his crew comfortable or miserable, and may often be a tyrant if he chooses. But it is also true that he is often very much at the mercy of his crew, amongst whom the chances are that he has at least one or two unruly and perhaps almost savage specimens. And with a new and strange crew every voyage, it is extremely difficult for him to establish and maintain discipline. He has very little power to punish, and in fact always does so at the risk of an action for assault at the end of the voyage. He often _dares_ not put a mutinous man in irons because he cannot spare him; and it is sometimes only by sheer physical strength, by the knowledge that he could and would, if necessary, knock down any man in the ship who defied him, that he can maintain his authority. I have known a sailor after being some days in irons for mutinous conduct, say by way of an apology for his behaviour that hitherto he had always sailed in small ships, and had been accustomed, if he had a difference with his captain, to ‘have it out’ with him on the poop. A few days later the same man when drunk flew at the captain like a tiger, and had to be taken below and fastened to the main-deck like a wild beast, spread-eagle fashion, to keep him quiet.

Of the captain and officers, on the other hand, we see a great deal. Nothing can exceed their patience in listening to anything, reasonable or unreasonable, which the passengers have to say or to complain of, and in answering any questions, sensible or foolish. It is a hard, wearing, anxious life for them, requiring nerve, temper, and power of endurance. A ship often has only two responsible officers, so that each has at least half of every night for his watch on deck (in all weathers be it remembered) in addition to his work by day. Yet for this a chief officer gets the miserable pittance of 7_l._ a month, and a second mate and doctor 5_l._ a month, sometimes even less, ceasing immediately at the end of the voyage. One could wish that the great shipowners, wealthy as they must be, were a little more liberal in this respect. The butcher, on the other hand, is a man of capital, and comes furnished with a crowd of bulldogs, canary-birds, thrushes, and other animals, which bring him in a handsome profit at the end of the voyage.

The _Mercia_ is a sailing-ship, as all but two of the Australian ships are, and has no auxiliary screw. It is a real pleasure, for once, to be out of the way of steam-power, to be entirely at the mercy of winds and waves, and dependent on good old-fashioned seamanship. If a voyage lasts longer without steam, it is far more interesting and pleasant. There is an interest in seeing the sails worked, in pulling at a rope now and then. There is a little excitement in watching for a change of wind, in welcoming the moment in bad weather when the sensitive aneroid ceases falling and takes a turn, in anticipating a good or a bad day’s run, in tracing the sometimes tortuous course on the chart, in speculating on the chance of an island being sighted or passed three or four hundred miles off. And in the morning there is something to be said about what the ship has done in the night; perhaps she has unexpectedly been put on the other tack, whereby somebody who had gone to sleep with his window open got a sea into his cabin. Or a sail has been split, or a spar carried away by a squall. All this is better at any rate than the everlasting monotonous throb of a steamer’s screw, the uniform day’s run which you can predict within twenty knots, the even sameness of the course drawn like a straight line across the ocean, and the smoke and smells of steam and oil (it is castor-oil) of the engines. And as for beauty, to stand by the wheel on the poop of a large ship, when the wind is light and fair and the studding-sails are set, projecting like wings over the ship’s sides, and to look up amongst the towering curves of canvas and the maze of ropes and spars, is a very beautiful sight, a sight which tourists do not often see nowadays, and which in a generation or two, when the world is still more stifled with smoke and steam, may not be to be seen by anyone.

It is well if a voyage passes without quarrels among the passengers. In such close quarters, one must be inoffensive indeed to offend nobody. If you are cordial friends with a fat or unwashed man who has sat next you at three meals every day for three months, and with a loud voice insisted on being helped first to everything, your disposition must be amiable indeed. Except the relation between the two Lords Justices of the Court of Chancery, compared with which the bond of matrimony itself is a trifle, I know none so trying as close juxtaposition on board ship. You are at the mercy of the noisiest, the least scrupulous, and the most officious. If a man drinks, he will drink twice as much at sea, where he has nothing else to do. And you are lucky if you escape having one man at least among the passengers who drinks to excess.

However, eating, sleeping, or talking, we are always going; that is the great satisfaction. The average daily run greatly increases as we get south. Between 40° and 45° south latitude there are no more light or foul winds for a ship sailing east, and the course is straight, at the rate of about 250 knots a day. But it gets colder and colder, till one day, just as we are considering the chances of being carried to the south of Prince Edward’s and Kerguelen Islands, the wind changes from north or north-west to south or south-west. It is equally fair for us, but we suddenly experience what it is to have a temperature of 40°, or lower, snow and hail falling, draughts as usual, and no possibility of a fire. It generally blows half a gale, sometimes a whole one. You cannot walk the deck to warm your feet, but must hold on fast, and take your chance of a drenching from one of the heavy seas, which from time to time strike the ship abeam, or on the quarter, with a noise like a ten-pound shot out of a gun. I cannot pretend to guess the height of the waves, but they are beyond comparison bigger than any I ever saw on the English coast. Standing on the poop, eighteen or twenty feet above the water, I have often seen the sun, when near its setting, _through_ the clear green crest of a wave. For four or five days it is so misty and overcast that no observation of the sun can be obtained, and our position can be inferred only by ‘dead reckoning.’ Some seaweed has been seen. The currents are uncertain hereabouts, and even the position of the islands has, till within the last few years, been incorrectly laid down in the charts. So that the captain looks more harassed than usual, and does not leave the deck for long at a time, till at last we run into finer weather and see the sun again, and ascertain that we have been making a straight course in exactly the right direction and at a glorious rate.

And now the air gets daily clearer and drier; we are getting into the Australian climate. At last the day comes for sighting land. For an hour or more it is doubtful, then it is certain, that land is in sight. I put the day down as a red-letter day in my life, as we pass within a mile or two of Cape Otway, and see the red sandy cliffs, the pale green grass close to the water’s edge, the lighthouse and telegraph station above, and behind, the ranges of thick impenetrable bush, huge forest trees, with their dark foliage standing out against the sky, a landscape as wild and unsullied by the hand of man as though it were a thousand miles from a settlement. One longs to be landed there and then, but the breeze is fair and strong, and though at sunset we take in all sail but topsails, we rush on, and are forced to heave-to before midnight, pitching and rolling in the swell, lest we get beyond Port Phillip Heads in the night. Soon after midnight all are astir, for there is a rumour that the pilot is coming. A large star near the horizon is to be seen. It moves, gets larger; it is not a star; the moon’s rays fall upon something indistinct on the waves beneath it, and shining white as silver a little schooner with a light at her mast-head shoots under the stern. The pilot climbs on board. Three more hours’ pitching, and the long low Heads are left astern of us, and we are in smooth water. As the Melbourne folk are sitting down to their Sunday’s breakfast, and those in England are going to bed for their Saturday night’s rest, our anchor drops in Hobson’s Bay, a mile or more from the long, low, sandy coast. Fronting us is Sandridge, the port of Melbourne; to the right, as far as the eye can see, dark green foliage, broken by clusters of houses and bare spaces of sand; and to the left, a marshy, sandy plain, bounded by the distant ranges, purple as the hills of Gascony or the Campagna.

II.

MELBOURNE.

‘All I can see is my own, and all I can’t see is my son’s,’ was the complacent remark, it is said, of John Batman, as he stood, some thirty-two years ago, looking over a vast tract of country which he thought he had bought as his own freehold from the aborigines for a few blankets and tomahawks. That tract of country comprised the ground whereon now stands Melbourne, nearly if not quite, the largest city in the southern half of the globe; in importance, actual or prospective, in the first rank of British cities.

Truly English it looks as yet, at first sight at any rate. After a long, wearisome voyage, the first impression is almost one of disappointment at having come so far only to see sights and hear sounds so familiar. Long before you land, the familiar ugly staring letters, with which the British shopkeeper delights to deface his dwelling, are visible on the waterside houses. A commonplace railway-train, with two classes to choose between, not one only, as might have been expected in a land of democracy, receives you at the shore end of the long wooden pier. You are set down in ten minutes in Melbourne itself, amongst cars, shops, hotels, and all the external appliances of old-world civilisation. But this first impression soon passes away. Already before entering the city itself, a white plain, marshy in winter, dried up and arid in summer, has been passed over. It is dotted over with little one-storied wooden houses, of which the verandah seems to be the most important part, and which are more like the mushroom erections on the sand _dunes_ of Arcachon in the _landes_ of Gascony than any habitation on English soil. And I suppose there is no spot in Melbourne where a man waking up, as from an enchanted sleep, and ignorant where he was, could for a moment fancy he was in England.

From the railway station you enter at once into the heart of the town. You pass into fine, straight, generally sloping streets, which will compare favourably with those of any English provincial town for width, for the number of well-filled showy shop-windows, and for the ambitious and costly architecture of the public buildings, hotels, and especially banks, which last are always numerous and conspicuous in Australian towns. First in importance among them is Collins Street, the Regent Street of Melbourne. Parallel, and scarcely inferior in rank to it, is Bourke Street, and at right angles to these are Elizabeth Street and four or five more which may be said to come next in dignity. These and several narrower ones, most of which are quiet and dignified and full of merchants’ offices, make up the most important part of Melbourne proper, as distinguished from the suburbs, each of which, though an integral part of the capital, has a sort of separate existence of its own, and bears a relation to it more resembling that of Kensington or Hampstead to London, than that of Marylebone or Mayfair. This central part of the town is the original and old part, if it may be so called in comparison to the rest. It was planned out long before Melbourne was a populous or important city, in the days when Governors ruled as well as reigned, and was systematically laid out in alternately broad and narrow roadways. It was intended that only the broad ones should have houses built along them, the narrow ones being meant only for back entrances to the gardens and outbuildings which were to occupy the intervening space. But both have now long since been turned into streets of contiguous houses.

The lowness of the houses strikes a new comer from England as a feature which makes the general appearance of the city different from anything at home. Even in the heart of it, where space is so valuable that one might have expected it would be more economised, the houses have generally only one story above the ground floor, and in the suburbs often not even that. This is made all the more conspicuous by the width of the streets. These are not paved but are well macadamized, and are now in good order in all weathers; but on each side of them you have to cross by little bridges, if you are on foot, or if you are driving, to bump down into and through broad, deep, paved gutters, or rather water-courses full of running water, which exhibit nature not yet quite submissive to civilization. After heavy rain, torrents of water rush down them to such an extent that boats are sometimes required in some of the lower streets. There is a tradition that before Flinders Street was macadamized the mud was so deep there that a baby jolted out of a car was drowned in a rut before it could be picked up. In the principal thoroughfares the traffic on the foot-pavement is considerable enough, and indicates a large and busy population. But the roadway looks rather empty. In an afternoon you may see a good many buggies and a few English-looking carriages driving about; but there is never anything approaching to a continuous string of vehicles of any kind in motion. There are plenty of street-cars, or jingles as they are called, which are like Irish cars with the seat turned breadthways instead of lengthways, and with a covering to keep off sun and rain. Here and there are to be seen stands of drays waiting to be hired, as if the population were in a chronic state of change of domicile.

The wind and blinding sun make one wish that the streets were a little less straight, both to add to their picturesqueness, and so as to afford a little more shelter. Whether the keen wind in winter or the hot wind of summer be blowing, the lee-side of a wall is equally desirable. In summer after a day or two of parching hot wind from the north, the south wind will suddenly come into conflict with it, producing what is called a ‘Southerly Buster’—a whirlwind full of dust, filling the air and darkening the sky, and resulting always in the victory of the south wind, and in a fall of temperature of twenty or thirty degrees in less than half an hour. But if curved streets are in some respects desirable, it must not be at the expense of a peculiar and most attractive feature in those of Melbourne, namely, that many of them have at each end a vista of open sky or distant mountain ranges, which in the clear dry air are always blue and distinct, and give a sense of space and freedom not common in the midst of large cities.

The respectable Briton everywhere clings to his black hat and black coat with tenacity. But the summer heat of Australia is too much for him, and white hats, or felt ones with stiff falling brim, and thick white pugrees give a semi-Indian look to the population. Those who have to do with horses, whether stockmen from the bush or livery-stable helpers, are particularly unlike their type in England. Instead of being the neatest and most closely buttoned and closely shaved of men, they will perhaps wear no coat or waistcoat, a purple flannel shirt, white linen inexpressibles, dirty unpolished jack-boots, a cabbage-tree hat, and a long beard. Follow one of them into the great horse-yard in Bourke Street, the Melbourne Tattersall’s. The broken horses are first sold, very much as they might be at Aldridge’s. Then the auctioneer goes to an inner part of the yard, where in large pens, strongly built of timber and six or seven feet high, is a ‘mob’ of a hundred or more four-year-old unbroken colts huddled together and as wild as hawks. Bidders climb up on to the railings and examine them as well as they can from there, for it is no easy matter to go amongst them or to distinguish one from the rest. The auctioneer puts them up for sale separately, and somehow or other, with much cracking of whips, each as his turn comes is driven out from among the rest into a separate pen. Probably the best of the mob had been picked out previously, for the commonest price at which I heard them knocked down was seventeen shillings and sixpence a-piece, and it is difficult to believe that, cheap as horses are in Australia, a good colt could be worth so little as that.

The space covered by Melbourne and its suburbs is, compared with an English or European town, out of all proportion large for the population. Short suburban railways, running all through and about it, make it easy for people to live at some distance from where their work is. Between one suburb and another there are often dreary spaces of bare ground, destitute of grass, and dusty or muddy according to the season. The population in some places is so sparse that you may have to wait some minutes if you want to ask your way of a passer-by. There is a so-called street, quite unknown to fame, rejoicing in the name of Hoddle Street (why Hoddle, and who or what Hoddle was, I have no idea), which cannot be much less, I should think, than three miles long. One end of it passes through a large, poorly-built suburb, called Collingwood; it then emerges into open ground and passes through some meadows by the river-side, which in a flood are sometimes many feet deep in water. For want of a bridge it (or rather its continuity or identity) crosses the river in a punt, and, still being Hoddle Street, forms part of South Yarra, a locality which disputes with Toorak the honour of being the Belgravia or Mayfair of Melbourne. Emerging from South Yarra it enters a sandy flat near the sea-shore, and ends its career (I believe, for I never followed it so far) somewhere in the pleasant sea-side suburb of St. Kilda.

The foreign element in Melbourne is very small. There are few Germans and fewer French. Only the Chinese are noticeable for their numbers. One meets them in the streets looking quite at home there, not begging, as in Europe, but prosperous and industrious. It is said that there are twenty thousand Chinamen in Victoria alone. One narrow street in the middle of Melbourne is inhabited almost exclusively by them, and is conspicuous with quaint blue and gold signboards covered with Chinese characters, looking like a large bit of tea-caddy, the proprietor’s name being put up in English letters underneath, for the information of outer barbarians. Sun-kum-on is a very conspicuous name on one of the wharves at Sydney. Public opinion, which was very hostile to the Chinese at one time, seems to have rather turned in their favour. In New South Wales there was an Act of the Legislature excluding them, but it has lately been repealed. They do work which other people despise, and by their abstemious and parsimonious habits will slowly get rich on gold-fields abandoned by other diggers as worked out. As market gardeners, they have done a real service to the Melbourne people. Formerly there were few if any vegetables to be had there in summer. It was supposed to be too dry and too hot to raise them. But by elaborate irrigation, unstinted spade labour, and abundant application of manure, the Chinese raise crop after crop of vegetables at all seasons, and in all soils. I saw two acres of ground in one of the suburbs which had been left uncultivated, and was altogether unprofitable, till five Chinamen rented it for 25_l._ a year, and now they contrive to raise 300_l._ worth of garden produce yearly. They are a race living quite apart. They do not bring their wives with them from China; there are not more than three or four Chinese women in all Victoria, it is said. And the poorest of the poor of other races, probably with good reason (as one’s nose suggests), will not live with them, much less intermarry with them.