Part 22
There are lifeboat coxswains who need but close their eyes to see fearfuller things. Just where those little creatures are brandishing their tiny bats and flourishing their shrimp-like legs, the great ship struck, and four hundred men and women shrieked out to God for mercy in one breath. A man’s fancy must be feeble even on the softest of summer days not to hear the crash of her timbers, the thunder-shocks of the smiting seas, the rending noises of hemp and wire and spar torn by the tempest from their strong fastenings; not to see the ghastly picture she makes in the wild gleam of the signal flare whose tongues of fire are blown horizontal, like streaming flags, by the furious breath of the storm, illuminating with a dull horrible crimson light the throngs of human beings who cry and struggle upon her decks, or hang, like streaming suits of clothes, in what remains of her rigging.
Is this an exaggerated picture? Alas! the pen never yet was wielded that could pourtray, in the barest form, any one of the countless horrible scenes which have taken place on that stretch of sands where one summer day I watched, leaning over the rail of a vessel, a number of light-hearted excursionists playing cricket.
Among the things which never can be known may be placed the thoughts which possess a man in the moment of shipwreck. Of the hundreds of published narratives none satisfies the reader; and of those who relate their experiences, how infinitely remote from the truth do their statements strike them as being when they put what they have written side by side with what they remember having felt! The reason is, I take it, because in no other situation is death more awful than upon the sea. It is commonly slow--at least, it gives time for anguish to become full-blown--and the hope of rescue must be very strong indeed, and well founded, to qualify that agony of expectation, sinking into paralyzing despair, which confounds and in a manner stuns a person stranded far out upon the water in a black night, seeing nothing but the glare of lightning or the spectral flashing of froth flying past, hearing nothing but the grinding and trembling and dislocating noises of the hull upon the ground.
It is supposed because sailors cannot or do not describe the horrors they pass through that they lack the capacity of expression. But you may put the most eloquent writer now living, call him by what name you please, on board a ship foundering amid a tempest or going to pieces in a storm on such a shoal as the Goodwins or the Sunk Sand, and when he has been long enough rescued and ashore to recover the use of his brains, you may defy him to write such a narrative of the disaster as will come, to his own conscience and memory, one jot nearer to the truth than the newspaper paragraph of five lines in which the wreck was chronicled. A man can describe what he has suffered in a railway collision, in a house on fire, down in a mine where there has been an explosion, in a theatre where there has been a panic; but put him aboard a ship and let him clearly understand that he is going to be drowned, and when succoured he can tell you little more than that the waves ran mountains high, that some people were brave, and that some people shrieked, and that what he best remembers is catching hold of something, and hearing the water in his ears, and being dragged into a boat.
Very true is the old saying, “If you want to learn how to pray, you must go to sea.” So distracting, so paralyzing, so utterly despairful are all the conditions of shipwreck in its worst forms, that I cannot but think, when a man is known to act bravely and coolly in that situation, unmindful of himself, thinking of others, encouraging and heartening them, the heroism he exhibits is of a kind not to be matched by any kind of courage a man may show in a position that lacks the overwhelming features which distinguish the foundering or the stranding of a ship.
Some days ago I met a seaman who had made one of the crew of a brig that a few months since was stranded on the Goodwin Sands, and went to pieces there. The circumstances of the wreck were so recent that I was sure it could not but be a very sharp, clear memory in this sailor; and, wanting to hear what sort of thoughts come into a man’s head at such a time, and how he will act, what kind of impulses govern him, and the like, I carried this mariner to where a seat and a glass of beer were to be had, and conversed with him.
“She was a wessel,” said he, “of 220 ton, and we was in ballast, bound from Can (Caen) to Seaham. All went well, nothen particular happening, I mean, till we comes abreast o’ the South Foreland. It might then be twelve o’clock in the middle o’ the night. The weather was as thick as mud, plenty of rain driving along, and the wind west, blowin’ a fresh breeze. We was under upper and lower main-tops’l, lower fore-tops’l, and foresail.”
Here he took a drink.
“And the weather as thick as mud, you say?”
“Ay, thick as mud in a wine-glass. The Sou’ San’head light was on our starboard beam, and ye may guess how clear it was when I tell you that that light took a deal of peering at to make out. As to the East Good’in, why, all that way was black as my boot: not the merest glimmer to betoken a lightwessel _there_. I was at the side, heavin’ the lead, getting nine fathom, and then seven, and then eight, and then seven again. Eight fair betwixt the Callipers and the Deal coast I’ll allow ye’ll get eleven and twelve fathom good till you come on to past the Downs--headin’ up, I mean--and then it shoals down to height and seven and five and a ’arf. So in a night as black as a dead wall, when there’s no moon, who’s to know, when the last light seen has drawed out of view, and there’s ne’er another to be sighted, where you are in that water? We was going along tidy fast, when a squall of rain drives right up over our starn in a wild smother, and I had just made seven fathom by the lead when the wessel took the ground, chucking me off the rail on to the deck. The skipper begins to bawl out like mad, ‘Let go the main-torps’l halliards! Haul up the foresail! Let go the ----’ Wash at that moment comes a lump of sea right over the port quarter, cantin’ our starn to the south’ard and smotherin’ the decks. You didn’t want to see--you could feel that the brig was hard and fast, though as the sea thumped her she’d kinder sway on her keel.”
Here he took another drink.
“Well?” said I.
“Well,” he continued, “what was to do now, master? Everything being let go aloft, the canvas was slatting like thunder up there, and though I’m not goin’ to tell you it was blowing a gale of wind, yet it seemed to come twice as hard the moment we took the ground, and the seas to rise as if our falling helpless on a sudden had swelled ’em up with joy. We lay with our head about nor’-nor’-east, and over the starboard bow you could see the white water jumping. But that was all that was visible. The wind seemed to blow up the thickness all round us, there was not a light to be seen, and looking around anywhere away from the white water was like putting your head in a pitch-kettle. Cold! master, that was the worst part of it. I’ll allow that in all sitivations of this kind the cold’s the part that’s hardest to bear. Somehow clanger ain’t so frightful when it’s warm. Can’t explain it, I’m sure; matter o’ constitootion, perhaps: but I doubt if ye’d find much bravery among the Hesquimos and the Roosians up near the pole, and the likes o’ them. Can’t see how it’s possible; but it’s only my ’pinion.”
Another drink.
“Well,” he continued, holding up the fresh glass of ale I had ordered for him to the light, with a look of pensiveness in the one bloodshot eye he kept open, “we tarns to and makes a flare--a sort o’ bonfire. But if we couldn’t see anything, who was to see us? However, we kept all on burning flares, whilst first the fore-top-gall’nmast came down with a run, causing us all to jump aft out of the road, and then the main-topmast carries away at the cap and falls with a roar over the side, and set us all running forrard. I for one made up my mind we was all to be drownded. I couldn’t see no help for it. The noise of them spars cracking and tumbling away in the blackness overhead, and the shindy set up by the slatting canvas, along with the creaking of the hull and the washing of the water that came as white as milk over the starboard rail, was enough, I reckon, to make any man suppose his time had come, and that his ghost was to be turned out of him. However, we took heart after a spell, by noticing that the seas burst with less weight as the tide left us, though every butt in her must have yawed open after she had been grinding awhile, for she was full of water and a few hours more of such dusting was bound to have made staves of her. Well, at about half-past four o’clock in the morning, we being by that time pretty near froze to death, the weather thinned down, and we caught sight of the Gull Light shining--about three mile off, I dare say. What was to be seen of our wessel was just a fearful muddle; masts overboard washing alongside, the lower masts working in her like loose teeth with every heave, decks full of raffle, and the water every now and again flying over us as though detarmined if it couldn’t wash us overboard it would keep us streamin’ wet. When we spied the Gull Light we turned to and made another flare, and presently they sent up a rocket, and to cut this yarn short,” continued he, having by this time emptied his second tumbler, and finding me slow in offering him a third, “just as the light was abreakin’ in the east one of us sings out that there was a steamer headin’ for us, and when the mornin’ grew stronger we spied a tug makin’ for us with a lifeboat in tow. Well, by this time there was little enough sea, and the lifeboat, letting go off the tug, came alongside, but two of our men was so badly froze up that they had to be lifted into her, and such had been our sufferings, though I’m not going to say they equalled what others have gone through on those cussed sands, that we couldn’t have looked worse, with salt in our eyes and our faces washed into the appearance of tallow, had we been spendin’ forty-eight hours on that shoal. We lost all our clothes, every bloomin’ thing we had with us; and that same forenoon, just afore twelve o’clock, half a gale of wind sprung up, and by two o’clock there was nothing to be seen of the brig.”
“And that’s the story,” said I.
“That’s it,” he answered; “every word gospel true.”
“How did the others behave,” said I, “in this awful situation? Pretty well?”
“It was too dark to see,” he answered.
“Did you encourage one another?”
“Well,” he replied, “the cook at first kept on singin’ out, ‘We’re all drownded men! Lord have mercy upon me!’ and the like of that, until the cold took away his voice. I don’t know that there was any other sort o’ encouragement.”
“And what were your feelings,” said I, “when the brig took the ground and the water washed over her?”
“My feelings?” he replied. “Why, that we was in a bloomin’ mess. That was my feelings.”
“How did the prospect of death affect you--I mean the idea of being swept into the black water and strangling there?”
“Are you chaffin’ me, sir?” he asked.
“Certainly not,” said I.
“Well,” he said, “I’m blessed if I was asked such a question as that afore,” grinning. “It’s like a meetin’-house question.”
“Didn’t you think at all?” said I.
“Yes,” he answered; “I thought what a jolly fool I was to be ashore on the Good’ens on a winter’s night, gradually dyin’ of frost, instead of bein’ in a warm bed ashore, with a parlour to take breakfast in when I woke up. That’s about it, sir.”
_THE STRANGERS’ HOME._
A plain red-brick building stands in the West India Dock Road, with the following lengthy name or description written along the front of it:--“The Strangers’ Home for Asiatics, Africans, and South Sea Islanders.” On the day I visited this house there were three or four people standing on the doorsteps, with faces which did more in an instant to express the character of the place than could have been effected by reams of reports of annual meetings and descriptive pamphlets. They were, it is needless to say, persons of colour, and of very decided colour too: one as black as a hat, another of a muddy yellow, a third a gloomy brown. They were dressed in European clothes: they might have belonged to nations which were in a high state of civilization when the Thames was clean water, and rolled its silver stream through a land whose scanty population hung loose and unclothed among the trees; but for all that, they had the look of wild men in breeches, and the very black person needed little more than a boomerang or a bow and arrows to give him the aspect at least of an unsafe object. I had, however, but little time to inspect these men, for a commotion in the hall of the building, coupled with an assemblage of some dozen or twenty people on the street pavement, called my attention to a spectacle of real interest. This consisted of the starting of a troupe of Javanese musicians for the place of entertainment where they were then performing. There were a number of men and four women--at least, I think there were four women; yet it is possible that I may have mistaken a man for one of the other sex, for some of the men and women were very much alike, especially the men. They streamed out in a great hurry, their bright black eyes sparkling in their brown faces, the men smoking short pipes of a decidedly West India Dock Road pattern, and the women bundling along in such queer raiment that it would be as hopeless to attempt to describe its colours and cut as to catalogue the stock of a rag-and-bottle merchant. A kind of large private omnibus stood at the door, into which these strange people got, some of them climbing upon the roof; and striking indeed was the appearance of the windows of the vehicle, framing, as they did, every one of them, a dark, contented face, whilst the roof of the omnibus was crowded with blacks and whites, like the keys of a pianoforte.
“Who are those people?” said I to a Chinaman, as the omnibus rolled away.
“Hey?” answered John.
“Those people,” I said, pointing towards the retreating vehicle, “they are not sailors, are they? There are women among them.”
“No, no, not sailor, no, no,” cried the Chinaman with great earnestness, and wagging his head so violently that he nearly shook his hat off. “Music-man, not sailor; play tic-a-tic, tic-a-tic;” and here he screwed an imaginary fiddle into his throat and fell to sawing the air with his elbow.
At this moment I was joined by the secretary--a gentleman, let me say at once, who, after spending many years of his life in India, is now gratuitously devoting his services to the poor Asiatic who finds himself homeless in this great wilderness of London, often penniless, and speaking a tongue with which he may journey from Mile End Gate to Hammersmith without finding an ear capable of comprehending a word he says. This gentleman told me who those queer-looking people were, how they were in charge of a Dutch _entrepreneur_, and how they were “putting-up” at the Strangers’ Home because there, and at no other place in London, they were likely to meet people who, even if they did not speak their language, would impart a sense of home.
We now proceeded to inspect the building. As at the Well Street Sailors’ Home, so here, the common room, if I may so term it, is the central hall, a large place furnished with seats and tables and heated by an immense stove. Here of an evening, when it is cold or damp out of doors, the inmates of the home assemble, and the bright lamps shed their light upon as many diverse countenances and costumes as there are nationalities to the eastward of Russia and in the great oceans which wash the Capes of Africa and South America. Strange, indeed, is the admixture to a European eye: the Hindoo sitting cross-legged on a bench listening, with dusky eyes rolling in his black attenuated features, to the pigeon-English of a round-faced Chinaman; a Malay endeavouring by gestures to make himself understood by a Kanaka; a native of Ceylon smiling over the porcine gutturals of a couple of Zulus; with here an Arab reis pacing the floor in lonely dignity, or a red man of a paternity indistinguishable in his features, which seem compounded of the Nubian, the last of the Mohicans, a dash of Polynesia, with a hint of Liverpool or Bristol, spelling over a volume full of murky and eye-confounding hieroglyphs.
“When this hall is full the sight is a remarkable one,” said the secretary. “What with the hum of the strange languages--perhaps as many as twenty all going at once--together with the various faces and clothes, I assure you it needs no small effort of mind to convince one’s self that one is still in London, and that just out of doors omnibuses are rolling, small boys calling out the evening papers, and policemen standing at the corners.”
I felt the force of this, thinly peopled as the hall was, when I stood in it gazing around. Was it the strange haunting Eastern smells--vague fumes, as of a hubble-bubble recently smoked out; a lingering whiff as of curry; a thin, ghostly odour of bamboos, chillies, oil, nutmeg, and cedar-wood? or was it the turban, the pigtail, the almond-shaped eye, the black, bronze, and yellow skins of the few Asiatics who were seated in a body on a central bench, that carried my imagination out of the West India Dock Road into the tangled forests, the hot, blue heavens, the joss-houses, the sampans and junks, the rushing rivers, the jackalls, the dusky figures, the blue gowns and red or yellow shoes of the distant, spacious provinces of the sun? Hark to the sing-song chatter babbling from that Mongolian visage! What is the magic of it, that this hall, gloomy with the smoke of the great city blowing riverwards, should be transformed into a shining Eastern city, whose shores, rich with the green of tropical vegetation, are washed by a sea whose breast reflects a heaven of sapphire? The voice ceases; the spell is broken; the muffled roar of the toiling world outside breaks in and establishes one of the very sharpest contrasts in life--that of the condition of an Asiatic, fresh from the hot suns and thick jungles of his own country, plunged amid the smoke, the turmoil, the unspeakable odours of the east end of London, incapable of making his wants known, languishing in misery and cold in the gloom of railway arches or some unfrequented court, feeling what solitude is in a sense never imagined by Byron. For the Asiatic’s loneliness is that of the dumb brute; he has a language, but he might as well be voiceless, and, worst of all, he is the victim of the unnatural, ignorant, and wicked prejudice which finds in the coloured skin nothing but what is fit for derision, contempt, and cruel neglect. This was the lot of the Eastern stranger before a number of humane Englishmen banded themselves together to furnish him with a refuge. I own that the fine humanity of this institution affected me strongly as I stood looking at the knot of dark-visaged, strangely apparelled men, and considered what would be their fate if this Home were not at hand to help them, to receive them, to interpret their wants, and to assist them to return to their native countries. Time was when few tragedies were commoner than that of the finding the body of some coloured man who had made his way as a sailor or stoker to London, been robbed by the beasts of prey who wander hungrily round the dockyard gates, and had lain himself down in some corner of this opulent city to die of cold and hunger. Such horrors are things of the past, and honoured be those and the memory of those who have made them so. No Asiatic stranger need perish for the want of a friend in London now. The Home will receive him, and for a very moderate sum--which he may easily pay either from the wages due to him from the ship he leaves, or by the note advanced by the owners whose ship he joins--feed and lodge him, and spare no trouble to restore him to his own country. Hence, to a large extent, the institution contributes to its own support. But the charges it makes are so small, the losses it incurs through the new allotment or bonus notes are so frequent, and the cases of absolute destitution it deals with so numerous, that it is bound to continue to be dependent upon outside help to a certain extent; and I believe that no one who has any knowledge of the work it is doing, no one with sympathy for the helpless of his own species, but will admit that there is not an institution in existence that better deserves the gifts of the charitable than this Home for Asiatic Strangers.
But all this time I am leaving the obliging and kind-hearted secretary waiting to show me over the premises. We pass out first of all into a space of open ground at the back of the building, of which a substantial piece has been converted into a flower garden. This the superintendent of the Home, who has joined us, contemplates for a while with silent satisfaction, and then, with considerable pride, draws my attention to it.
“It has all been done within the last two or three years,” he says. “The Asiatics lend a hand, find old seeds knocking about the bottom of their chests, and plant them, but they never come to anything. They won’t grow, you know, in this climate. Here’s a sample,” he says, pointing to a row of shoots which look like the first buddings of that patriotic vegetable the leek; “they were planted three days ago by those Javanese women you saw, and this is what they’ve already come to. But I suspect they’ll end at that.”
A balcony runs at the back of the house, and along it there was stumping a John Canoe, smoking something strange, whether a pipe or cigar or cigarette or piece of cane I could not tell. He vanished through a door when we mounted the steps, which I regretted, as I should like to have examined the thing he had in his mouth.
“This,” said the secretary on our re-entering the building, “is what we call the firemen’s dormitory.” It was a large room with a bulkhead dividing it, and on either hand of the bulkhead went a row of narrow beds furnished with coarse coverlets and mattresses stuffed with fibre. There was no carpet, and I ventured to ask the reason, as the bare boards had but a cheerless look.
“Carpet!” exclaimed the secretary; “my dear sir, these Asiatics wouldn’t know what to do with such a thing. They’d pull it up and make trousers of it. You cannot conceive the strangeness of their habits and customs. For instance, to give them a table-cloth would be like ill treating them. Nothing bothers them more than a fork; and you may see them eating eggs with clasp-knives, which they pull out of their pockets.” Then seeing me eyeing the beds, he continued, “It would hardly do to give the firemen fine linen to lie in. Sir, they arrive here thick with grime, they foul whatever they touch, and it takes several days of hard bathing to clean them.”
There were several of these dormitories, each of them divided by bulkheads, uncarpeted, and containing the same kind of bedsteads, every one bearing a number at its head. The Javanese troupe occupied one of these dormitories, the men sleeping on one side of the bulkhead and the women on the other. I looked for their luggage, but could find nothing but a fiddle and an old sword. I think, if the public had seen where these musicians sleep, they would reckon the sight stranger than any other part of the performance these Eastern people were giving. There is one dormitory, however, upstairs filled with cabins similar to what they have at the old Sailors’ Home at Belvedere. These are occupied, I was told, by the better class of Asiatics.
“And who might they be?” I asked.