Part 19

These are the gayer thoughts, for they come with the hurricane-chorus that breaks from the forecastle of yonder ship as her crew get the anchor, now that the first of the flood has come, and the tug alongside is already to forge ahead and tauten the hawser. “Oh, when we get to the dockyard gates!” shout the poor fellows gleefully, with as much voice as a voyage from San Francisco has left in them; and you think that to-night there will be some middling salt and tough yarns spun in more than one grog-shop, whilst already Jack’s most unlovely Nan--as Charles Dickens only too truthfully described her--is overhauling her few penn’orths of finery in anticipation of the treats which are to be got out of a fund made up of £3 10s. a month.

But Gravesend appeals most from the other side of the picture--the outward-bound side. I was favoured with an immense illustration of this. A big steamer, with a black-and-white funnel, lay abreast of the Gravesend pier, with her decks literally choked with emigrants. She should have sailed the day before, I was told; but the emigrants--mainly foreigners--had rebelled; declared they had been promised a steamer belonging to another company, and refused to start in the vessel they were packed aboard of. Some one on the Gravesend pier told me that a thousand people had been put into her that morning. There was hardly room for a pin along the bulwarks. Clustering masses of human heads blackened the rail, as though all the crows in Kent had swooped down upon that great iron steamship, and were taking their ease upon her sides. I had no excuse to board her, but I managed to gather a good idea of her living freight by taking a boat and pulling round her. I had seen a very similar class of foreign emigrants in a North-country port, and had made a short voyage in company with five or six hundred of them, but that crowd did not impress me as this did. There was something very pathetic and melancholy in the postures and looks of this large concourse of people, who overhung the water, and gazed, with little of movement among them, at the shores on either hand. The thought of this mass of human souls afloat on the deep with nothing between them and eternity but a thin surface of iron, combined with the speculations as to the future into which the mind was irresistibly impelled; the new lands which awaited them; the long--perhaps everlasting--separation from their mother country; the numberless interests they represented; and the rapid growth of that amazing Western Empire, whose humanizing and civilizing progress was strangely illustrated by the embarkation of this immense assembly--the freight of a single ship, too!--for its ports, contributed to make the picture of the _Holland_--for that was the name of the steamer--a truly impressive and memorable one. It was a warm, sunny afternoon; far down the Hope, trending north-wise athwart Gravesend Reach, were the white heights of Cliffe, sparkling like marble in the brilliant radiance; the long stretch of water was crowded with shipping, whose bunting and variously-coloured sides filled the eye with colour; Gravesend lay in a heavy mass of grouping close down to the water’s edge, with a lumber of huddled houses to the right of the new Falcon Hotel, here and there a window flashing back the sunlight, and the church bell ringing a pleasant farewell to a Peninsular and Oriental steamer, whose head was being canted towards the north shore by a tug that she might have a clear road before her engines were set in motion; whilst, some distance up the river, vessels which had passed Gravesend twenty minutes before were fading upon the blueish haze of smoke from tall chimneys and fog from the marshes, the spars of the Blackwall liner looming huge and vague above the land which concealed her hull.

The very beauty of the picture furnished an element of melancholy to the crowded steamship, and the rows upon rows of faces which were all steadily gazing landwards. I watched the Peninsular and Oriental steamer get under way, and contrasted her with the emigrant ship. The big deck-house or saloon of the former, with the two funnels rearing out of it, gave her, to my eye, a somewhat heavy look forward; but it was something to remember to run the eye from her almost unpeopled decks--nobody to be seen but some men in uniform on the bridge, a Lascar in a turban squatting in the after-awning, holding a little white flag in his hand, and one or two figures in the forward part of the ship--to the motionless black hull of the emigrant steamer, teeming with life, and the bulwarks literally creeping with faces. It is a responsible thing to carry mails, to be answerable for a mass of specie, and for the lives of a number of gentlemen and ladies; but think of standing on the deck of a steamer on a dark night, and reflecting that under your feet lie sleeping a thousand human beings, not counting your crew, and that the very existence of this vast company of fellow-creatures depends upon your vigilance, judgment, skill as a seaman. I believe the sympathy and wonder of any man who saw that crowded vessel and gave attention to the sight, would have gone to the captain--to the seaman who was to hold all those lives in his hand, so to speak. Who would willingly accept such a responsibility? and who, finding men equal to the discharge of these enormous trusts, would not gladly lend a hand to smooth their path for them by denouncing and demanding the removal of whatever unfairly obstructs and harasses them--the action of unjustly-constituted courts, the decisions of empirics, and of people who could not tell the difference between a gin-block and a dead-eye, the iniquities of the modern ship-building yard, and the hundred small red-tape worries which makes the shipmaster’s life a burden to him ashore?

How much Gravesend is a point of arrival and departure I was reminded as I stood overhanging the stone projection and looking down on the landing-steps. From a large sailing-ship towing up the river, a waterman’s boat shot away and made for the Gravesend pier. In it was a middle-aged man, bronzed with the suns and winds of four months, and dressed in clothes which it scarcely needed a tailor to guess were of an Antipodean cut. His luggage was heaped about him in the bottom of the boat. I watched him land, and followed him as he came up the steps, when a rush was made by a little group of people dressed in mourning, and in a breath a woman, tossing up her black veil, was in his arms, and sobbing on his shoulder. Those sombre garments threw a shadow upon the happiness of this meeting; but still, he had come back, he was well, and by-and-by the dead, never to be forgotten, let us hope, would be buried indeed, and the living heart reassert itself. The watermen seemed to know when that ship had left her port on the other side of the world, and so I found that this man had been four months in making his way to England. And how much longer had he been absent? But then think of the glory of the green trees and fragrant beauties of our English May to this traveller fresh from one hundred and twenty days of salt water! Figure the flavour he will find in a cut from a prime sirloin! the sweetness of “soft tack”--ay, even such bread as is now baked--after the bilious little bits of dough manufactured in the galley by the baker, and sent aft under the satirical title of “rolls!”

Scarcely had the sunburnt man and his friends disappeared, when there came a little figure that I could not view without lively concern and compassion. This was a small midshipman, resplendent in the newest of uniforms. The buttons glittered on his tiny jacket, and the brand-new badge on his cap shone like a freshly minted sovereign. There lay his ship a short way down the stream--a good-looking iron vessel, very long and very narrow, without an inch of that “swell of the sides” one loves to see, as I had taken notice when she slewed on her heel to the first of the flood and gave us a view of herself end on, with double topgallant yards, skysail poles, and the capacity for an immense spread of lower cloths. The poor little chap took a long squint at his new home, and then a peep at the lady alongside of him, who, from the strong family likeness between them, I reckoned at once to be his mamma. She had been crying, her eyes were red, but she looked at her youngster with a kind of quivering smile now, for it would clearly not do to capsize his sensibilities at this most trying point. He had insisted upon going to sea, no doubt, much against poor mamma’s will. He had fine notions of the marine calling, I dare say, all acquired by days and nights of study of nautical romances; and here he was ready to sail away, handsomely brass bound, mamma red-eyed at his side, bravely fighting with her heart. Hundreds of men have gone through this, and something betwixt a laugh and a sigh will come from them when they think of this little brass bounder and look back to their first voyage. What ideas had the young fellow formed of the life? But, alas! what mariner has not allowed his boyhood to gull him in the same way? “There is,” says Dana, “a witchery in the sea, its songs and stories, and in the mere sight of a ship and the sailor’s dress, especially to a young mind, which has done more to man navies and fill merchantmen than all the pressgangs in Europe. I have known a young man with such a passion for the sea, that the very creaking of a block stirred his imagination so that he could hardly keep his feet upon dry ground.” These sentences recurred to me as I watched the little midshipman. But for how many days was the spell of the ocean’s witchery to lie upon him? Probably, if they had head winds down Channel, he would be sick of the life and longing to be ashore in a warm bed, with his mother to tuck him up, and a good breakfast to go downstairs to next morning, before they were abreast of the Start. “Oh, my golly!” said a negro whom I met at Gravesend, selling flowers, “S’elp me, sah, as I stan’ here, I’d gib dis basket--yas, ah would--and all de close horff my back, for a good blow-out of lobscouse!” But that little middy will have to be a black man if he wants to enjoy sea-fare as my negro-friend did. A few days of dark and evil-looking pork, and salt beef out of which he might cut models of ships for his friends at home, and “duff” made of copper-skimmings, not to mention the being routed out in his watch below, and having to tumble up aloft in a night blind with storm and rain, are pretty sure to disillusion him. But his buttons are new, and his hopes are young and fresh; there is no tarnish of salt water on either as yet; so let him take his mother’s yearning, passionate kiss, and bundle into the boat and be off. She could not bear to see him row away, and the moment he went down the steps she hurried off; whilst he, to show what a man he was, squatted himself in the stern sheets, and pulled out a short wooden pipe and lighted it. In a few minutes he was out in the stream. I watched him get alongside his ship, trot up the gangway ladder, and vanish in a kind of twinkle of new brass and gilt over the side.

It is these constant comings and goings which give Gravesend its interest and its memories. One hour it is a party of people newly arrived from the bottom of the world; another it is a couple of drunken firemen tumbling into a boat, and shoving off for some lump of a steamer that lies abreast of the Obelisk or Denton Mill. But, in spite of the heaps of nautical conditions which beset it, Gravesend cannot be called wholly marine. It may be thought fishy, but it certainly is not salt. Contrast it with Deal, which it resembles in its lower streets. The wind may pipe never so merrily, but there is no shrewd briny pungency in the shrilling gusts as they sweep round the corners. The boatmen have a fresh water look. Their sou’westers and jerseys cannot deceive the practised eye. They can handle an oar capitally; but they have not the toughened and bronzed and Channel-tossed look of the fellows whom you encounter lolling in blanket trousers over the Ramsgate piers, or arguing in groups at the entrance of the Margate jetties, or heightening the picturesque appearance of the Deal and Folkestone shingle. Yet I cannot conceive of any place better calculated to delight a man of maritime studies and scenes than Gravesend. You may linger all day on the queer-looking roofed-in pier, with the old barge moored against it, and never feel weary. Hour after hour unfolds the canvas of a never-ending panorama of shipping. Picture after picture goes by--the great ocean steamship, the little ratching ketch, the sturdy old collier, the white and shining yacht, the large and loftily rigged ship, the eager tug hissing through the trembling current, and all the life and light and colour and wondrous transformations of the river take a certain character of remoteness akin to unreality, as though what you gazed at was nothing but a series of noble paintings, indeed, from the quietude that prevails about you; an atmosphere of lazy stillness broken by the muffled, rushing sound of the current sweeping under the pier, the dulled voices of men conversing outside the wooden structure, and the straining noise of boats as the tide sets the little craft chafing one another’s sides.

_A CHAT WITH A FISHERMAN._

A few days after the dreadful gale that had wrecked whole fleets of smacks belonging to the eastern and north-eastern ports, and drowned many hundreds of fishermen, I was visited by a Hull smacksman, who came to tell me that he had lost a son in one of the vessels which had gone down on the Dogger Bank during the storm, and to inform me of the misery and destitution into which the widows and children of the poor drowned men were plunged. He told me in a rough, plain, earnest way how his son was to have been married to a young girl on his return, and how the poor lad had saved up a few pounds to purchase a little furniture for the home, which she was preparing, when the news reached her that the smack in which her sweetheart was had gone down with all hands; how, in house after house, down whole streets, there was a constant sound of wailing and moaning, with misery and hunger indoors, amongst the weeping women and the sobbing children; and, said my fisherman to me, though God knew he was a poor man, yet such was the suffering he had witnessed, so unspeakably great was the calamity that had overtaken the fishing population of Hull--and of other ports, but he spoke of Hull because he belonged to it--that, had the thirty shillings he subscribed to the fund for the relief of these widows and orphans been the last bit of money he had in the world, he must have given it and taken his chance for himself.

The subject was a deeply interesting one to me, who had lived among fishermen, written about them, knew their heroism well, their hardships, the simple-heartedness of them. We got talking about the smacksman’s life, his risks, of various features connected with his calling; and, as the subject is one that has been commended to the British public in an appeal for charity for those whom the frightful storm bereaved, I offer no excuse for repeating in print some of the observations made by this smacksman on his own vocation. His reference to what is known as the “boxing system” enabled me to lead off with my questions. The term boxing, I may say, is applied to the conveyance of fish in boats from the smacks to the steamers which bring the fish home. As the vessels fill up with fish they transfer them to steamers, which, by relieving them of their freight, enables them to remain for weeks on the fishing ground.

“Is it a fact,” I inquired, “that smacksmen object to the boxing system?”

“It is, sir,” was the reply.

“Why?”

“Because it’s dangerous to life, sir. It keeps men working for a considerable time in open boats in all kinds of weather. It answers the owner’s purpose; he shares in the profits of carrying the fish, and it enables him to keep his vessel at sea as long as it is possible for her to remain there; and by this means the men are deprived of all home comforts and of the management of their families.”

“What is the size of the boats employed in carrying fish from the smacks to the steam cutters?”

“Well, their length’ll be about 20 ft., breadth 6 ft., and depth 3 ft.”

“And these boats the men have to launch in heavy weather?”

“Yes, often in weather that may be called heavy. The risk is increased by the peculiar circumstances under which the men are placed whilst working at the boxing system; for you’ll hear again and again of their shoving the whole of a night’s catch into the boat at once, in order to secure a quick despatch and obtain the earliest possible market.”

“How is the Dogger Bank relished as a fishing ground?”

“Well,” he replied, “it passes by the name of ‘The Cemetery’ among us. In the winter time, I don’t suppose there’s a more dangerous place in the world. With strong winds from the N.E., veering to the N.W., there come the heavy seas from the Atlantic--if you can call the ocean to the norrards of the North Sea by that name--which strike the rising ground of the bank and turn the water into a boiling caldron. It was there where the smacks went down. The seas just coiled over and fairly broke upon ’em, smothering ’em, smashing in their decks, stamping ’em out as you might grind a beetle out of sight with your heel.”

“Are your smacks supplied with barometers? I mean by that, have they any means of knowing when to expect foul weather?”

“No, sir; they’re not generally supplied. One firm owning about twenty sail of vessels, who always work on the single-boat system in winter, provide their vessels with barometers. I should think they must be very useful instruments,” said he, speaking as though he had never been shipmates with one; “and I may here add that none of those twenty vessels alluded to were lost. The majority of us smacksmen have nothing to tell the weather by except practical experience.”

“But couldn’t the admiral signal--couldn’t _he_, at least, be furnished with a barometer?”

“No doubt,” he replied. “But smacks get scattered, and it would be best for each master to understand the weather for himself. The admiral is more for rallying of us. He has his job cut out for him after a storm. His general scheme is to fall in with a steam carrier, and then sail to the ground from which he’s been driven by the gale, expecting the rest of the fleet to do likewise; but it often happens that many days pass before they’re able to get together, and this brings heavy losses among the fishermen, who, having no ice, are forced to find the admiral before they can start fishing afresh.”

“What difference is there in the mode of fishing among the Hull, Grimsby, Ramsgate, Penzance, and other smacks?”

“Vessels belonging to Hull, Grimsby, Ramsgate, and Lowestoft use the trawl net; but the Penzance boats are what is called ‘drifters,’ or herring boats.”

“I asked that question,” said I, “in order to inquire what kind of fishing--that is, which sort of voyage--is most in favour among smacksmen.”

“Why, in winter time we like best the single-boat system--when a smack goes out and gets what fish she can, and returns. This system does not require us to use small boats. It pays just as well as the other system, and is less dangerous in other directions than that of doing away with ‘boxing,’ as it leads to vessels scattering, and helps in that manner to lessen the risk of collision. We don’t object to the boxing system in summer, but it oughtn’t to be practised in winter. That’s what we think.”

“Smack-owners manage to secure themselves, don’t they?”

“Well, yes, by what’s termed mutual insurance, which provides for total loss and for damage to a certain amount apart from fishing gear. Masters don’t much like these here insurance companies. They’re too despotic. I’ll tell you what they do, sir: they won’t allow a master the right of defending himself against any charge that’s brought against him before them. Why, they think nothing of suspending a man from acting as master for a couple of years, perhaps for nothing worse than an error of judgment which the Board of Trade Commissioner would have been satisfied to reprimand him for.”

“Do smacksmen make a provision for their families by any method of insurance or clubbing?”

“Yes, sir,” he answered; “as a rule they do. There is a Fishermen’s Widow and Orphan Society, which, for payment of one shilling a month, pays a widow £20 or £25, according to the time her husband has been a member; and there is also a Friendly Protection Society, numbering at Hull 700 members, which gives sick pay for certain periods and £12 at death. Both these institutions do a great deal of good. Many fishermen also join the local friendly societies.”

“But a large number, I suppose, do not subscribe, and it is the widows and children of those who have been plunged into immediate destitution by their husbands’ death?”

“Yes, sir. But it is not always possible to subscribe; there are too many of us, and some go without work for weeks.”

“What is the average tonnage of the Hull and Grimsby smacks?”

“About seventy tons.”

“What is your opinion of them as seaworthy vessels?”

“Well, sir, the build and behaviour of them are first rate; but a great many are ill found, and are in a bad state as concerns leakage; and I can assure you that among us fishermen there is a strong feeling that there ought to be Government inspection of fishing vessels by practical men.”

“Will you explain to me the meaning of shares, and how they are proportioned?”

“It’s in this way,” said he: “the net proceeds are divided into eight shares; the master takes 1⅜ share, the mate 1⅛ share, and the owner 5½ shares, out of which he has to pay three boys or casual hands, who receive together on an average about £2 2s. a week, and he has also to find his vessel’s outfit.”

“Is it true that smacksmen object to lifebelts?”

“No; they don’t object generally. Some do, on the ground of their being too cumbersome to work in. They ought to be worn in ‘boxing.’ There’s a particular danger in that system which I forgot to mention: it’s that of collisions, which are constantly happening owing to the men being anxious to get their fish on board the steam cutter, to do which they all sail to her as close as they can, with their boats in tow and two hands in each boat.”

“And what other special dangers are there,” said I, “connected with your calling?”

“Well,” he replied, “answering that question, as concerning the single-boat system, which I’ve explained, I can but say that what the smacksman has to contend with are just the ordinary perils of a seaman’s life, such as shipping heavy seas which wash us overboard, and being dragged into the sea whilst drawing water, hauling in the net, and the likes of that. But the boxing system adds to these dangers by the risk of collision, the capsizing of boats, and the uselessness of the casual hands, the best of them preferring to ship in vessels on the single-boat system.”

“Your casual hands, as you call them, touch the apprentice question. What is your opinion of smack-boys’ homes?”

“Why, that they’re a great advantage to all fishing ports and to the lads themselves, if the homes are properly managed.”

“Can you say that smack-boys are ill-treated at sea?”

“No, I can’t, sir. There are a few exceptions, but my experience is that the boys are treated with uniform kindness.”

“To return to the question of loss of life,” said I, “amongst smacksmen, what proposals have you to offer to diminish it?”