CHAPTER I

DOWN CHANNEL

We had left Gravesend at four o’clock in the morning, and now, at half-past eight o’clock in the evening, we were off the South Foreland, the ship on a taut bowline heading on a due down Channel course.

It was a September night, with an edge of winter in the gusts and blasts which swept squall-like into the airy darkling hollows of the canvas. There was a full moon, small as a silver cannon-ball, with a tropical greenish tinge in its icy sparkling, and the scud came sweeping up over it in shreds and curls and feathers of vapour, sailing up dark from where the land of France was, and whitening out into a gossamer delicacy of tint as it soared into and fled through the central silver splendour. The weight of the whole range of Channel was in the run of the surge that flashed into masses of white water from the ponderous bow of the Indiaman as she stormed and crushed her way along, the tacks of her courses groaning to every windward roll, as though the clew of each sail were the hand of a giant seeking to uproot the massive iron bolt that confined the corner of the groaning cloths to the deck.

The towering foreland showed in a pale and windy heap on the starboard quarter. The land ran in a sort of elusive faintness along our beam, with the Dover lights hanging in the pallid shadow like a galaxy of fireflies: beyond them a sort of trembling nebulous sheen, marking Folkestone; and on high in the clear dusk over the quarter you saw the Foreland light like some wild and yellow star staring down upon the sea clear of the flight of the wing-like scud.

The ship was the _Countess Ida_, a well-known Indiaman of her day--now so long ago that it makes me feel as though I were two centuries old to be able to relate that I was a hearty young fellow in those times. She was bound to Bombay. Most of the passengers had come aboard at Gravesend, I amongst them; and here we were now thrashing our way into the widening waters of the Channel, mighty thankful--those of us who were not sea-sick, I mean--that there had come a shift of wind when the southern limb of the Goodwin Sands was still abreast, to enable us to keep our anchors at the cathead and save us a heart-wearying spell of detention in the Downs.

The vessel looked noble by moonlight; she was showing a maintopgallant sail to the freshening wind, and the canvas soared to high aloft in shadowy spaces, which came and went in a kind of winking as the luminary leapt from the edge of the hurrying clouds into some little lagoon of soft indigo, flashing down a very rain of silver fires, till the long sparkling beam travelling over the foaming heads of the seas, like a spoke of a revolving wheel, was extinguished in a breath by the sweep of a body of vapour over the lovely planet. I stood at the rail that ran athwart the break of the poop, surveying this grand night-picture of the outward-bound Indiaman. From time to time there would be a roaring of water off her weather-bow, that glanced in the moonshine in a huge fountain of prismatic crystals. The figures of a couple of seamen keeping a look-out trudged the weather-side of the forecastle, their shadows at their feet starting out upon the white plank to some quick and brilliant hurl of moonlight, clear as a sketch in ink, upon white paper. Amidships, forward, loomed up the big galley, with a huge long-boat stowed before it roofed with spare booms; on either hand rose the high bulwarks with three carronades of a side stealing out of the dusk between the tall defences of the ship like the shapes of beasts crouching to obtain a view of the sea through the port-holes. A red ray of light came aslant from the galley and touched with its rusty radiance a few links of the huge chain cable that was ranged along the decks, a coil of rope hanging upon a belaying pin, and a fragment of bulwarks stanchion. Now and again a seaman would pass through this light, the figure of him coming out red against the greenish silver in the atmosphere. A knot of passengers hung together close under the weather poop ladder, with a broad white space of the quarter-deck sloping from their feet to the lee waterways, whence at intervals there would come a sound of choking and gasping as the heave of the ship brought the dark Channel surge brimming to the scupper holes. The growling hum of the voices of the men blended in a strange effect upon the ear with the shrill singing of the wind in the rigging and the ceaseless washing noises over the side and the long-drawn creaking sounds which arise from all parts of a ship struggling against a head sea under a press of canvas.

Aft on the poop where I was standing the vessel had something of a deserted look. The pilot had been dropped off Deal; the officer of the watch (the chief mate) was stumping the weather-side of the deck from the ladder to abreast of the foremost skylight; the dark figure of the captain swung in a sort of pendulum-tramping from the mizzen rigging to the grating abaft the wheel. Dim as a distant firebrand over the port quarter, windily flickering upon the stretch of throbbing waters, shone the lantern of the lightship off the South Sand Head; and it was odd to mark how it rose and fell upon the speeding night sky to the swift yet stately pitching of our ship, with the figure of the man at the helm somehow showing the vaguer for it, spite of the shining of the binnacle lamp flinging a little golden haze round about the compass stand, abaft which the shape of the fellow showed vague as the outline of a ghost.

Ha! thought I, _this_ is being at sea now indeed! Why, though we were in narrow waters yet, there was such a note of ocean yearning in the thunderous wash of the weather billows sweeping along the bends that, but for the pale glimmer of the line of land trending away to starboard, I might easily have imagined the whole waters of the great Atlantic to be under our bow.

It was a bit chilly, and I caught myself hugging my peacoat to me with a half-formed resolution to make for my cabin, where there were yet some traps of mine remaining to be stowed away. But I lingered--lover of all sea-effects, as I then was and still am--to watch a fine brig blowing past us along to the Downs, the strong wind gushing fair over her quarter, and her canvas rising in marble-like curves to the tiny royals; every cloth glancing in pearl to the dance of the moon amongst the clouds, every rope upon her glistening out into silver wire, with the foam, white as sifted snow, lifting to her hawse-pipes to the clipper shearing of her keen stem, and not a light aboard of her but what was kindled by the luminary in the glass and brass about her decks as she went rolling past us delicate as a vision, pale as steam, yet of an exquisite grace as determinable as a piece of painting on ivory.

I walked aft to the companion hatch and entered the cuddy, or, as it is now called, the saloon. The apartment was the width of the ship, and was indeed a very splendid and spacious state-cabin, with a bulkhead at the extremity under the wheel, where the captain’s bedroom was, and a berth alongside of it, where the skipper worked out his navigation along with the officers, and where the midshipmen went to school. There were also two berths right forward close against the entrance to the cuddy by way of the quarter-deck, occupied by the first and second mates; otherwise, the interior was as clear as a ballroom, and it was like entering a brilliantly illuminated pavilion ashore, to pass out of the windy dusk of the night and the flying moonshine of it into the soft brightness of oil-flames burning in handsome lamps of white and gleaming metal, duplicated by mirrors, with hand-paintings between and polished panels in which the radiance cloudily rippled. A long table went down the centre of this cuddy, and over it were the domes of the skylights, in which were many plants and flowers of beauty swinging in pots, and globes of fish and silver swinging trays. Right through the heart of the interior came the shaft of the mizzen mast, rich with chiselled configurations, and of a delicate hue; a handsome piano stood lashed to the deck abaft the trunk of giant spar. The planks were finely carpeted, and sofas and arm-chairs ran the length of this glittering saloon on either side of it.

There were a few people assembled at the fore-end of the table as I made my way to the hatch whose wide steps led to the sleeping berths below. It was not hard to perceive that one of them was an East Indian military gentleman whose liver was on fire through years of curry. His white whiskers of the wire-like inflexibility of a cat’s, stood out on either side his lemon-coloured cheeks; his little blood-shot eyes of indigo sparkled under overhanging brows where the hair lay thick like rolls of cotton-wool. This gentleman I knew to be Colonel Bannister, and as I cautiously made my way along--for the movements of the decks were staggering enough to oblige me to tread warily--I gathered that he was ridiculing the medical profession to Dr. Hemmeridge, the ship’s surgeon, for its inability to prescribe for sea-sickness.

‘It iss der nerves,’ I heard a fat Dutch gentleman say--afterwards known to me as Peter Hemskirk, manager of a firm in Bombay.

‘Nerves!’ sneered the colonel, with a glance at the Dutchman’s waistcoat. ‘Don’t you know the difference between the nerves and the stomach, sir?’

‘Same thing,’ exclaimed Dr. Hemmeridge soothingly; ‘sea-sickness means the head, any way; and pray, colonel, what are the brains but’----

‘Ha! ha!’ roared the colonel, interrupting him; ‘_there_ I have you. If it be the brains only which are affected, why, then, ha! ha! no wonder Mynheer here doesn’t suffer, though it’s his first voyage, he says.’

But my descent of the steps carried me out of earshot of this interesting talk. My cabin was well aft. There was a fairly wide corridor, and the berths were ranged on either hand of it. From some of them, as I made my way along, came in muffled sounds various notes of lamentation and suffering. A black woman, with a ring through her nose and her head draped in white, sat on the deck in front of the closed door of a berth, moaning in a sea-sick way over a baby that she rocked in her arms, and that was crying at the top of its pipes. The door of a cabin immediately opposite opened, and a young fellow with a ghastly face putting his head out exclaimed in accents strongly suggestive of nausea: ‘I thay, confound it! thtop that noithe, will you? The rolling ith bad enough without _that_ thindy. Thteward!’ The ship gave a lurch, and he swung out, but instantly darted back again, being indeed but half clothed: ‘I thay, are _you_ the thteward?’

‘No,’ said I. ‘Keep on singing out. Somebody’ll come to you.’

‘Won’t they thmother that woman?’ he shouted, and he would have said more, but a sudden kickup of the ship slammed his cabin door for him, and the next moment my ear caught a sound that indicated too surely his rashness in leaving his bunk.

I entered my berth, and found the lamp alight in it, and the young gentleman who was to share the cabin with me sitting in his bedstead, that was above mine, dangling his legs over the edge of it, and gazing with a disordered countenance upon the deck. I had chatted with him during the afternoon and had learnt who he was. Indeed, his name was in big letters upon his portmanteau--‘The Hon. Stephen Colledge;’ and incidentally he had told me that he was a son of Lord Sandown, and that he was bound to India on a shooting tour. He was a good-looking young man, with fair whiskers, white teeth, a genial smile, yet with something of affectation in his way of speaking.

‘It’s doocid rough, isn’t it, Mr. Dugdale?’ said he; ‘and isn’t it raining?’

‘No,’ said I.

‘Oh, but look at the glass here,’ he exclaimed, indicating the scuttle or porthole, the thick glass of which showed gleaming, but black as coal against the night outside.

‘Why,’ said I, ‘the wet there is the sea; it is spray; nothing but spray.’

‘Hang all waves!’ he said in a low voice. ‘Why the dickens can’t the ocean always be calm? If I’d have known that this ship pitched so, I’d have waited for a steadier vessel. Will you do me the kindness to lift the lid of that portmanteau? You’ll find a flask of brandy in it. Hang me if I like to move. Sorry now I didn’t bring a cot, though they’re doocid awkward things to get in and out of.’

I found the flask, and gave it to him, and he took a pull at it. I declined his offer of a dram, and went to work to stow away some odds and ends which were in my trunk.

‘Don’t you feel ill?’ said he.

‘No,’ said I.

‘Oh, ah, I remember now!’ he exclaimed; ‘you were a sailor once, weren’t you?’

‘Yes; I had a couple of years of it.’

‘Wish _I’d_ been a sailor, I know,’ said he. ‘I mean, after I’d given it up. As to _being_ a sailor--merciful goodness! think of four, perhaps five months of _this_.’

‘Oh, you’ll be as good a sailor as ever a seaman amongst us in a day or two,’ said I encouragingly.

‘Don’t feel like it now, though,’ he exclaimed. ‘Let’s see: I think you said you were going out to do some painting?--Oh no! I beg pardon: it was a chap named Emmett who told me that. You--you----’ He looked at me with a slightly inebriated cock of the head, from which I might infer that the ‘pull’ he had taken at his flask was by no means his first ‘drain’ within the hour.

‘No,’ said I, with a laugh; ‘I am going out to see an old relative up country. And not more for that than for the fun of a voyage.’

‘The _fun_ of the voyage!’ he echoed with a stupid face; then with a sudden brightening up of his manner, though his gloomy countenance quickly returned to him, he exclaimed, ‘I say, Dugdale--beg pardon, you know; no good in _mistering_ a chap that you’re going to sleep with for four or five months--call me Colledge, old fellow--but I say, though, seen anything more of that ripping girl since dinner? By George! what eyes, eh?’

He drew his legs up, and with a slight groan composed himself in a posture for sleep, manifestly heedless of any answer I might make to his question.

I lingered awhile in the berth, and then, filling a pipe, mounted to the saloon, and made my way to the quarter-deck to smoke in the shelter of the recess in the cuddy front. Colonel Bannister lay sprawling upon a sofa, holding a tumbler of brandy grog. There were other passengers in the cuddy, scattered, and all of them grimly silent, staring hard at the lamps, yet with something of vacancy in their regard, as though their thoughts were elsewhere. As I stepped on to the quarter-deck, the cries and chorusing of men aloft, came sounding through the strong and hissing pouring of the wind between the masts and through the harsh seething of the seas, which the bows of the ship were smiting into snowstorms as she went sullenly ploughing through the water with the weather-leech of the maintopgallant-sail trembling in the green glancings of the moonlight like the fly of a flag in a breeze of wind. They were taking a reef in the fore and mizzen topsails. The chief mate, Mr. Prance, from time to time, would sing out an order over my head that was answered by a hoarse ‘Ay, ay, sir,’ echoing out of the gloom in which the fore-part of the ship was plunged. I lighted my pipe and sat myself down on the coamings of the booby hatch to enjoy a smoke. I was alone, and this moon-touched flying Channel night-scene carried my memory back to the times when I was a sailor, when I had paced the deck of such another vessel as this, as a midshipman of her. It seemed a long time ago, yet it was no more than six years either. The old professional instinct was quickened in me by the voices of the fellows aloft, till I felt as though it were my watch on deck, that I was skulking under the break of the poop here, and that I ought to be aloft jockeying a lee yard-arm or dangling to windward on the flemish horse.

Presently all was quiet on high, and by the windy sheen in the atmosphere, caused by the commingling of white waters and the frequent glance of the moon through some rent in the ragged scud, I could make out the figures of the fellows on the fore descending the shrouds. A little while afterwards a deep sea voice broke out into a strange wild song, that was caught up and re-echoed in a hurricane chorus by the tail of men hauling upon the halliards to masthead the yard. It was a proper sort of note to fit such a night as that. A minute after, a chorus of a like gruffness but of a different melody resounded on the poop, where they were mastheading the topsail yard after reefing it. The combined notes flung a true oceanic character into the picture of the darkling Indiaman swelling and rolling and pitching in floating launches through it, with her wide pinions rising in spaces of faintness to the scud, and the black lines of her royal yards sheering to and fro against the moon that, when she showed, seemed to reel amidst the rushing wings of vapour to the wild dance of our mastheads. The songs of the sailors, the clear shrill whistling of a boatswain’s mate forward, the orders uttered quickly by the chief officer, the washing noises of the creaming surges, the sullen shouting of the wind in the rigging resembling the sulky breaker-like roar of a wood of tall trees swept by a gale--all this made one feel that one was at sea in earnest.

I knocked the ashes out of my pipe and went on to the poop. The land still showed very dimly to starboard, with here and there little oozings of dim radiance that might mark a village or a town. You could see to the horizon, where the water showed in a sort of greenish blackness with some speck of flame of a French lighthouse over the port quarter, and the September clouds soaring up off the edge of the sea like puffs and coils of smoke from a thousand factory chimneys down there, and now and again a bright star glancing out from amongst them as they came swiftly floating up to the moon, turning of a silvery white as they neared the glorious planet.

There were windows in the cuddy front, and as I glanced through one of them I saw the captain come down the companion steps into the brightly lighted saloon and seat himself at the table, where in a moment he was joined by the fiery-eyed little colonel. Decanters and glasses were placed by one of the stewards on a swing-tray, and the scene then had something of a homely look spite of the cuddy’s aspect of comparative desertion. Captain Keeling, I think, was about the most sailorly-looking man I ever remember meeting. I had heard of him ashore, and learnt that he had used the sea for upwards of forty-five years. He had served in every kind of craft, and had obtained great reputation amongst owners and underwriters for his defence and preservation of an Indiaman he was in command of that was attacked in the Bay of Bengal by a heavily armed French picaroon full of men. Cups and swords and services of plate and purses of money were heaped upon him for his conduct in that affair; and indeed in his way he was a sort of small Commodore Dance.

I looked at him with some interest as he sat beside the colonel with the full light of the lamp over against him shining upon his face and figure. There had been little enough to see of him during the day, and it was not until we dropped the pilot that he showed himself. His countenance was crimsoned with long spells of tropic weather, and hardened into ruggedness like the face of a rock by the years of gales he had gone through. He was about sixty years of age; and his short-cropped hair was as white as silver, with a thin line of whisker of a like fleecy sort slanting from his ear to the middle of his cheek. His nose was shaped like the bowl of a clay-pipe, and was of a darker red than the rest of his face. His small sea-blue eyes were sunk deep, as though from the effect of long staring to windward; and almost hidden as they were by the heavy ridge of silver eyebrow, they seemed to be no more than gimlet holes in his head for the admission of light. He had thrown open his peacoat, and discovered a sort of uniform under it: a buff-coloured waistcoat with gilt buttons, an open frock-coat of blue cloth with velvet lapels. Around his neck was a satin stock, in which were three pins, connected by small chains. His shirt collar was divided behind, and rose in two sharp points under his chin, which obliged him to keep his head erect in a quite military posture. Such was Captain Keeling, commander of the famous old Indiaman _Countess Ida_.

I guessed he would not remain long below, otherwise I should have been tempted to join him in a glass of grog, spite of the company of Colonel Bannister, who was hardly the sort of man to make one feel happy on such an occasion as the first night out at sea with memory bitterly recent of leave-taking, of kisses, of the hand-shakes of folks one might never see again.