CHAPTER II.THE VOYAGE.
“Hurrah! hurrah! up she’s rising,—Stamp and go, boys! up she’s rising,—Round with a will! and up she’s rising,Early in the morning.What shall us do with a lubberly sailor?—What shall us do with a lubberly sailor?—Put him in the long-boat and make him bale her,Early in the morning.Hurrah! hurrah! up she’s rising.”—&c. &c.ad infinitum.Anchor Song.
“Hurrah! hurrah! up she’s rising,—Stamp and go, boys! up she’s rising,—Round with a will! and up she’s rising,Early in the morning.What shall us do with a lubberly sailor?—What shall us do with a lubberly sailor?—Put him in the long-boat and make him bale her,Early in the morning.Hurrah! hurrah! up she’s rising.”—&c. &c.ad infinitum.Anchor Song.
“Hurrah! hurrah! up she’s rising,—Stamp and go, boys! up she’s rising,—Round with a will! and up she’s rising,Early in the morning.
“Hurrah! hurrah! up she’s rising,—
Stamp and go, boys! up she’s rising,—
Round with a will! and up she’s rising,
Early in the morning.
What shall us do with a lubberly sailor?—What shall us do with a lubberly sailor?—Put him in the long-boat and make him bale her,Early in the morning.
What shall us do with a lubberly sailor?—
What shall us do with a lubberly sailor?—
Put him in the long-boat and make him bale her,
Early in the morning.
Hurrah! hurrah! up she’s rising.”—&c. &c.ad infinitum.
Hurrah! hurrah! up she’s rising.”—
&c. &c.ad infinitum.
Anchor Song.
Anchor Song.
Clear and joyous as ever a summer’s day came out of the heavens, was the 12th of June, 18—, when the good shipWalrus, with her steam up, her boats secured, and everything ready for sea, lay lazily at single anchor off Blackwall-stairs. The weather was as still and calm as weather might be. The mid-day sun, brilliant and healthful, imparted life and animation even to the black and unctuous waters, that all that morning had, in the full strength of the spring tide, been rushing past her sides. The breeze, light and fitful, just stirred the air, but was altogether powerless on the glazy surface of the stream, which sent back, as from a polished and unbroken mirror, the exact double of every mast, yard, and line of cordage, that reposed above it. The ships lay calm and still. The outward-bound had tided down with the first of the ebb, and were already out of sight, and the few sails that still hung festooned in their bunt and clew-lines, lay as motionless as the yards that held them. Like light and airy dragon-flies, just flitting on the surface, and apparently without touching it, the river steamers were darting from wharf to wharf; while ever and anon a great heavysea-going vessel would grind her resistless way, defying wind and tide, and dashing the black wave against the oily-looking banks.
Steamer after steamer passed, each steadily bent on her respective mission; and the day wore on—yet there lay theWalrus, though her sea-signalling blue Peter had hung from her fore-truck ever since day-light, and the struggling and impatient steam would continually burst in startling blasts from her safety-valves. The tide was slackening fast; the chain cable, that all that forenoon had stretched out taut and tense from her bows, like a bar of iron, now hung up and down from her hawsehole, while the straws and shavings and floating refuse of the great capital began to cling round her sides.
“It is a great honour, no doubt, to carry an ambassador, with Heaven knows how many stars of every degree of Russian magnitude in his train,” said the Parson, who, seated on the taffrail, with his legs dangling over the water, had been watching the turning tide, and grumbling, as ship after ship in the lower reaches began to swing at her anchors, while three or four of the more energetic craft were already setting their almost useless sails, and yo-ho-ing at their anchors, preparatory to tiding up; “it is a very great honour, and I hope we are all duly sensible of it; but, like most great honours, it is a very particular nuisance. These Russian representatives of an autocrat majesty must fancy they can rule the waves, when all the world knows it is only Britannia that can do that. They have let the whole of this lovely tide pass by—(the Parson cast his eyes on the greasy water)—and fancy, I suppose, that daddy Neptune is bound to supply them with a new one whenever they please to be ready for it.”
“Why, Mate!” said the Captain, as a smart sailor-like looking fellow fidgeted across the quarter-deck, with an irregular step and an anxious countenance; “is this what you call sailing at ten a.m. precisely? Most of us would have liked another forenoon on shore, but your skipper was so confounded peremptory; and this is what comes of it.”
“What is one to do, sir?” said the Mate, who seemedfully to participate in the Captain’s grievance. “These Russians have taken up all the private cabins for their own particular use, and occupy half the berths in the main and fore-cabins besides—we cannot help waiting for them. They have pretty well chartered the ship themselves—what can we do? But,” continued he, after a pause, during which he had been looking over the side, as the steamer now began evidently to swing in her turn, “I wish we had gone down with the morning’s tide.”
“We should have been at the mouth of the river by this time,” said the Captain, “if we had started when we ought.”
“Yes,” said the Mate, “and we should now be crossing the dangerous shoals, with fair daylight and a rising tide before us.”
“Why, surely you are not afraid,” said the Parson; “that track is as well beaten as the turnpike road.”
The Mate shrugged his shoulders, and stepped forward, giving some unnecessary orders in a tone unnecessarily sharp and angry.
“Well, Birger, what news? Do you see anything of them?”
The individual addressed was a smart, active, little man, with a quick grey eye, and a lively, pleasant, good-humoured countenance, who was coming aft from the bridge of the steamer, on which he had been seated all the forenoon, sketching, right and left of him groups of shipping on the water and groups of idlers on the deck.
“Anything of whom?” said he. “Oh! the Russians. No, I don’t know. I suppose they will come some time or other; it does not signify—it is all in the day’s work. Look here,”—and he opened his portfolio, and displayed, in wild confusion all over his paper, the domes of Woolwich, the houses of Blackwall, the forests of masts and yards in the Pool, two or three picturesque groups of vessels, a foreign steamer or two, landing her weary and travel-soiled passengers at the Custom-house—and, over leaf, and in the background as it were, slight exaggerations of the ungainly attitudes in which his two friends were then sprawling. “Ifyou had found something as pleasant as this grumbling to fill up your time with, you would not be wasting your eyes and spoiling your temper in looking for the Russians. They are going back to their own country, poor devils! no wonder they are slow about it. Did you ever see a boy going to school?”
“Birger is not over-fond of the Russians,” said the Captain.
“Few Swedes are,” said Birger; “remember Finland and Pomerania.”
“Besides, it is not over-pleasant to have a great White Bear sitting perpetually at one’s gate, always ready to snap up any of one’s little belongings that may come in its way. The Russian fleet is getting formidable, and Revel and Kronstadt are not very far from the mouth of the Mälar.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” said Birger, gallantly; “we are the sons of the men who, under Gustaf, taught that fleet a lesson.”
“You are a gallant set of fellows,” said the Parson; “and Sweden would be a precious hard nut to crack. But your long-armed friends over the water know the value of a ring fence, and would dearly like a seaboard. Only fancy that overpowering country, which is now kept in order by the rest of Europe, only because, just at present, it lies at the back of creation, and cannot get out of the Baltic, Black, and White Seas, to do harm to any one,—only fancy that pleasant land, with its present unlimited resources, and Gothenborg for its Portsmouth, and Christiania, and Frederiksvärn and Christiansand for its outports—a pleasant vision, is it not, Mr. Guardsman? Don’t you think it probable that something of this sort has soothed the slumbers of the White Bear we were speaking of, before this?”
“Did you ever hear of Charles the Twelfth? He taught that White Bear to dance.”
“He taught that White Bear to fight,” said the Captain, “and an apt scholar he found him. There was more lost at Pultava than Charles’s gallant army.”
“There are men in Sweden yet,” said Birger, slightly paraphrasing the legend of “Holger.”
“There are,” said the Parson; “and if you could only agree among yourselves, you might have hopes of muzzling the White Bear yet. Another union of Calmar?”
“O, hang the union of Calmar; there is no more honesty in a Dane or a Norseman than there is in a Russ. We are not going to have another Bloodbath at Stockholm. My mother is a Lejonhöved,[1]and I am not likely to forget that day.”
“I should have thought you more nearly connected with the Svinhöved family,” said the Parson; “but depend upon it, unless you men of the north can make up your quarrels, the White Bear will chop you up in detail, and us after you.”
Birger, who, in some incomprehensible way, traced his descent from the founder of Stockholm, the great and terrible Earl Birger, was a smart young subaltern in the Royal Guards, and though his present dress—a modest and unpretending blouse—was anything but military, his well-set-up figure, firm step, and jaunty little forage cap stuck on one side of his head, sufficiently revealed his profession. From his earliest youth he had discovered a decided talent for drawing, and in accordance with a most praiseworthy custom in the Swedish service, he had been travelling for the last twelvemonth at the expense of the Government, and was now returning to the “Kongs Ofver Commandant’s Expedition,” with a portfolio filled with valuable sketches, and a mind no less well stored with military knowledge, which he had collected from every nation in Europe. The Captainhad fallen in with him at the Swedish ambassador’s, and, being himself something of an artist, had struck up on the spot a sort of professional friendship with him. The pleasant little subaltern was thus, from that time forward, enrolled among their party; and though their acquaintance was not yet of twenty-four hours’ standing, was at that moment talking and chatting with all the familiarity of old and tried friendship.
“Here come those precious rascals at last,” said he, breaking off the conversation, as a train of at least half-a-dozen carriages rattled down to the landing-place, and counts, countesses, tutors, barons, children, dogs, governesses, portmanteaus, bags, boxes, and trunks were tumbled out indiscriminately on the landing-place. “Heaven and earth! if they have notimpedimentaenough for an army! and this is only their light marching baggage either. All their heavy articles came on board yesterday, and are stowed under hatches. I’ll be bound we draw an additional foot of water for them. Hang the fellows! they are as bad as Junot, they are carrying off the plunder of half the country.”
“Like the Swedes under Oxenstjerna,” said the Parson; “but what need you care for that? The plunder—if it is plunder—comes from England, not Sweden.”
“It will lumber up the whole cabin, whether it comes from the one or the other,” said Birger; “we shall not have room to swing a cat.”
“We don’t want to swing a cat,” said the Parson; “that is a Russian amusement rather than an English or a Swedish one, if all tales be true; and you may depend upon it we shall fare all the better for their presence: our skipper could never think of setting anything short of turtle and venison before such very magnificent three-tailed bashaws.”
“Yes,” said Birger, “they are going to Petersburgh, too, where the chances are, the bashaws will find some good opportunity of squaring accounts with the skipper for any ill-treatment, before the steamer is permitted to sail.”
All the while this conversation was going on, the illustrious passengers were rapidly accomplishing the short passage from the shore to the steamer, a whole flotilla ofboats being employed in the service, while the hurried click of the pauls, and the quick revolutions of the windlass, as the chain-cable was hove short, showed that in the Captain’s opinion, as well as that of the Mate, quite time enough had been wasted already.
But the golden opportunity had been lost. English tides respect no man, not even Russian ambassadors, and old Father Thames was yet to read them a lesson on the text—
If you will not, when you may,When you will, you shall have Nay.
If you will not, when you may,When you will, you shall have Nay.
If you will not, when you may,When you will, you shall have Nay.
If you will not, when you may,
When you will, you shall have Nay.
While the vessel was riding to the ebb tide, as she had done all the morning, a warp which had been laid out from her port quarter would have canted her head well into the stream; and the tide, acting on her starboard bow while the after-part was in comparatively still water, would have winded her downwards, almost before her paddles were in motion, or her rudder could be brought to act. But the turn of the tide had reversed all this. The vessel had indeed swung to the flood, which by this time was rattling up at the rate of five or six miles an hour, and thus her bowsprit was looking the way she wanted to go; but a strong eddy was now bubbling up under her starboard bow, and pressing it towards the left bank, while a great lumbering Indiaman lay just ahead of her, and a Hamburgh steamer, which had anchored a little higher up on her starboard quarter, forbade all reversing of the engine and thus getting out of the mess stern foremost.
The moment the anchor broke ground the helm was put hard a-port, and the paddles were set in motion; but though from the tide alone the rudder had some effect, the strength of the eddy was too much for her; round came her head to port, as if she were going to take a leap at the embankment.
“Hard a-port!—hard a-starboard!—ease her!—stop her!—turn her a-head!” were the contradictory orders bawled out almost simultaneously. If noise and shouting could have got the steamer out of the scrape, there was no lack of it; but all these cries, energetic as they were, produced no effect whatever, beyond exciting a little suspicion in the mind ofour travellers (some of whom having been at sea before, knew the stem of a ship from the stern) that the skipper was not altogether a “deacon in his craft;” and thus giving a point to the Mate’s silent but expressive shrug when the Parson had alluded to the shoals at the river’s mouth. At last, an indescribable sensation of grating, and a simultaneous volley of heterogeneous oaths, such as sailors shot their guns with on grand occasions, announced the fact that she had taken the ground abaft.
This, however, as it turned out, was about the best thing that could have happened, for it gave the skipper time to collect his senses; or, what was more to the purpose, gave the Mate time to whisper in his ear; and the rising tide was sure to float her again in ten minutes. By this time a warp had been got out to a ship anchored upon the Surrey side, an expedient which any sailor would have thought of before tripping his anchor in the first instance. The end of it was passed round the windlass and hove taut, and as the rising water slowly lifted the unlucky vessel from her sludgy bed and a few turns brought a strain upon her, she gradually slewed her head outwards. The steam was turned on, the paddles went round; the black water began to fizz under her counter, as if a million of bottles of stout had been poured into it—she was at last a-weigh and fairly on her course, only about six hours after her proper time.
“I tell you what,” said the Parson, as he dived down the companion to inspect the submarine arrangements of the cabin, “I leave this vessel at Christiansand, and I wish we were fairly out of her. This fellow knows no more of sea-craft than a tailor. Kind Providence shield us, or we shall come to grief yet!”