Chapter 6

FORE AND AFT SEAMANSHIP.

It has been my fate to put to sea in some of the worst-found craft that ever scrambled into port again, but of the lot, that ugly little cutter of Haigh's stands pre-eminent.

She possessed no single good point in her favour. She had swung in harbour so long that everywhere above the water-line she was as staunch as a herring-net. Her standing rigging, being of wire, was merely rusted, but her running gear was something too appalling to think about. As for her bottom, if she had been turned up and dried for a day (so Haigh cheerfully averred), there would have been enough bushy cover on it to put down pheasants in. Fittings, even the barest necessaries, were painfully lacking, as the man had been living riotously on them for over a month and a half. A Chinese pirate could not have picked her much cleaner. What he was pleased to term the "superfluities of the main and after cabins" had gone first, fetching fair prices. Afterwards he had peddled his gear little by little, dining one day off a riding-light, going to a theatre the next on two marline spikes and a sister-block, and so on. His ground tackle, long saved up for a _bonne bouche_, had provided funds for that last night in the gambling hell, where we both got cleared out together; and the balance that was left didn't represent a mosquito's ransom.

Haigh told me all this as we walked back again down the narrow streets to the quay, and I suggested that although Mediterranean air was good, we couldn't exactly live on it during the passage across. But he pointed out that as his dinghy was very old and rotten, it would be quite a useless encumbrance on the cruise; and so, dropping me on board the cutter, he sculled off again to swap this old wreck for provisions.

I roused out a weather-thinned mainsail, black with mildew, and bent it; and by the time that was on the spars, he had completed his barter, and had been put on board again by a friend.

We had a dozen words of conversation, and then got small canvas hoisted and quietly slipped moorings. The night was very black, and thick with driving rain; and we slid out through the pier-heads unquestioned save by a passing launch which hailed, and was politely answered in gibberish.

There was a singular lack of formality about our departure which was much to be regretted. But there was some small trouble about big accumulations of harbour dues and such minor items, which would have had to be settled in return for a clearance _en règle_; and, remembering how history was galloping, we could not afford the time to deal with them. And so, after a narrow squeak of being cut down by a big steamer just outside, we found ourselves close-hauled under all plain sail, making a long leg with a short one to follow.

"Funds wouldn't run to the luxury of a chart," observed Haigh when I inquired about this trifle, "but I had a look at a big Mediterranean track chart at the place where I bartered the dinghy, and the course to Port Mahon is due south-west, as near as no matter."

"As near as no matter," groaned I in response.

"Why, my dear chap, we really can't indulge in the extreme niceties of navigation. We've got a compass, which is fairly accurate if you joggle it with your finger occasionally, and we can fix up a lead line when we get in soundings, and I dare say we can make a log. D'you mind having a spell at the pump now? I'm a bit out of condition."

The leaking decreased as the planking swelled to the wet, but other unpleasantnesses began to show themselves. One of the greatest, to my way of thinking, was the way we were victualled. To begin with, there were twenty-three bottles of vermouth, straw-jacketed, and carefully stowed. Then there was a bag of condemned sea-biscuits, which Haigh pleasantly alluded to as "perambulators." And the list of solids was completed by half a dozen four-pound tins of corned beef, and a hundred and fifty excellent cigars which had not paid duty. There was an iron tank full of rusty water which "had to do," as refilling it might have entailed awkward questions. And, lastly, there had been brought on board a very small and much-corroded kedge anchor, which, as it was the only implement of its kind that we possessed, gave much force to Haigh's comment that "it might come in handy."

To tell the truth, when the cold sea air blew away the glamour of plotting and planning, and I was able to tot up all these accessories with a practical mind, I was beginning very much to wish myself well off what seemed a certain road to Jones.

Haigh, on the other hand, seemed supremely contented and happy. Yachting as a general thing, he said, he found slow; but this cruise had an element of novelty which made it vastly entertaining. He had never heard of any one deliberately getting to sea quite under such circumstances before. He didn't uphold the wisdom of the proceeding in the least, for when I grunted something about the world not containing such another pair of thorough-paced fools, he agreed with me promptly. In fact, he was in far too jovial a humour to argue about anything, and by degrees I began to fall in with his vein. "Let's split a bottle of vermouth," said he, "and drink confusion to every one except our two selves." And we did it.

The breeze lulled at daybreak, and northed till we had it nearly fair.

"This is great business," said Haigh. "I'll bet you five hundred pounds that we make the islands in the next twenty-four hours. I.O.U.'s accepted." He slipped off the after-hatch, and dragged up from the counter a venerable relic of a spinnaker, which was one vivid mottle of mildew. The sail was duly mocked and set. The wind was freshening, and our pace increased. The cutter and her parasitical escort kicked up enough wake for a Cardiff ore-steamer.

"Who says a foul bottom matters now?" said Haigh. "Who will suggest that she isn't kicking past this scenery at nine knots? Bless the ugly lines of her, we mustn't forget her builder's health. Hand up another bottle of that vermouth and the dipper."

We lifted her through it all that morning at a splendid pace, the wake boiling up astern like a mill-tail. The two booms did certainly make occasional plunges which might have jarred timid nerves, but such a trifle did not disturb us.

"It's the best bit of racing I've ever done," said Haigh. "There's a pig of a following sea, and the wind's squally. Just her weather. If we'd only got another craft trying to beat us, the thing would be perfect. We should have some inducement to carry on then."

Whilst we were eating our mid-day meal (on deck, of course) that variegated spinnaker went "pop," splitting neatly from head-cringle to foot-rope. It was my trick at the tiller, and so I was tied aft. Haigh peered round at the ruin, and returned to his occupation of knocking weevils out of his biscuit. He didn't think it worth while to budge, and so we let the canvas blow into whatever shaped ribands it chose. If we couldn't carry the sail, we didn't want it.

The wind hardened down as the day went on, and every knot we went the sea got worse. The ugly cutter slid down one wet incline, drove up the next, and squattered through the hissing crest with a good deal of grumbling and plunging and rolling and complaining. But she had a good grip of the water, and with decently careful steering she showed but small inclination to broach-to or do anything else she wasn't wanted to. She might not be a beauty; she might be sluggish as a haystack in a light breeze; but, as Haigh said, this was just her day, and we were not too nervous to take advantage of it. Still, considering her small tonnage, and the fact that all her tackle was so infernally rotten, she took a tidy bit of looking after. You see, we might be reckless about our skins, but at the same time we were very keenly anxious to make the Balearic Islands.

The thing that I mostly feared was that our old ruin of a mainsail would take leave of us. If once it started to split, the whole lot would go like a sheet of tissue-paper. However, whether we liked it or not, we had to run on now. The wind and sea were both far too heavy to dream of an attempt at rounding-to. And, indeed, even if we had succeeded in slewing her head to the wind without getting swamped in the process (the odds on which were about nine hundred to one against), it was distinctly doubtful as to whether she would deign to stay there. Small cutters are not great at staying hove-to in really dirty weather.

And so we topped the boom well up, hoisted the tack to prevent overrunning the seas, and let her drive; and whilst Haigh clung on to the tiller and its weather rope, I busied myself with a bent sail-needle at stitching up any places within reach on the mainsail where the seams seemed to be working loose.

Soon after dark that night--and I never saw much more inky blackness in my life--we came across a deep-laden brig which very nearly gave us a quietus. She was running sluggishly under lower fore-topsail, wallowing like a log-raft in a rapid, and doing less than a third of our knottage. We possessed neither side-lamps nor oil, and showed no light; and as she had not a lantern astern, we got no glimmer of warning till we were within a dozen fathoms of her taffrail. Haigh couldn't give the cutter much helm for fear of gibing her and carrying away everything, and consequently we did not clear that brig's low quarter by more than a short fathom. Had we passed her to starboard instead of to port, we should have fouled our main boom, and--well, we shouldn't have got any farther.

As we tore past, the white water squirming and hissing between the vessels' sides, a man leaned over the bulwark, with his face looking like a red devil's in the glare of the port light, and shook a fist and screamed a frightened venomous curse. Our only reply was a wild roar of laughter. As we drove off into the mist of scud ahead, I looked back and saw the man staring after us with dropped jaw and eyes fairly goggling. He must have thought us mad. Indeed, I believe we had taken leave of some of our senses then.

"Vermouth's cheapening," said Haigh. "Pass up another bottle. If we do happen to go to Jones, it 'ud be a thousand pities to take the liquor down with us undecanted."

Don't get the idea that we were drunk all through that wild cruise, because we were not. But one thing and another combined to make the excitement so vivid, that with the liquor handy it did not take much inducement to make us tipple pretty heavily. We were vilely fed, bitterly exposed, heavily overworked, unable even to smoke--and--the vermouth was very, very good.

As the seas swept her the ugly cutter's planking swelled, but before she became staunch a fearful amount of water had passed into her. Haigh, who was in no sort of condition, got utterly spun out by a five-minutes' spell at the pump, and consequently it had been my task to restore the incoming Mediterranean to its proper place again. It was a job that wearied every nerve in my body. The constant and monotonous heaving up and down of a pump-handle is probably the most exhausting work existent; and soon after passing that deeply-laden brig I pumped her dry for (what seemed) the ten thousandth time, and toppled on the deck dead beat.

"Look here," said Haigh, "you get below and turn in. I'm quite equal to keeping awake until further notice. I'm never much of a hand at sleeping at the best of times; and just now I'm well wound up for a week's watch on end. If you're wanted, I'll call you. Go."

I slipped down without argument, dropped into a bare and clammy bunk, and slept.

* * * * *

Haigh never roused me. I woke of my own accord, and found daylight struggling in through the dusty skylight in the after-cabin roof. After yawning there a minute or so, I conquered laziness and returned to the deck.

Those who think the Inland Sea is always calm ultramarine, under a sky to match, should have seen it then. The colouring was all of grays and whites, with here and there a slab of cold clear green, where a big wave heaved up sheer. It was awfully wild. The sea was running higher than ever, and the gale had not slackened one bit. The brine-smoke was hissing through our cross-trees in dense white clouds.

Haigh greeted me with a nod and a grin. His hat had gone, and the dank wisps of his hair were being fluttered about like black rags; his narrow slits of eyes were heavily bloodshot; his face was grimy and pale, his hands grimy and red; his clothing was a wreck. He looked very unpleasant, but he was undoubtedly very broad awake. He resigned the tiller and rope, and began gingerly to stretch his cramped limbs, talking the while.

"D'ye see that steamer, broadish on the weather-bow?"

I looked, and saw on the gray horizon a thin streak of a different gray.

"I rose her a quarter of an hour ago," he went on, "and bore away a couple of points so as to cut her off. I'm thinking it wouldn't be a bad idea to speak her if it could be managed, and find out where we are. As we haven't been able to rig a log-ship and line, and as the steering has been, to say the least of it, erratic, our dead reckoning has been some of the roughest. Personally, I wouldn't bet upon our whereabouts to quite a hundred miles. Ta-ta."

He went below to smoke, leaving me fully occupied with the steering. We rose the steamer pretty fast, and in half an hour could see her water-line when she lifted. She was a fine screw boat of three thousand tons, racing along at eighteen knots, and rolling with the beam sea up to her rails, in spite of the fore and aft canvas they had set to steady her.

Haigh came back to deck, blinking like an owl at the growing day. "Look at the gray-backs chivying her," said he. "Aren't the passengers just sorry for themselves now? And won't they have some fine yarns to pitch when they get ashore about the hardest gale the captain ever knew, and their own heroic efforts (down below), and all the rest of it? I've listened to those tales of desperate adventure by the hour together. Passengers by Dover-Calais packets are great at 'em."

All this while we were closing up. The steamer's decks were tenantless save for a couple of lookouts forward in oilskins, bright varnished by the spin-drift, and a couple of officers crouched behind the canvas dodgers of the bridge, and holding fast on to the stanchions. I was clearing my throat to hail these last, when Haigh turned and told me I might save my wind.

"Never mind," he said; "I know her well. She's the _Eugène Perrier_, a Transatlantique Company's boat, one of the quick line out of Algiers for Marseille. Look at your compass, and note the course she's steering--N.N.E. and by E. That's from Cape Bajoli straight for Marseille. They run both ways between Mallorca and Minorca without touching. Hooray! who says our luck isn't stupendous? Here we are, not having made enough southing, and heading so as to fetch Gibraltar without sighting the islands at all; and then in the nick of time up comes a _dea ex machinâ_ in the guise of the _Eugène Perrier_ to shove us on the course again. In main-sheet, and then, blow me if we won't have a bottle of that vermouth by way of celebrating the event in a way at once highly becoming and original."

We made a landfall that afternoon off some of the high ground in North-east Mallorca, and Haigh gave over champing his cold cigar-butt, and delivered himself of an idea.

"Isn't there another harbour in Minorca besides Port Mahon?"

I said I believed there were some half-dozen small ones.

"Any this west side?"

"Ciudadella, about in the middle."

"Know anything about it?"

"Nothing, except the fact of its existence; and as we have no vestige of chart, I don't exactly see how we are to learn anything more."

"Precisely. Then, my dear chap, to finish this cruise consistently, Ciudadella must now become our objective. It would take us another day to run round under the lee of the island to Port Mahon, and days are valuable. The cutter's only drawing five foot five, and with our luck at its present premium you'll see we'll worry in somehow without piling her up. Perhaps we may get some misguided person to come out and con us. Of course we'll take him if any one does offer, and owe him the pilotage; but I'd just as soon we navigated her on our own impudent hook. It's no use having a big credit on the Universal Luck Bank if you don't draw on it heavily. The concern may bust up any day."

Luckily for us the gale had eased, or we should never have been able to put the cutter on the wind. But as it was, with a four-reefed mainsail and a bit of a pocket-handkerchief jib, she lay the course like a Cowes-built racing forty; and if she did ship it green occasionally, there was no rail to hold the water in board. We didn't spare her an ounce. We kept her slap on her course, neither luffing up nor bearing away for anything. That was the sort of weather when the ugliness of the old cutter's lines was forgotten, and one saw only beauties in them. She might send the spindrift squirting through her cross-trees, but with the chap at the helm keeping her well a-going, she'd smoke through bad dirt like a steamer.

We rose the low cliffs of Eastern Minorca about half-way across; but rain came on directly afterwards, and in the thickness we lost them again. In that odd way in which things one has glanced through in a book recur to one when they are wanted, I had managed to recall something I had once conned over in a Sailing Directions about Ciudadella. The harbour entrance was narrow--scarcely a cable's length across--and it was marked by a lighthouse on the northern side, and a castle or tower or something of that kind on the other bank. The town behind, with its heavy walls and white houses, was plainly visible from seaward, and the spire of the principal church was somehow used as a leading mark. But whether one had to keep it on the lighthouse or the castle, I could not recollect. Neither could I call to mind whether there was a bar. In fact, I could not remember a single thing else about the place; and as Haigh remarked, what little I did recall (without being in any way certain about its accuracy) was of singularly little practical use. But this ignorance did not deter us from holding on towards the coast in the very least. We might pile up the cutter on some outlying reef, but we were both cocksure that our stupendous luck was going to set us safe ashore somehow. _Et après_--the Recipe.

We held on sturdily, lifting slant-wise over the heavy green rollers till we were within half a mile of the land, and could see the surf creaming to the heads of the low cliffs, and could hear the moaning and booming as it broke on rocky outliers; and then easing off sheets again, we put up helm and ran down parallel with the coast. Being blissfully ignorant of anything beyond a general idea of Minorca's outlines, we had to keep a very wary lookout; for a heavy rain had started to drive down with the gale, and looking to windward was like peering through a dirty cambric pocket-handkerchief. Indeed, we made two several attempts at knocking the island out of the water, each sufficiently distinct to have made any ordinary sailorman in his sane senses get snugly to sea without further humbugging. And the afternoon wore on without our seeing either the lighthouse, the castle, or the town we were looking for; and just upon dusk the coast turned sharply off to the eastward.

"That looks like a bay," said Haigh, squinting at the land that was rising and falling over our weather quarter. "If we hold on as we are going, we ought to pick up the other horn of it." So we stuck to the course for three hours, and then came to the conclusion that the point we had seen must have been the extremity of the island, and that we were at present heading for a continent named Africa, then distant some two hundred nautical miles.

The discovery cast a gloom over the ship's company. Our nerves were in a condition then for taking strong impressions. For myself, all lightheartedness flitted away. The ugly cutter's good deeds were forgotten, and she appeared nothing more nor less than an ill-formed cockle-shell. The gale was terrific. I was bone-weary; also the most particularly damned fool on the globe's surface.

What Haigh's personal conclusions were I do not know. He said nothing, but stood propped against the weather runner, mumbling over an unlit cigar and peering into the mist.

After a while he turned. "Here, give me the helm, Cospatric, and do you get your strong fists on the main-sheet. We'll put her on the wind again, as close-hauled as she'll look at it. It's no use ratching up to windward again hunting for Ciudadella, as ten to one we'd miss it a second time. We'll just run along the lee coast here for Port Mahon. There, now she's heading up for it like a steamer."

There was silence for a while, and we listened to the swish of the seas and the rattle of the wind through the rigging. Then Haigh delivered himself of further wisdom.

"It's a queer gamble this, take it through and back, and it's remarkably like roulette in being a game where a system doesn't pay. As long as we worked haphazard we did wonders. As soon as we tried to do a rational thing, and make that harbour at Ciudadella, we got euchred. Well, I dare say we both know how to take a whipping without howling over it. So for the present let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we may drown. Knock me a biscuit out of the weevils, old chappie, and give me likewise vermouth and corned horse."

Had the wind remained in its old quarter, we could have made one board of it all up the southern flank of the island; but, as if to accentuate the fact that we had already drawn more than our share of good fortune, the gale veered round to the east, and settled down to blow again in real hard earnest, bringing up with it a heavy sea. It was tack and tack all through the night, and we were always hard put to it to keep the ugly cutter afloat. Indeed, when some of the heavier squalls snorted down on to us, we simply had to heave-to. It was just a choice between that and being blown bodily under water.

The dawn was gray and wretched, but from the moment we sighted the last point the weather began to improve. The air cleared up, the gale began to ease, and when we ran in under Fort Isabelle just as the sunrise gun was fired, we saw that the day was going to turn out a fine one.

The long snug harbour of Mahon, which was in the days of canvas wings almost always filled with craft refuging, is now in this era of steam usually tenantless. So it was a bit of a surprise to us to find the English Channel Fleet lying there at anchor. The big war steamers were getting their matutinal scrub, and were alive with blue-and-white-clothed men. They looked very strong, very trim, very seaworthy, and the bitter contrast between them and our tattered selves made me curse them with sailor's point and fluency. Not so Haigh. He didn't mind a bit; rather enjoyed the _rencontre_, in fact; and producing a frayed _Royal I_---- blue ensign, ran it up to the peak and dipped it in salute. If I remember right it was the _Immortalité_ we met first, and down went the _St. George's_ flag from her poop staff three times in answering salutation, whilst every pair of eyes on her decks was glued on the ugly cutter, their owners wondering where she had popped up from. And so we passed her particularly Britannic Majesty's ships _Anson_, _Rodney_, _Camperdown_, _Curlew_, and _Howe_, and dropped our kedge overboard (at the end of the main halliards) close inside the torpedo-catcher _Speedwell_.

The strain was over. We staggered below and dropped into a dead sleep. Had there been a ton of diamonds waiting on the cliff road beside us, with half Mahon rushing to loot them, we could not have been induced to budge.