Chapter 4

Again, and this time once more off Cape Horn. It was my third voyage; I was still a midshipman, and in the second mate's watch. I came on deck at midnight and found the ship hove-to, breasting what in this age of steamboats, and, for the matter of that, perhaps in any other age, might be termed a terrific sea. She was making good weather of it--that is to say, she kept her decks dry, but she was diving and rolling most hideously, with such swift headlong shearing of her spars through the gale that the noises up in the blackness aloft were as though the spirits of the inmates of a thousand lunatic asylums had been suddenly enlarged from their bodies and sent yelling into limbo. The wind blew with an unendurable edge in the sting and bite of it. The second mate and I, each with a rope girdling his waist to swing by, stood muffled up to our noses under the lee of a square of canvas seized to the mizzen shrouds. Presently he roared into my ear, "Sort of a night for a pannikin of coffee, eh, Mr. Russell?" "Ay, ay, sir," I replied, and with that, liberating myself from the rope, I clawed my way along the line of the hencoops--the decks sometimes sloping almost up and down to the heavy weather _scends_ of the huge black billows,--and descended into the midshipmen's berth. It was not the first time I had made a cup of coffee for myself and the second mate in the middle watch during cold weather. An old nurse who had lived in my family for years had given me an apparatus consisting of a spirit-lamp and a funnel-shaped contrivance of block tin, along with several pounds of very good coffee, and with this I used to keep the second mate and myself supplied with the real luxury of a hot and aromatic drink during wet and frosty watches. The midshipmen's berth was a narrow room down in the 'tween decks, bulkheaded off from the sides, fitted with a double row of bunks, one on top of another, the lower beds being about a foot above the deck. There were five midshipmen all turned in and fast asleep. The others, who were on watch, were clustered under the break of the poop for the shelter there. A lonely one-eyed sort of slush lamp, with sputtering wick and stinking flame, swung wearily from a blackened beam, rendering the darkness but little more than visible. I slung my little cooking apparatus near to it, filled the lamp with spirits of wine, put water and coffee into the funnel, and then set fire to the arrangement. I stood close under it, wrapped from head to foot in gleaming oilskins--looking a very bloated little shape, I don't doubt, from the quantity of clothing I wore under the waterproofs,--waiting for the water to boil. The seas roared in thunder high above the scuttles to the wild and sickening dipping of the ship's side into the trough. The humming of the gale pierced through the decks with the sound of a crowd of bands of music in the distance, all playing together and each one a different tune. The midshipmen snored, and coats and smallclothes hanging from the bunk stanchions wearily swung sprawling out and in, like bodies dangling from gallows in a gale of wind.

All in a moment a sea of unusual weight and fury took the ship and hove her down to the height as you would have thought, of her topgallant rail; the headlong movement sent me sliding to leeward; the forethatch of my sou'wester struck the spirit-lamp; down it poured, in a line of fire upon the deck, where it surged to and fro in a sheet of flame, with the movements of the ship. I was so horribly frightened as to be almost paralysed by the sight of that flickering stretch of yellowish light, sparkling and leaping as it swept under the lower bunks and came racing back again to the bulkhead with the windward incline. I fell to stamping upon it in my sea-boots, little fool that I was, hoping in that way to extinguish it. A purple-faced midshipman occupied one of the lower bunks, and his long nose lay over the edge of it. He opened his eyes, and after looking sleepily for a moment or two at the coating of pale fire rushing from under his bed, he snuffed a bit, and muttering, "Doocid nice smell; burnt brandy, ain't it?" he turned over and went to sleep again with his face the other way.

I was in an agony of consternation, and yet afraid of calling for help lest I should be very roughly manhandled for my carelessness. There was a deal of "raffle" under the bunks--sea-boots, little bundles of clothing, and I know not what else; but thanks to Cape Horn everything was happily as damp as water itself. There was therefore nothing to kindle, nor was there any aperture through which the burning spirit could run below into the hold; so by degrees the flaming stuff consumed itself, and in about ten minutes' time the planks were black again. I went on deck and reported what had happened to the second mate. All he said was "My God!" and instantly ran below to satisfy himself that there was no further danger. I can never recall that little passage of my life without a shudder. There were a hundred and ninety-five souls of us aboard, and had I managed to set the ship on fire that night the doom of every living creature would have been assured, seeing that no boat could have lived an instant in such a sea as was then running.

In a very different climate from that of Cape Horn I came very near to meeting with an extremely ugly end. It was a little business entirely out of the routine of the ordinary ocean dangers, but the memory of it sends a thrill through me to this hour, though it is much past twenty years ago since it happened. I was making my second voyage aboard a small full-rigged ship that had been hired by the Government for the conveyance of troops to the East Indies. I was the only midshipman; the other youngsters consisted of five apprentices. We occupied a deck-house a little forward of the main-hatch. This house was divided by a fore and aft bulkhead; the apprentices lived in the port compartment, the third and fourth mates and myself slung our hammocks on the starboard side. The third mate was a man of good family, aged about twenty-one, a young Hercules in strength, with heavy under-jaws and the low, peculiar brow of the prize-fighter. He had been a midshipman in Smith's service, and was a good and active sailor, very nimble aloft and expert in his work about the ship, but of a sullen, morose disposition, and a heavy drinker whenever the opportunity to get drink presented itself. I think he was regarded by all hands as a little touched, but I was too young to remark in him any oddities which might strike an older observer. He was given to delivering himself of certain dark, wild fancies. I remember he once told me that if he owed a man a grudge he would not scruple to plant himself alongside of him on a yard on a black night and kick the foot-rope from under him when his hands were busy, and so let him go overboard. But this sort of talk I would put down to mere boasting, and indeed I thought nothing of it.

We were in the Indian Ocean, and one evening I sat at supper (as tea, the last meal on board ship, is always called) along with this man and the fourth mate. We fell into some sort of nautical argument, and in the heat of the discussion I said something that caused the third mate to look at me fixedly for a little while, whilst he muttered under his breath, in a kind of half-stifled way, as though his teeth were set. I did not catch the words, but I am quite certain from the fourth mate's manner, that he had heard them, and that he knew what was in the other's mind. I say this because I recollect that very shortly afterwards the fellow rose and walked out on deck with an air about him as if he was willing to give the third mate a chance of being alone with me. It was a mean trick, but then he was a cowardly rogue, and when I afterwards heard that he had been dismissed from the service he had formerly entered for robbing his shipmates of money and tobacco and the humble trifles which sailors carry about with them in their sea-chests I was wicked enough, recalling how he had walked out of that deck-house, leaving me, a little boy, alone with a strong, brutal, crazy third mate, to hope that he might yet prove guilty of larger sins still, for I could not but regard him as a creature that deserved to be hanged. The instant this man stepped through the door the third mate jumped up and closed it. It travelled in grooves, and he whipped it to with a temper which caused the whole structure to echo again to the blow.

"Now, you young--" he exclaimed, turning his bulldog face, white with rage, upon me, yet speaking in a cold voice that was more terrifying to listen to than if he had roared out, "I have you and I mean to punish you," and with that he unclasped his heavy belt, and then clasped it again so as to make a double thong of the leather, and grasped me by the collar.

What my feelings were I am unable to state at this distance of time. I believe I was more astonished than frightened. I could not imagine that this huge creature was in earnest in offering to beat me for what I had said, and yet I was sensible too of an unnatural fire in his eyes--a glow that put an expression of savage exultation into them; and this look of his somehow held me motionless and speechless. He half raised his arm, but a sudden irresolution possessed him, as though my passivity was a check upon his intentions.

"No, no," he exclaimed, after a little, "I'll manage better than this"; and still grasping me by the collar of my jacket he dropped his belt and ran me to the fore end of the compartment, threw me on my back, and knelt upon me. Within reach of his arm, kneeling as he was, were three shelves on which we kept such crockery and cutlery as we owned, along with our slender stores of sugar and flour and the cold remains of previous repasts. He felt for a knife; I could hear the blades rattle as his fingers groped past his curved wrist for one of them, and then flourishing the black-handled weapon in front of my eyes he exclaimed, "Now I'm going to murder you." I lay stock-still; I never uttered a word; I scarcely breathed indeed. Again, I say that I do not know that I was terrified. My condition was one of semi-stupefaction, I think, with just enough of sense left in me to comprehend that if I uttered the least cry or struggled, no matter how faintly, I should transform him into a wild beast. Nothing but my lying corpse-like under the pressure of his knee saved me, I am certain. My gaze was fixed upon his face, and I see him now staring at me with his little eyes on fire, and the knife poised ready to plunge. This posture maybe he retained for two or three minutes; it ran into long hours to me. Then on a sudden he threw the knife away backwards over his shoulder, rose and went to the door, where he stood a little staring at me intently. I continued to lie motionless. He opened the door and passed out, on which I sprang to my feet and fled as nimbly as my legs would carry me to the poop, where I found the chief mate. He was a little Welshman of the name of Thomas, a brother of Ap Thomas, the celebrated harpist, and if he be still alive and these lines should meet his eyes, let him be pleased to know that my memory holds him in cordial respect as the kindest officer and the smartest seaman I ever had the fortune to be shipmates with. To him I related what had happened.

"O--ho," cried he, "attempted murder, hey? Our friend must be taught that we don't allow this sort of thing to happen aboard _us_."

He gave certain orders and shortly afterwards the third mate was seized and locked up in a spare cabin just under the break of the poop. Two powerful seamen were told off to keep him company. How much the unfortunate man needed this sort of control I could not have imagined but for my hearing that he was locked up and my going to the cabin window that looked on to the quarter deck to take a peep at him if he was visible. He saw me and bounded to the window, bringing his leg-of-mutton fist against it with a blow that crashed the whole plate of glass into splinters. His face was purple, his eyes half out of their sockets. There was froth upon his lips, with such a general distortion of features that it would be impossible to figure a more horrible illustration of madness than his countenance. I bolted as if the devil had been after me, catching just a glimpse of the powerful creature wrestling in the grasp of the two seamen who were dragging him backwards into the gloom of the cabin. Such an escape as this I regard as distinctly more eventful, if not more romantic, than falling overboard and being rescued when almost spent, or being picked up after a fortnight's exposure in an open boat. My most sleep-murdering nightmares nearly always include the phantom form of that burly, crazed third mate kneeling upon my motionless little figure and feeling for a knife on one of the shelves just over my head.

Another little plum out of my plain sailor's pudding. This time my ship was an East Indian trader that whilst lying at Calcutta was chartered by the Government to convey troops to the North of China. It was in 1860. Difficulties had arisen, and John Chinaman was to be attacked. We proceeded to Hong Kong with the headquarters of the 60th Rifles on board, and thence to the Gulf of Peche-li, which I should say submitted one of the finest spectacles in the world, with its congregations of transports and English and French and Yankee ships of war. It was an old-world scene which the sponge of time has obliterated for ever, and I behold again in memory those two noble frigates, the _Impérieuse_ and the _Chesapeake_, straining tightly at their cables, with smoke-stacks too modest in proportions to impair to the critical nautical eye the tack and sheet suggestions of the graceful, exquisitely symmetrical fabric of spars and yards and rigging soaring triumphantly aloft to where the long whip or pennant at the main flickered like a delicate line of fire against the hard cold blue of the Asiatic sky.

We lay for many months in that bay, and were obliged repeatedly to send ashore for fresh meat, vegetables, and the like. On one occasion I recollect going with the mate in the long-boat some distance up the river Peiho, a rushing, turbid stream at the mouth of which the Chinese had fixed a very _chevaux-de-frise_ of spikes, upon which they had fondly hoped our men-of-war would impale themselves, forgetting that the depth of water scarcely permitted the approach of a shallow gunboat. We were returning to the ship with a fair wind, and on top of the fierce rush of the river, when our helmsman run us plump against one of Johnny's huge impalers. The shock of the blow threw the mate into an immense basket of fresh eggs. He fell with a squelch past all power of forgetting, and lay wriggling in a very quagmire of yolk and white and fragments of shells. We pulled him out blind and streaming with eggs. His aspect was so preposterously absurd that the helmsman, rendered almost imbecile by laughter, let the boat drive into a second pile, when, as I live to write it, the mate, who was cleaning himself near to the basket, was thrown a second time into the glutinous mess! I will not attempt to repeat the sea-blessings he bestowed upon the steersman. Happily eggs were cheap, and a dollar might have represented a more considerable smash. Now it was two days following this that the captain sent the long-boat to procure some sheep and poultry from a little village situated close to the shores of the bay on the north of the river. The second mate took charge, and I and another midshipman and a couple of sailors went along with him. We landed and left the boat in charge of a seaman, and strolled towards the village. The second mate was a wild, dissolute young fellow, who, before he quitted China, became the recipient of more than one round dozen by order of the provost-marshal for looting. A little knot of Chinamen stood watching as we approached, whilst just beyond we caught sight of a couple of women hobbling nimbly away out of reach of our sight, as though they walked on stilts. Sherman--for such was the second mate's name,--approaching the Chinamen, began with them in pigeon English. They did not understand. He exhibited a few dollars, and traced the outline of a sheep upon the ground, and, with many surprising motions of his arms, sought to acquaint them with the object of his visit. All to no purpose. "What's to be done?" said Sherman, looking at us. "There's nothing that resembles a sheep hereabouts." His eyes suddenly brightened as they lighted on a large concourse of cocks and hens pecking in tolerably close order at some fifty paces distant from us. "Boys," he shouted, "as these chaps can't be made to understand, let's help ourselves. Each one seize what he can get and make for the boat. Follow me." He sprang with incredible agility towards the fowls, and in a trice had a couple of them shrieking and fluttering in his grasp. In a breath the Chinamen--thirty or forty strong--uttering a long, peculiar shout, armed themselves with pitchforks--at all events, a species of weapon that to my young eyes resembled a pitchfork,--sticks, and stones, and gave chase. They tramped after us with the noise of an army in pursuit. We flew towards the boat, screaming to the fellow in charge to haul in and receive us. A stone struck me in the small of my back, and urged me forwards faster than my legs were travelling. Down I should have tumbled on my nose, and in that posture have been straightway massacred, but for the timely grip of a sailor who was running by my side. "Hold up, my hearty!" he roared, hooking his fingers into the back of my collar and jerking me backwards. In a few moments we gained the boat, wading waist-high to come at her, and rolling like drunken men over her gunwale into her bottom. A volley of stones rattled about our ears, but we were safe. Had the Chinamen carried firearms, not one of us but must have been shot down.

I could relate a score or more of such experiences: of ugly collisions with the police in Calcutta, of a narrow escape of being thrown overboard by a dinghy-wallah of the river Hooghley, of a desperate fight in the slings of the mizzen-topgallant yard with an apprentice of my own age, and the like; but the space at my disposal obliges me to conclude. Very little of the heroic enters the sailor's life. The risks he runs, the adventures he encounters, have, as a rule, nothing of the romantic in them; they are mainly brought about by his own foolhardiness, by the proverbial carelessness that is utterly irreconcilable with the stern obligations of vigilance, alertness, and foresight imposed upon him by the nature of his calling, by the imbecility of shipmates, and much too often by drink. Yet no matter what the cause of most of the perils he meets with, his experiences, I take it, head the march of professional dangers. Small wonder that faith in the "sweet little cherub that sits up aloft" should still linger in the forecastle. For certainly were it not for the bright look-out kept over him by some sort of maritime angel, the mariner would rank foremost as amongst the most perishable of human products.

_The Strange Adventures of a South Seaman._

On November 4th, 1830, a number of convicts were indicted at the Admiralty Sessions of the Old Bailey for having on the 5th of September in the previous year piratically seized a brig called the _Cyprus_. A South Seaman was innocently and most involuntarily, as shall be discovered presently, involved in this tragic business, to which he is able to add a narrative that is certainly not known to any of the chroniclers of crime. But first as to the piratical seizure.

The _Cyprus_, a colonial brig, had been chartered to convey a number of convicts from Hobart Town to Macquarie Harbour, on the northern coast of Tasmania, and Norfolk Island, distant about a week's sail from Sydney--in those days a penal settlement. There were thirty-two felons in all. These men had been guilty of certain grave offences at Hobart Town, and they had rendered themselves in consequence liable to new punishment; they were tried before the Supreme Court of Judicature there, and sentenced to be transported to the place above mentioned.

Only the very worst sort of prisoners were sent to Norfolk Island and Macquarie Harbour. The discipline at those penal settlements was terrible; the labour that was exacted, heart-breaking. The character of the punishment was well known, and every felon re-sentenced to transportation from the colonial convict settlements very well understood the fate that was before him.

The _Cyprus_ sailed from Hobart Town in August, 1829. In addition to the thirty-two convicts, she carried a crew of eight men and a guard of twelve soldiers, under the command of Lieutenant Carew, who was accompanied by his wife and children. The prisoners, as was always customary in convict ships, were under the care of a medical man named Williams.

Nothing of moment happened until the brig either brought up or was hove-to in Research Bay, where Dr. Williams, Lieutenant Carew, the mate of the vessel, a soldier, and a convict named Popjoy went ashore on a fishing excursion. They had not been gone from the ship above half-an-hour when they heard a noise of firearms. Instantly guessing that the convicts had risen, they made a rush for the boat and pulled for the brig. It was as they had feared: the felons had mastered the guard and seized the brig. They suffered no man to come on board save Popjoy, who, however, later on sprang overboard, and swam to the beach. They then sent the crew, soldiers, and passengers ashore, but without provisions and the means of supporting life. Then, amongst themselves, the prisoners lifted the anchor and trimmed sail, and the little brig slipped away out of Research Bay.

The chroniclers state that the vessel was never afterward heard of, though some of the convicts were apprehended, separately, in various parts of Sussex and Essex. The posthumous yarn of the mate of an English whaler disproves this. He relates his extraordinary experience thus:

"We had been fishing north of the Equator, and had filled up with a little 'grease,' as the Yankees term it, round about the Galapagos Islands, but business grew too slack for even a whaleman's patience. Eleven months out from Whitby, and, if my memory fails me not, less than a score of full barrels in our hold! So the Captain made up his mind to try south, and working our way across the Equator, we struck in amongst the Polynesian groups, raising the Southern Cross higher and higher, till we were somewhere about latitude 30 deg., and longitude 175 deg. E.

"I came on deck to the relief at four o'clock one morning: the weather was quiet, a pleasant breeze blowing off the starboard beam; our ship was barque-rigged, with short, topgallant masts--Cape Horn fashion; she was thrusting through it leisurely under topsails and a maintopgallantsail, and the whole Pacific heave so cradled her as she went that she seemed to sleep as she sailed.