“IT WAS A MONKEY.”
“IT WAS A MONKEY.”
One could see that the poor beast was terribly weak. He would climb up on a thwart, then fall backwards, and, as his boat slipped past, he lay on his side looking up at us through his spectacles with the most woebegone, piteous, grinning face of appeal that ever monkey in this world assumed.
There was a sudden explosion of laughter from amongst us; no man could help himself. Indeed, the first sight of the boat had put some fancies of horrors to be disclosed into our heads, and thechange, from our notion of beholding dead or dying human beings, into this apparition of a huge monkey in a smoking cap and spectacles, was so violent and ridiculous a surprise that it proved too much for the gravest amongst the crowd aft.
“Hands to the topsail braces!” bawled the captain; “lay the maintopsail to the mast. We must pick the poor brute up.”
TheLady Violetwas brought to a stand. Five men in charge of the second mate sprang into a lee-quarter boat; the tackles were slacked away, and in a few minutes our boat was alongside the other, with two of the fellows handing out the monkey, that lay as quiet as a baby in their arms.
Everybody crowded on to the main-deck to get a view of the poor beast when the boat had brought him alongside. He had the look of an old man; and though you saw that the unhappy animal was suffering, his grimaces were so ugly, the appeal of his bloodshot eyes through his spectacles so ludicrously human-like, that he made you laugh the louder at him somehow or other for the very pity that he excited in you.
“Get him water and food, lads, some of you,” cried the second mate from the poop; “treat him as though he were mortal like yourselves. He’ll take all ye’ll give him and more than he ought to have; and we haven’t saved him to perish of a bust-up.”
He was carried to the forecastle followed by acrowd of sailors and steerage people, and I lost sight of him, though I hung about, boy-like, for a bit, hoping they would bring him forth presently. However, it seemed that after the seamen had given him a drink of water and a couple of biscuits to eat, they took off his cap and spectacles and put him into a hammock with a blanket up to his throat, where he lay like a human being, rolling a languishing eye round upon those who looked at him, until he fell asleep.
The nameDolphin, Boston, was painted in the stern-sheets of the boat in which the monkey was, and of course it was supposed, fore and aft, that that was the name of the wreck we had fallen in with. But I afterwards heard—when I had been home some months—that the hull we had seen founder was a large English barque called theElijah Gorman, whilst the boat from which we had taken the monkey had belonged to the Yankee craft whose name was on her. How the boat happened to have been adrift, and how her sole occupant should have been a monkey, I never could get to hear, though my father made many inquiries, being much interested in my story of this little affair. The crew of theElijah Gormanhad been taken off by a steamer bound to England from a South American port; so full particulars concerning her loss had been published in the newspapers some time before we arrived in the Thames.
Well, the sailors made a great pet of this immense monkey, who proved a very inoffensive, gentle, well-tamed creature, abounding in such tricks as a rough forecastle would educate a monkey in. The Jacks tried him with a pipe of tobacco, and he was observed to take several whiffs with an air of great relish, though he put the pipe down long before the bowl was empty. Once, seeing a man shaving, he imitated the fellow to such perfection as to show that he had been taught to feign to handle a razor; whereupon the carpenter shaped a piece of wood to resemble a razor, with which the monkey, whenever he was asked, would shave himself, pretending to lather his beard, after, with his own hands, putting a little bit of canvas under his chin. The sailors also discovered that the creature could play the fiddle—that is to say, if you put two sticks in his hand and told him to fiddle, he would adjust one of them to his shoulder, and saw away withthe other, making the most horrible faces the while, as though ravished by the exquisite sounds he was producing.
Again and again would I stand watching him till the tears flowed from my eyes. The sailors called him Old Jacob, dimly conceiving that was a good name for anything with a white beard. But alas! the ocean had marked him for her own, and poor Old Jacob did not live to see land again. His death was very tragical, and the manner in which I was startled by it leaves the incident, to this moment, very clear in my memory.
We had run out of the north-east trades, and were sweeping along over a high sea before a strong breeze of wind. We had met with a bothersome spell of baffling weather north of the equator, and the captain was now “cracking on,” as the term goes, to make up for lost time, carrying a main-royal, when, at an earlier season, he would have been satisfied with a furled topgallant sail, and through it theLady Violetwas thundering with foam to the hawse-pipe, the weather-clew of her mainsail up, and the foretop-mast staysail and jibs flapping and banging in the air over the forecastle, where they were becalmed by the forecourse and topsail.
“WOULD SHAVE HIMSELF.”
“WOULD SHAVE HIMSELF.”
There was a sailor at work on the rigging low down on the fore-shrouds. I had been watching him for some minutes, observing the carelessnessof his pose as he stood poised on a ratline, whilst I thought how utterly hopeless would be the look-out of a man who should fall overboard into the white smother roaring alongside; and I turned my back to walk aft, when I heard a loud cry of “Man overboard!”
I looked; the fellow I had been watching had disappeared! I rushed to the side and saw poor Old Jacob skimming along astern! He had his spectacles and his cap on, and he was swimming like a man, striking out with vigour. He swept to the height of a sea, and his poor white-whiskered face most tragically comical with its spectacles stood out clear as a cameo for a breath, ere it vanished in the hollow. It then disappeared for good.
I glanced forward again and perceived the man whom I thought had fallen into the sea climbing out of the forechains to the part of the rigging where he had been at work.
The mate, coming forward, cried, “Who was it that sang outman overboard?”
“I did, sir,” answered the sailor.
“Step aft!” said the mate.
The fellow dropped on to the deck and approached the officer.
“What do you mean,” cried the mate in a passion, “by raising over a monkey such an alarm asman overboard?”
“I thought it was a man, sir,” answered the sailor. “I had caught sight of him on the jibboom, and believed it was Bill Heenan.”
“What!” shouted the mate, “with those spectacles on?”
“I didn’t notice the spectacles, sir,” said the man; “I see a figure out on the jibboom, and whilst I was looking the jib-sheet chucked him overboard, and that’s why I sung out.”
The mate stared hard at the man, but seemed to think he was telling the truth, on which he told him to go forward and get on with his work, biting his underlip to conceal an expression of laughter, as he walked towards the wheel.
That evening, in the second dog-watch, there was a fight between the sailor, whose name was Jim Honeyball, and Bill Heenan. Bill had heard that Jim had mistaken him for Old Jacob, and had told the mate so; and thereupon challenged him to stand up like a man. There was a deal of pummeling, much rolling about, encouraging cheers from the sailors, and “language,” as it is called, on the part of the combatants; but neither was much hurt.
Such was the end of the poor monkey; yet he seemed to have found a successor in Bill Heenan, for, to the end of the voyage, the Irishman was always called Old Jacob.
We were talking in the midshipmen’s berth overthe loss of the monkey, when Poole, the long midshipman, who was in my watch, spun us the following yarn:—“I made my first voyage,” said he, “in a ship called theSweepstakes, to Madras, Calcutta, and Hong Kong. On our way home we brought up off Singapore for a day on some business of cargo, of which I forget the nature. I was standing at the gangway, my duty as midshipman being to keep the ship’s side clear of loafers, when I saw a large boat heading for us. She was like one of those surf-boats you see at Madras. There were five fellows rowing her, and one chap steered with a long oar. They were all darkies, naked to the waist. I was struck by the manner in which one of them, as the boat approached, looked over the shoulder at our ship. The others kept their eyes on their oars or gazed over the stern; but this chap stared continuously behind him as the boat advanced; by which I mean that he looked ahead, for of course a fellow rows with his back upon the bow of a boat. They came alongside, and I found that the men had a great number of monkeys to sell. I looked hard at the fellow whose chin had been upon his shoulder as he rowed, and was wondering what on earth sort of native he was, when, on a sudden, I caught sight of his tail! He was a huge ape, of the size of a man—at all events, of the size of his shipmates. He so much resembled the others at a little distance that therewas nothing wonderful in my not having distinguished him quickly. He had pulled his oar with fine precision, keeping time like one of the University Eight, and there had been nothing odd about him at all, saving his manner of looking over his shoulder. The others held up monkeys to show us, and, I tell you, I burst into a roar of laughter when I saw this great ape pick up a bit of a marmozette and flourish it up at me as if he would have me buy. In a very little while the ship was full of monkeys. Almost every man amongst us bought one. I chose a pretty little creature that slept in the clews of my hammock all the way home; but he grew so tall and quarrelsome that my mother, when I was absent last year, gave him away to an old gentleman, who shortly afterwards, in the most mysterious manner, disappeared, together with the monkey.”
“Where wath the mythtery?” asked Kennet.
“Well,” said Poole, “the notion was that the monkey had eaten up the old gentleman, dressed himself up in his clothes, and gone to London to consult a solicitor, with a view of contesting the old man’s will, as being next of kin.”
We were gradually now drawing near home. The English Channel was no longer so far off but that we could think of it as something within reach of us. All my clothes had shrunk upon me, whence I might know that I had grown muchtaller and broader than I was when I left England. My face was dark with weather, the palms of my hands hard as horn with pulling and hauling. I had the deep-sea rolling gait that is peculiar to sailors, and, indeed, I had been transformed during the months I had been away into as thorough a little “shellback” as was ever made of a boy by old ocean. I was wonderfully hearty besides—had the appetite of a wolf and the spirits of a young spaniel. I was equal to doing “my bit” on board ship, whatever might be the job I was set to. I could put as neat a bunt to the furl of the mizzen-royal as any lad aboard, knew how to send the yard down, how to pass an earing—though I was too small, and without sufficient strength, to jockey the yard-arm in reefing—was well acquainted with all the parts of the rigging, and the various uses of the complicated gear; could steer, make knots of twenty different kinds—in short, I had picked up a great deal of sea knowledge of a working sort; but I knew nothing of navigation beyond the art of bringing the sun down to the horizon through a sextant, and working out a simple proposition of latitude, for which I had to thank Mr. Cock; Captain Tempest taught me nothing.
I was very eager to get home; I had never before been so long absent from my parents. I was pining, too, for comforts which when at home I had made nothing of, but which I would nowthink upon as the highest luxuries. How often when hacking with a black-handled knife at a piece of iron-hard salt junk and rapping the table with a biscuit to free the mouthful of any stray weevil which might be lurking in the honeycombed fragment—how often, I say, has the vision of my father’s table arisen before my eyes: the basin of soup at which I have known myself to sometimes impatiently turn up my nose; the fried sole or delicious morsel of salmon; the roast leg of mutton or sirloin of beef, with its attendant vegetables—things not to be dreamt of at sea—the jam tarts, the apple pies, the custards, not to mention the dessert! Oh, how often has the lump of cold salt fat pork or the mouthful of nauseous soup and bouilli come near to choking me with those thoughts of breakfast, dinner, and supper at home, which the odious nature of the food on our cabin table has excited in my hungry imagination!
After we had crossed the parallels of the Horse Latitudes, as they are called, we met with some strange weather: thick skies with a look of smoke hanging about the horizon, sometimes the sun showing as a shapeless oozing, like a rotten orange, a dusky green swell rolling up out of two or three quarters at once, as it seemed, and shouldering one another into a jumble of liquid hills which strained the ship severely with rolling, making every tree-nail, bolt, and strong fastening cry aloud with avoice of its own, whilst the masts were so wrung that you would have expected them any minute to snap and fall away overboard.
Some of our passengers whom the mountainous seas of the Horn had not in the least degree affected were now sea-sick; in fact, I heard of one lady as lying below dangerously ill with nausea. The men declared it made them feel squeamish to go aloft. I should have laughed at this in such salt toughened Jacks as they but for an experience of my own; for being sent to loose the mizzen topgallant sail, I was so oppressed with nausea on my arrival at the cross-trees, that it was as much as I could do to get upon the yard and cast the gaskets adrift. This was owing to the monstrous inequalities of the ship’s movements, to the swift jerks and staggering recoveries which seemed to displace one’s very stomach in one; added to which was the close oppressive temperature, a thickness of atmosphere that corresponded well with the pease-soup-like appearance of the ocean, and that seemed to be explained by the sulphur-coloured, smoky sort of sky that ringed the horizon.
It was on this same day, or rather in the night of it, during the first watch, from eight o’clock to midnight, that a strange thing happened. It was very dark, so black indeed that though you stood shoulder to shoulder with a man you could see nothing of him. There was no wind, but a heavyswell was running on whose murky, invisible coils the ship was violently rolling. There was not a break of faintness, not the minutest spot of light in the sky, whose countenance, with a scowl of thunder upon it, seemed to press close to our wildly sheering mast-heads.
There was something so subduing in the impenetrable gloom, something that lay with so heavy a weight upon the spirits, that the noisiest amongst us insensibly softened his voice to a whisper when he had occasion to speak. I particularly noticed this when some of the watch came aft to clew up the main topgallant sail and snug the main sail with its gear; there was no singing out at the ropes; instead of the hoarse peculiar songs sailors are wont to deliver when they drag, the men pulled silently as ghosts, and not a syllable fell from them that was audible to us when they were upon the yard rolling the sail up.
“SUDDENLY SHONE OUT A LIGHT.”
“SUDDENLY SHONE OUT A LIGHT.”
I was holding on to a belaying pin to steady myself when there suddenly shone out a light upon the boom iron at the extremity of the main-yard. It was of a greenish hue, sickly somewhat, so as to make one think of a corpse-candle or a graveyard Jack-o’-lantern. It swayed as a bladder would or as a soap-bubble might ere it soars from the pipe out of which it is blown. It had some power of illuminating in spite of its wan complexion, for I observed that it threw a very feeble lightupon the clew of the sail, and that, as the ship rolled the yard-arm on which it shone towards the sea, the huge, round, ebony black swell mirrored it in the shape of a dull star like a phosphoric jelly-fish.
I had never seen such a sight before, nor indeed had I ever heard of the like of such a thing. I was standing close to Poole at the time, and he said to me—
“What do you think it?”
“Why, but whatisit?” I responded.
“A spirit of the sea!” he exclaimed in a sepulchral voice; “the ghost of a dead sailor who has grown tired with flying and is resting himself on the yard-arm. The souls of dead seamen always carry lanterns with them to show them the road on dark nights after this pattern.”
As he spoke the fiery exhalation disappeared.
“Ha! he’s started again!” cried Poole. “He’ll meet with another ship presently and take another spell of rest.”
“A very good explanation, Mr. Poole,” exclaimed the voice of the mate, “but not strictly scientific, sir.”
He had been standing within earshot of us, yet was utterly indistinguishable in the blackness.
“The light, Rockafellar,” continued the officer, “is what is called by sailors a corposant. It is supposed that the points of iron on board a shipkindle into a flame some quality of electricity in the air. I daresay it will show again in a minute. Yes, as I thought.... It is on the topsail yard-arm now.”
He had scarcely uttered these words when a shock ran through the ship for all the world as though the heave of the swell had let her fall with violence upon some hard shoal. The decks trembled as though to an explosion. The tremor of the fabric seemed to enter into one’s very marrow, and it would be impossible to express the sense of dismay it excited, happening as it did on a black night, and in the middle of the wide ocean where we knew there could be no shoals for hundreds of leagues.
The light at the yard-arm vanished; there was a noise of hurrying feet forwards, with a rumbling of exclamations uttered in agitation.
“What was that?” was shouted from the companion-hatch in the captain’s familiar accents. “Mr. Johnson?”
“Sir?”
“What have we struck? Is there any ship near us?”
“I don’t know, sir,” answered the mate; “it has been as black as thunder all through.”
“Get a cast of the lead,” exclaimed the captain, but quietly, with no note of hurry in his voice; “send the carpenter aft to sound the pumps; get lanterns up to show a light over the side.”
The blow felt as though the ship had struck some floating wreck. In a minute the vessel was wide awake. The shock had aroused the sleepers, who came tumbling up pell-mell out of cabin and forecastle. The decks, which before were of a death-like stillness, were now alive with sailors running about, with passengers full of excitement and fear, with lanterns briskly travelling from place to place, with one stationary one at the pumps, where the white-haired carpenter stood lowering his sounding-rod, with the deliberation of a Scotchman, down the well.
There was nothing to be seen over the side, and there was no more water in the bottom of the ship than was always to be found there. The sea was sounded all around with the hand-lead, but, as will readily be supposed, no bottom was got.
In the midst of this commotion the heavens seemed to be split open by a flash of lightning; the whole surface of the ocean shone out to its farthest confines to the crimson blaze, and thencame, within three seconds of the terrific glare, a crash of thunder right overhead. The enormous explosion liberated the rain; down it came, a very Niagara Falls of water! In a trice it was up to a man’s knees in the main-deck, and every mother’s son of us was as a drowned rat, soaked through and through; the passengers rushing headlong to the hatches, and the sailors floundering about here and there to the hurried cries of the mate ordering sail to be shortened.
There was no more lightning, but the rain continued to fall in a living sheet of water, which flashed the fire up out of the sea all about us. Indeed, the black atmosphere was extraordinarily full of electricity, and even through the blinding veil of the rain you could catch a sight of bluish sparks glittering about the ironwork, with the coming and going of nebulous lights upon the yard-arms and bowsprit. The ship was snugged down, but the furling of the wet and beating canvas was hard work. You could not see an inch before your face. I had to grope my way on to the mizzen topsail yard as a man might through a small tunnel in the bottom of a pyramid. The foot-ropes were as slippery as ice, and as my legs were very short my situation was one of real danger, not more due to the sickening rolling and strong beating of the heavy saturated canvas than to the circumstance of Poole beingalongside of me—by which I mean that his long legs, like a pair of compasses, weighed down the foot-rope upon which we were standing into an angle down which I would slide, until my feet were off the line, and there was nothing to save me from going overboard but my grip of the jack-stay.
All the while that we were working we expected the mass of impenetrable shadow that hung over our heads, dark as the midnight inkiness of a vault, to burst into a roaring gale of wind; yet all remained quiet; the rain ceased; saving the straining noises of the rolling ship there was nothing to be heard but the sobbing of water cascading off the decks overboard through the scupper holes. No more shocks were felt, though I fancy the nerves of us all continued on the strain in expectation of such another thump as that which had sent the people below running up in terror through the hatches.
At midnight it was still a thick black calm, and the same high swell working that had been running throughout the watch. I was not a little rejoiced to hear the chimes of the bell, for I had been soaked by the downfall to the very marrow, yet durst not leave the deck for a minute to change my wet clothes for dry ones. We turned in dog-tired, and slept without a stir throughout the four hours; and when we were called again at fouro’clock the stars were shining, the moon was setting in the west, a fresh breeze was blowing over our starboard quarter, and theLady Violetwas once more driving through it on her way home under canvas that clothed her from truck to waterway.
What it was that we had struck or that had struck us could only be a matter of conjecture. The captain was of opinion that the shock had been caused by a submarine earthquake—a volcanic explosion deep down. “It was the right sort of night,” he argued, “for disturbances of that kind; the water full of fire, and the atmosphere tingling with electricity.” On the other hand, Mr. Johnson had no doubt that the ship had received a blow from the rising of a whale under her keel. The creature had risen to spout, but had been frightened by the thump it had given itself and made off.
It was a thing, as I had said, that one could only speculate upon. The ship was divided into two parties, one accepting the captain’s and the other the mate’s opinion. Which side I declared for I do not remember; but on recurring to the incident at this distance of time, I have no doubt whatever that the mate was in the right, for since those days I have been on board a ship where an earthquake has happened in the deep sea beneath her, and the sort of vibratory scraping sensation that accompanied the shock was entirely different from thedull lumpish thud that had made every heart in theLady Violetbeat fast on that black night.
As we approached the entrance to the English Channel ships grew numerous, and every hour yielded us a fresh canvas of ocean panorama. At daybreak one morning we spied a large ship right ahead, and by four o’clock in the afternoon had approached her close enough to read the name upon her stern; and great was our triumph when we discovered that she was the fine clipper shipOwen Glendower, that had left Sydney eight days before us. We passed her in the night, and the watch on deck let fly an ironical cheer at her, taking their chance of being heard, and at sunrise next morning nothing but her royal and topgallant sails were visible on the shining line of the horizon.
“A FINE CUTTER CAME THRASHING THROUGH IT.”
“A FINE CUTTER CAME THRASHING THROUGH IT.”
It was rather thick weather in the Channel, and we saw no land till we made the South Foreland. A fine cutter came thrashing through it to alongside of us when off Dungeness, and a pilot climbed out of her over our side. With what profound interest, and joy, and admiration did my young eyes explore his purple visage, and survey his stout coat and the warm shawl round his neck! He had not been on board ten minutes when the sun shone forth, and the green and frothing waters of the Channel showed clear to the horizon. Then it was that the coast of our dear old home lay fair and beautiful upon our port beam and bow—white cliffsslopes of green sward, delicate as satin, groups of Liliputian houses, with windows sparkling, the chocolate-coloured canvas of smacks, the white wings of pleasure-yachts, the grimy cloths of round-bowed, black-hulled colliers, enriching the surface of the laughing seas betwixt us and the line of shingle upon which the surf was surging.
Off the South Foreland a tug chased and cleverly hooked us by making a short cut to the North Foreland, where she intercepted us as we swept round in a large, majestic arch, with the red-hulled lightship stationed abreast of Ramsgate resting like a spot of colour against the yellow shelf of the Goodwin Sands, on our port quarter, and a busy scene of shipping opening under our bows as we headed for the River Thames. But the shift of helm brought the wind ahead, and by this time our captain and the skipper of the tug, having agreed upon the question of terms for towage, the order was given to clew up and furl; a line from the tug was hove to us, the end of a huge hawser attached to it and paid out over the bow, and presently theLady Violet, in tow of the panting little steamer, was quietly gliding along for her home in the East India Docks, with her crew aloft sending down sails and unreeving gear.
News of our being in the Channel had reached my father long before we had arrived in the river, and he was one of the first to step on boardwhen we had been warped to our berth in the docks.
I was below, polishing myself up to go ashore, when Kennet called through the hatch that my father was on the quarter-deck and waiting to see me. I rushed up, and in a moment was in his arms. I had no objection to his kissing me now; in fact, I may say that I kissed him. The overstrained sense of manliness in me was gone. I was a young sailor with a full heart, and there were tears both in my father’s and my own eyes as he drew away from me, after our first hug, to have a good look at me.
“The picture of health!—gracious, how sunburnt—grown a whole foot, I do declare!—my goodness, Tommy, what shoulders!”
This, and the like, was all he could say for some time. I asked after my mother, my sisters, my little brother. Thank God, they were all well, and eagerly awaiting my arrival at home.
“I have ordered a jolly good dinner at the Brunswick Hotel,” said my father; “let us go and partake of it, my son. But first you will say good-bye to the officers and your shipmates.”
“WERE SEATED AT A TABLE.”
“WERE SEATED AT A TABLE.”
The captain was not to be seen. Mr. Johnson shook me cordially by the hand and assured my father that I had the making of a sailor in me. All the midshipmen had hurried ashore with the exception of Kennet, who was below, sitting on achest smoking his pipe when I descended to say farewell to such of the lads as I could find in the cabin. He pretended to weep as he squeezed my hand.
I said, “Kennet, are you not going ashore?”
“Yeth,” he said; “but I muth finith my pipe firtht.”
“Kennet,” I said, “come and dine with my father and me. He has ordered a good dinner to be in readiness for us at the Brunswick Hotel.”
He threw down the sooty clay pipe he had been smoking and jumped up.
“Rockafellar,” he said, “I alwayth thaid you were a brick!”
A little later, my father, Kennet, and myself were seated at a table, white with damask and sparkling with glass, in a window overlooking the Docks. Oh! the excellence of the roast beef! Oh! the sweetness of the cauliflower with its melted butter! Oh! the incomparable flavour of the mealy potatoes!
“Ithth the change from thalt horthe, thir, that maketh it nithe,” said Kennet, with his mouth full.
And so ended Master Rockafellar’s voyage. Would you like to know if I ever went to sea again? Well it is a question that need not signify just now. If this little yarn which I have been spinning has amused you, then, should you desiremore by-and-by, I don’t doubt there is enough stuff stowed away in the locker of my memory to make plenty of “twisters,” as stories are called at sea. Meanwhile, boys and girls, I touch the peak of my midshipman’s cap to you in respectful farewell.
UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED, PRINTERS, WOKING AND LONDON.