Chapter Fourteen.“In the Bay of Biscay, O!”“Tom,” said Mick to me, when we came down from the yards, by which time the ship was abreast of Southsea Pier on her way out in the fairway, “Oi’m afther settin’ oop, faith, fur a conjirer, now me drame’s coom roight!”“You’re more than a conjurer, Mick,” I replied to this, laughing. “You’re a prophet!”“Begorrah!” he rejoined with his usual grin, “it ain’t mooch profit Oi’ll git oot ov it, me darlint, or yersilf ayther, fur thet matther—aboot ez mooch, faith, ez Pat O’Connor got whin he shaved his pig!”The squadron remained but a couple of days at anchor at Spithead; proceeding thence to Portland, whence, theCalypsoandRuby, ships belonging to the eastern division, having joined us, we all set sail in company for our cruise, bound for the West Indies.Passing down Channel, through those ‘chops’ which our late cruiser had so watchfully guarded during the Manoeuvres, we gave Ushant a wide berth and entered the celebrated Bay of Biscay; the subject of a song as popular with us sailors as that of which my great-great-great-ancestor, Tom Bowling of pious and historic memory, was the hero.Now, at last, I could say that I really was at sea!A good many of my shipmates had no necessity, however, to do this; for theyfeltit—especially crossing the Bay!The weather was dirty, as it usually is in this region.This occurs through the influence of the Gulf Stream, which, after being wooed by the incurving and more hospitable coast of France, suddenly finds itself violently repulsed by the projecting Spanish peninsula; when, naturally angry, the current, like some folk who, on their not being able to vent their spleen on the people who may offend them, ‘pass it on’ to the nearest, tries to ‘make it warm’ for such unfortunate mariners as may cross its turbid bosom!It is always rough there, and the winds as uncertain as a lady’s smile; and, I may say that on this occasion both Boreas and Neptune seemed to have arranged to render our passage over this special broken-water domain of theirs as disagreeable as possible.We were well handled, our commanding officer being, as I have already said, one of the smartest sailors in the service; but, notwithstanding this, theActivehad very bad weather of it, while those of our consorts whom we could see in the distance appeared to experience worse.The ship plunged and rolled to such an extent that it was almost impossible to go up and down the hatchways carrying anything; for a chap wanted more hands than he possessed to hold on with, let alone dunnage!We boys had, as might be expected, most of the dirty work to do; and it was our task, when dinner was finished below, to help clear up the messes, and take the ‘gashing-tubs,’ in which the refuse of all our meals was thrown, up above to the upper deck and pitch the contents over the side, it being impossible for us to open any of the ports on the lower deck, from the heavy rolling seas that came toppling inboard every now and again.The job was not a nice one, nor an easy one either; and the second day we were knocking about in the Bay an accident happened while we were at it that nearly settled the hash of one of us, making him more fit to go into the ‘gashing-tub’ himself than to handle it!Four of us were trying to hoist our burden up the slippery ladder, which was rendered all the more slippery by the water washing down in a cataract every time a roller came over the forecastle and filled the waist of the corvette; not to speak of the rolling of the ship from port to starboard, and from starboard to port, varied by an occasional lift up in mid-air atop of some huge billow, and a dive down the next moment into the hollow of the waves, as if we were going down to Davy Jones’s locker.Mick, who was the leading member of our quartet, on the top step of the ladder, was holding on like grim death to the side-rope with one hand, and stretching out the other towards Finlayson, a new boy whom we had not seen before till we joined theActive, he having been drafted from theBoscawenat Portland; and who, in turn, had hold of the tub and was clutching Mick’s hand to steady himself.“Pull away, ye divvle!” cried Mick. “One more stip, begorrah, an’ we’ll be landid on the dick!”“Shove up, you fellers below there!” shouted Finlayson, in response to this, to myself and another boy who had come forwards from the after part of the mess-deck to our assistance, but whose face I had not seen, from the fact of my back being turned to him. “Shove up, carn’t you! This chap atop here an’ me is bearin’ all the weight on it!”“That’s all very well,” I growled, for the tub was slipping back on me, though I was holding it with both hands and shoving my knees into the steps of the ladder to keep myself steady. “Pull away, you beggar, your self! Aye, and you too, Mick, aloft there! I shall tumble back if you don’t take the weight of the tub off me!”“Begorrah, Tom, me hearty, ye shan’t git kilt wid that there gashing-tub!” cried Mick, squinting down the hatchway and seeing my predicament. “Pull away, ye young divvle—it’s you, ye new boy, I’m afther manin’—pull away wid a will! Tom, why, sure, don’t ye make thet chap alongside ye put his shoulder to it properly? He ain’t workin’ at all, at all, bad cess to him, who ivver he is, fur I can’t say him at all, at all!”“Whoi, I be a-shuvvin’ and a-shuvvin’ all the time,” rejoined a voice whose accents were strangely familiar to me. “You pull yerself, maister, and stop hollerin’ at Oi!”I turned; and there, much to my astonishment, at the foot of the ladder was ‘Ugly,’ of whose being on board the same ship I was ignorant up to that moment, he being in the starboard watch and I in the port, and the necessities of the service not having brought us together before, though how I’d never seen him even casually at Portsmouth or at Portland I can’t account for.Unfortunately, the curiosity that made me turn round brought about the mishap to which I have alluded, nearly making Tom Bowling, junior, your present informant, lose the number of his mess.‘Ugly,’ as much surprised as myself at our strange meeting, started back on seeing me.He had really, in spite of all that Mick said, been doing his part to assist me; and now, from his loosing his hold of the tub, which he had been trying to shove upwards on the one side the same as I did on the other, while the other two fellows above us pulled, the beastly thing came sliding back a step on me; and, as I was not holding on to anything, and the ship lurched at the moment, making Mick and Finlayson both let go at the same time, I tumbled incontinently backwards on to the lower deck, with the gashing-tub on top of me!My good providence, however, still watched over me; for, as I fell, a big wave, coming splosh right over the side into the waist, poured down bodily through the hatchway, floating away the tub and flooding the lower deck.This probably saved my life, as had the heavy tub fallen really on top of me I should have been squashed into a jelly.“Faith, I belaive ye’ve ez many loives ez a cat,” cried Mick, making little, in proper sailor fashion, of my peril; and then, dropping his voice so that the others shouldn’t hear him, he added, “Whisht, Tom—faith it’s thet nasty baste ‘Ugly’ thet done it; an’, sure, he’s done it a-purpos!”“No, Mick, I don’t believe that,” I whispered, in my turn, picking myself up with the aid of my suspicious chum, who proceeded to help me in clearing away the remains of the garbage from the tub which had been emptied into my jumper. “The fellow started back at sight of me, and I don’t think he meant to leave go of the gashing-tub as he did.”“Begorrah!” cried Mick indignantly, “why didn’t he stop and say so loike a man, insted ov snakin’ away loike a cur?”I cast my eyes about me and saw, truly enough, that ‘Ugly’ had disappeared.
“Tom,” said Mick to me, when we came down from the yards, by which time the ship was abreast of Southsea Pier on her way out in the fairway, “Oi’m afther settin’ oop, faith, fur a conjirer, now me drame’s coom roight!”
“You’re more than a conjurer, Mick,” I replied to this, laughing. “You’re a prophet!”
“Begorrah!” he rejoined with his usual grin, “it ain’t mooch profit Oi’ll git oot ov it, me darlint, or yersilf ayther, fur thet matther—aboot ez mooch, faith, ez Pat O’Connor got whin he shaved his pig!”
The squadron remained but a couple of days at anchor at Spithead; proceeding thence to Portland, whence, theCalypsoandRuby, ships belonging to the eastern division, having joined us, we all set sail in company for our cruise, bound for the West Indies.
Passing down Channel, through those ‘chops’ which our late cruiser had so watchfully guarded during the Manoeuvres, we gave Ushant a wide berth and entered the celebrated Bay of Biscay; the subject of a song as popular with us sailors as that of which my great-great-great-ancestor, Tom Bowling of pious and historic memory, was the hero.
Now, at last, I could say that I really was at sea!
A good many of my shipmates had no necessity, however, to do this; for theyfeltit—especially crossing the Bay!
The weather was dirty, as it usually is in this region.
This occurs through the influence of the Gulf Stream, which, after being wooed by the incurving and more hospitable coast of France, suddenly finds itself violently repulsed by the projecting Spanish peninsula; when, naturally angry, the current, like some folk who, on their not being able to vent their spleen on the people who may offend them, ‘pass it on’ to the nearest, tries to ‘make it warm’ for such unfortunate mariners as may cross its turbid bosom!
It is always rough there, and the winds as uncertain as a lady’s smile; and, I may say that on this occasion both Boreas and Neptune seemed to have arranged to render our passage over this special broken-water domain of theirs as disagreeable as possible.
We were well handled, our commanding officer being, as I have already said, one of the smartest sailors in the service; but, notwithstanding this, theActivehad very bad weather of it, while those of our consorts whom we could see in the distance appeared to experience worse.
The ship plunged and rolled to such an extent that it was almost impossible to go up and down the hatchways carrying anything; for a chap wanted more hands than he possessed to hold on with, let alone dunnage!
We boys had, as might be expected, most of the dirty work to do; and it was our task, when dinner was finished below, to help clear up the messes, and take the ‘gashing-tubs,’ in which the refuse of all our meals was thrown, up above to the upper deck and pitch the contents over the side, it being impossible for us to open any of the ports on the lower deck, from the heavy rolling seas that came toppling inboard every now and again.
The job was not a nice one, nor an easy one either; and the second day we were knocking about in the Bay an accident happened while we were at it that nearly settled the hash of one of us, making him more fit to go into the ‘gashing-tub’ himself than to handle it!
Four of us were trying to hoist our burden up the slippery ladder, which was rendered all the more slippery by the water washing down in a cataract every time a roller came over the forecastle and filled the waist of the corvette; not to speak of the rolling of the ship from port to starboard, and from starboard to port, varied by an occasional lift up in mid-air atop of some huge billow, and a dive down the next moment into the hollow of the waves, as if we were going down to Davy Jones’s locker.
Mick, who was the leading member of our quartet, on the top step of the ladder, was holding on like grim death to the side-rope with one hand, and stretching out the other towards Finlayson, a new boy whom we had not seen before till we joined theActive, he having been drafted from theBoscawenat Portland; and who, in turn, had hold of the tub and was clutching Mick’s hand to steady himself.
“Pull away, ye divvle!” cried Mick. “One more stip, begorrah, an’ we’ll be landid on the dick!”
“Shove up, you fellers below there!” shouted Finlayson, in response to this, to myself and another boy who had come forwards from the after part of the mess-deck to our assistance, but whose face I had not seen, from the fact of my back being turned to him. “Shove up, carn’t you! This chap atop here an’ me is bearin’ all the weight on it!”
“That’s all very well,” I growled, for the tub was slipping back on me, though I was holding it with both hands and shoving my knees into the steps of the ladder to keep myself steady. “Pull away, you beggar, your self! Aye, and you too, Mick, aloft there! I shall tumble back if you don’t take the weight of the tub off me!”
“Begorrah, Tom, me hearty, ye shan’t git kilt wid that there gashing-tub!” cried Mick, squinting down the hatchway and seeing my predicament. “Pull away, ye young divvle—it’s you, ye new boy, I’m afther manin’—pull away wid a will! Tom, why, sure, don’t ye make thet chap alongside ye put his shoulder to it properly? He ain’t workin’ at all, at all, bad cess to him, who ivver he is, fur I can’t say him at all, at all!”
“Whoi, I be a-shuvvin’ and a-shuvvin’ all the time,” rejoined a voice whose accents were strangely familiar to me. “You pull yerself, maister, and stop hollerin’ at Oi!”
I turned; and there, much to my astonishment, at the foot of the ladder was ‘Ugly,’ of whose being on board the same ship I was ignorant up to that moment, he being in the starboard watch and I in the port, and the necessities of the service not having brought us together before, though how I’d never seen him even casually at Portsmouth or at Portland I can’t account for.
Unfortunately, the curiosity that made me turn round brought about the mishap to which I have alluded, nearly making Tom Bowling, junior, your present informant, lose the number of his mess.
‘Ugly,’ as much surprised as myself at our strange meeting, started back on seeing me.
He had really, in spite of all that Mick said, been doing his part to assist me; and now, from his loosing his hold of the tub, which he had been trying to shove upwards on the one side the same as I did on the other, while the other two fellows above us pulled, the beastly thing came sliding back a step on me; and, as I was not holding on to anything, and the ship lurched at the moment, making Mick and Finlayson both let go at the same time, I tumbled incontinently backwards on to the lower deck, with the gashing-tub on top of me!
My good providence, however, still watched over me; for, as I fell, a big wave, coming splosh right over the side into the waist, poured down bodily through the hatchway, floating away the tub and flooding the lower deck.
This probably saved my life, as had the heavy tub fallen really on top of me I should have been squashed into a jelly.
“Faith, I belaive ye’ve ez many loives ez a cat,” cried Mick, making little, in proper sailor fashion, of my peril; and then, dropping his voice so that the others shouldn’t hear him, he added, “Whisht, Tom—faith it’s thet nasty baste ‘Ugly’ thet done it; an’, sure, he’s done it a-purpos!”
“No, Mick, I don’t believe that,” I whispered, in my turn, picking myself up with the aid of my suspicious chum, who proceeded to help me in clearing away the remains of the garbage from the tub which had been emptied into my jumper. “The fellow started back at sight of me, and I don’t think he meant to leave go of the gashing-tub as he did.”
“Begorrah!” cried Mick indignantly, “why didn’t he stop and say so loike a man, insted ov snakin’ away loike a cur?”
I cast my eyes about me and saw, truly enough, that ‘Ugly’ had disappeared.
Chapter Fifteen.Comedy to Tragedy.“Hullo, my lads! This won’t do, this won’t do!” shouted out a petty officer just then, as he came tacking about the deck and trying to make a straight course for the hatchway. “There’d be a fine row if Number One came along here and saw that theer mess on the deck!”“Faith, we couldn’t hilp it, row or no row,” said Mick, whose temper was a little bit heated from the recollection of ‘Ugly’s’ conduct, and the fright he really had experienced on my account in spite of his trying to treat it as a joke. “Sure, sor, the toob toombled down atop ov this poor bhoy here, an’ a’most made gammy duff ov him!”“Well, well, p’raps y’ll have better luck next time,” replied the man jokingly; and, turning to me, he said in a kindly way, “A miss is as good as a mile, my lad; but, accident or no accident, you’ll have to clear up that mess there, or there’ll be ructions aboard, I can tell you!”“All roight, sor,” said Mick, as he clutched hold of a swab which we had brought with us, in case of such an emergency. “Oi’ll make it roight, sure, in a brace ov shakes, sor.”I, too, bore a hand with another swab, as did Finlayson; and we soon made the place all shipshape again, another wave, which washed down the hatchway when we had finished, putting a polish on our work.Nothing further was seen of ‘Ugly,’ however, either by Mick or myself, the ill-tempered brute evidently keeping out of our way; and it was not till late in the afternoon that I saw him again aft, when both watches were called to treble-reef the topsails, and we boys belonging to the ship had to go aloft to take in the mizzen.We had not weathered Finisterre yet, though we had been bucketing about in the Bay now for over three days; the wind, which had been blowing in strong squalls from the north’ard and west’ard, suddenly backing to the south-east and coming on to blow harder than ever.The sea got up also in a corresponding degree, its huge billows, as they rolled onward propelled by the gale, rearing themselves up in mid-air till they seemed sometimes to be level with the top of our mainmast, surpassing in height even those which my old friend Larrikins had described as ‘mountings ’igh.’I had seen already in my trips in theMartinup and down Channel what I fancied at the time to be rough weather; but, never in my life previously had I ever seen such a scene of grandeur as the ocean presented that stormy afternoon!Far and wide, it seethed and boiled like a huge cauldron, its surface covered with foam as white as snow, which the dark setting of inky clouds along the horizon brought out in whiter relief.Above, masses of ragged wrack scudded aimlessly across the sky, whose leaden hue was cheerless and grim, save where, in the west, the sun went down suddenly in a wrath of crimson majesty, the darkness of night descending on the scene as if a curtain ofcrêpe, had been let down the moment after he vanished beneath the waste of angry waters, unlightened by a single ray of his customary after-glow.Apparently the tempest-loving demons of the deep were only waiting for the shades of night in order to carry on their revels with the greater ‘go’ at our expense; for no sooner had the evening closed in than the gale increased in force, and the sea waxed even angrier, so that by Four Bells in the first watch, that is at ten o’clock, in landsman’s parlance, the ship had to lie-to under storm staysails—pitching and plunging bows under, and taking in some of the huge rollers occasionally over her forecastle, that swept down into the waist to such an extent that it was as much as the scuppers could do to get rid of the water as she rolled.Fortunately, we did not get any of this below, the hatches having been battened down early in the afternoon, subsequently to our mishap with the ‘gashing-tub’; but, although this saved us some wet, it was far from pleasant on our mess-deck, the steam from the wet clothes of the fellows belonging to the watch just relieved, and the smell of the bilge from the place being shut up, making it resemble towards morning something like what I have read of an African slaver’s hold being in the middle latitudes.When day broke, I found, on turning out of my hammock, our ship riding a little easier, the rolling having abated considerably; and, on going on deck shortly afterwards, though there was no order as usual to ‘lash up and stow,’ the weather being too rough for that, the reason for this change for the better, so far as the uneasy motion was concerned, became apparent enough.The commodore had ordered a storm jib to be set, as well as the after-trysail, which was about the size of a good old-fashioned pocket-handkerchief; and, instead of laying-to as we had been when I turned in close on midnight, the ship was now running before the south-easter and making good progress, too, out of the neighbourhood of the treacherous Bay.By breakfast-time we were making so much better weather of it that we were able to open the hatches, and the windsails were rigged up to let down some fresh air below, which enabled us to have a better meal than we expected; so our hot cocoa and bread possessed an additional relish, not only from this circumstance, but also from the fact of our not having enjoyed anything hot since the previous day at dinner, the galley fires having been swamped out just before tea-time, thus forcing us to turn in supperless.Later on, as the gale slackened, we set our topsails close-reefed, and more ‘fore-and-aft’ sail; and, when the sun had got above our foreyard, the commodore ordered the topgallant-masts to be sent up, these having been housed when it came on to blow heavily. Our topgallants were consequently set above our close-reefed topsails, which some of the young seamen on board appeared to think a most extraordinary proceeding; but one of the quarter-masters, who was an old hand, said he had often seen it done when sailing “under old Fitzroy on the Pacific station,” when their ship would be bowling along under this sail before a stiff nor’-easter, in the run down from Vancouver to Callao, past the inhospitable Californian coast.At noon that day, the navigating officer, who took the sun on the poop, surrounded by a lot of the young midshipmen we had on board for instruction during the training cruise, like us boys on the lower deck each in our respective billet, gave out that we were in latitude 44 degrees 10 minutes north, and longitude 10 degrees 15 minutes west, thus showing that we were well to the westward of the ill-omened Cape Finisterre and now safely out of the Bay of Biscay!The navigator also told our commanding officer, in the usual stereotyped nautical formula, that it was twelve o’clock.“All right,” replied the commodore. “Make it so!”Accordingly, the sentry on the forecastle struck Eight Bells, and the men were piped down to dinner; the boatswain’s mates sounding their shrill calls through the ship as the echo of the last stroke of the clapper on the side of the ship’s bell ceased to reverberate in the noisy air, which was filled with the creaking of the blocks aloft and the hum of the wind, the sea breaking against our counter alongside in a sullen fashion as if old Neptune were disappointed at letting us slip out of his clutches!At One Bell, half-an-hour later, when the grog was served out to the men—we boys, of course, having none of this, nor wanting it either—a rather amusing incident occurred.Some of the chaps on board, though passed for ordinary seamen, were ‘green hands’; and the older sailors that leavened the company, used to crack jokes on these and ‘pull their legs’ pretty considerably, until the green ones got too knowing to be taken in.One fellow we had with us in the starboard watch, however, seemed to be so naturally ‘raw’ that nothing served to ‘salt’ him; and he was the butt not only of his own mess, but of the whole ship’s company.On this occasion Harris, a leading seaman, took a fine rise out of him.“Say, Joblins,” he called out, as he was going to light his pipe to have a smoke forwards, we boys having set out the spittoons for the men along the ‘’tween decks,’ “got your grog all right, old ship?”“Oh ay,” answered the other. “I’se droonk un.”“But I means yer second ’lowance.”“Hay?” said Mr Johnny Raw, his eyes beginning to visibly brighten. “What fur be that?”“Yer second ’lowance,” repeated the joker Harris. “All the noo hands can git it if they axes fur it.”“Now, yer bean’t a-joking?”“No,” declared Harris unblushingly, winking to the others around. “Joking—why should I, man?”The greenhorn grew quite excited at the prospect of another tot of grog after his pipe.“Say, shipmate,” said he, rising from the bench at the mess-table where he had been sitting having a whiff, “tell us wot I shall do fur to get un?”“Take hold on that ‘spud-net’ there,” said Harris, pointing to the net in which the potatoes had been boiled for the mess, the other fellows near turning their backs so that Joblins couldn’t see them laugh as he proceeded to carry out the joker’s suggestion. “Ah, ye’ve got it all right, then? Now, Joblins, ye can take that to the upper deck, where they’re now sarvin’ out the grog for the port watch, and tell the ‘Jaunty’ that yer come fur yer second ’lowance.”Would you believe it?Well, whether you do so or not, all I have to say is that the innocent yokel actually went up on deck with the potato-net in his hand, holding it out in front of him as he took his station beside those standing round the grog-tub.“Hullo!” exclaimed the ship’s steward, who acts as master of the ceremonies in this daily allowance of drink to the ship’s company, assisted by one of the corporals, and sometimes even by the master-at-arms himself, the purveyor of the grog recognising him as having previously received his quota. “What do you want here? You’ve had your ’lowance already!”Joblins, however, was reluctant to give up the chance of getting an additional supply without a struggle for it, so, he would not accept this rebuff.“They sez below, sir,” explained he, still holding out the spud-net straight in front of him, “as how I wer to tell yer, sir, as I wur a noo hand, an’ yer would give I a second ’lowance.”“Oh, you’re a new hand are you?”“Ay,” replied Joblins, in a very satisfied tone, thinking the matter was now satisfactorily settled. “That I be, sir.”“I thought so,” said the ship’s steward drily. “What are you going to put the grog in if I gave it to you?”Joblins did not reply in words, but held out the net.“Well,” exclaimed the steward, with a grin on his face that was reflected in that of every one standing by, “I’ve heard of green hands and greenhorns before; but of all the raw johnnies I ever saw on board ship you take the cake!”Strange to say, such was his denseness, that even then, the yokel could not see the point of the joke and the steward had to order him away.“Now, clear out of this,” he cried, getting a bit angry when his laugh was out. “Don’t you see, you fool, if you can see anything at all, that the rum would run out of the net like water out of a sieve? Be off with you!”Then at last the poor chap recognised the fact that Harris had been ‘taking him in,’ and darted down the ladder with the obvious intention of ‘taking it out’ of his tormentor; but the shout of merriment with which he was received when he got forward amongst the men again, stopped his saying anything, and the watch being just then called, his anger had time to evaporate before he had any further chance of calling his tormentor to account.The weather continuing on the mend, the commodore gave orders to the officer of the watch, soon after dinner, to shape a course for Madeira, that being the appointed rendezvous of the squadron in the event of their parting company at any time in this first part of our cruise; for we had seen nothing of any of them since the beginning of the gale, the littleRubybeing the last we had sighted shortly before our being forced to lie-to.During the afternoon, however, the horizon clearing to the nor’ard and a gleam of sunshine lighting up the sea, a distant sail was seen hull down on our lee quarter.“Signalman,” hailed the officer of the watch, “what do you make her out to be?”“Can’t say yet, sir,” replied the man, with the glass screwed to his eye, squinting to leeward. “She’s too fur off, sir.”After a short pause the officer repeated his question.“Make her out yet, Jones?”“No, sir,” replied the signalman; “but she’s rising now, sir, an’ I thinks she’s closing us.”“Ay.”Another short interval elapsed; and then, being down in the waist, right under the break of the poop, the quarter-master having set me to work flemishing down the slack ends of some of the sheets that he did not think were tidily arranged, I heard the signalman mumble some exclamation or other which he could not get out properly from his excitement.“What is it, you say?” said the officer of the watch, who had gone to the binnacle to look at the compass and did not quite catch what the man said. “Speak distinctly, my man. I can’t hear you!”“It’s theRuby, sir!” shouted out the signalman, in a voice that could be heard, I believe, at the distance by which our consort was separated from us, making the officer of the watch, Lieutenant Robinson, jump off the deck, he having come up quite close in the meantime. “I knows her by the clew on her tops’l.”“All right, my man,” blurted out the lieutenant, who was a crusty, ill-tempered, sour sort of chap, one always speaking to the men as if he had a bad liver and who couldn’t look a chap square in the eye if he stood up before him, having underhung brows and a nasty way of looking from under them. “You needn’t roar at me like a grampus, Jones. I’ve a great mind to put you in the list for disrespectful conduct to your superior officer! What did you say?”“TheRuby, sir,” repeated the signalman, as tenderly now as a sucking dove. “It’s the gallant littleRubysure enough, sir.”The irate lieutenant did not appear, though, to share the enthusiasm of Jones; and I afterwards heard that he had some grudge against the ‘boss’ of theRuby, as indeed he had against most people with whom he came in contact; and I don’t think many were sorry when he left the service subsequently to our cruise, starting in some line of civil life where his uncivil demeanour has probably gained him as many friends as he got afloat!“I don’t want any of your opinions, my man,” said he; “and, if you talk of gallantry, I don’t think she has stuck to us as she might have done in the gale. Probably, though, she couldn’t help this; for she’s a wretched tub and has the misfortune of having a nincompoop for a commander besides!”Luckily for the sour-tempered chap, whom I had time to reckon up since I had been on board the corvette, the commodore did not hear what he said, or he would most probably, officer of the watch though he might be, have given him a ‘dressing down’ before us all.The fact of our having sighted theRubyhad already been communicated by one of the midshipmen to our chief, who was down in his cabin having a rest, never having left the deck either day or night, I believe, since the gale overtook us; and, as soon as we got within signalling distance, he ordered the yeoman at the signal halliards to make our number.Although the weather was becoming finer, as I have said, the wind was still gusty and chopping about between the east and nor’-east quadrants; and, hardly had our pennant been run up to the mizzen truck than the ‘fly’ of the flag got foul of the halliards.“Hi, boy!” cried Lieutenant Robinson, wishing to be very smart, now the commodore was on deck. “’Way aloft there and free that flag!”I thought he spoke to me, and jumped towards the weather shrouds to obey the order, but as I got into the rigging I saw ‘Ugly’ was before me.He was in the chains and on his way up to the top before the lieutenant spoke, and naturally he had first addressed him.‘Ugly,’ however, was so sluggish in his movements through the corvette rolling a bit and the ratlines being none too steady, that Lieutenant Robinson grew impatient.“Here, you boy!” he roared at me even louder than Jones had spoken to him shortly before. “See if you can’t teach that lubber how to climb aloft and free a flag when he is told, without taking a month of Sundays over the job!”Almost before he had spoken I had sprung into the rigging after ‘Ugly’; and by the time the lieutenant’s last word was uttered I was more than half-way up to the top, overhauling ‘Ugly’ at the crosstrees.From thence, he and I proceeded upward, he on one side of the mast, I on the other, and neither speaking a word as we shinned up the ‘Jacob’s ladder.’So we climbed up to the cap of the topgallant-mast in company; but, as far apart as the poles, though so close together.Then, each of us set about in his own fashion, without minding the other, to disentangle the fly of the pennant, which had been whipped by the wind round the halliards till it had formed itself into half a dozen granny’s knots.We were holding on to the royal lift and brace, both of us, each with one hand while with the other we tried to unloose the closely knotted bunting, our faces almost touching each other, and still without ever saying a word; when, all at once, through some one having neglected his duty when the topgallant-mast was sent aloft after the gale, the ends of the lift and brace slipped off the jack, to which they had been only loosely secured, leaving ‘Ugly’ and I suspended in the air partly by the signal halliards and partly by the flag, which latter parted with a ripping sound that I hear now in my ears as I speak of it. Aye, and as I always shall hear it, I believe!I heard also at the time, confused cries and orders from below, singing out I know not what.My companion’s face was close to mine as we swung from the feeble cord and more fragile stuff that interposed between us and eternity; a fall to the deck beneath or into the sea meaning death in one way or the other, either by drowning or by a more cruel fate.I could see into his very soul, I think, at that awful moment, and he into mine!It all occurred in an instant, recollect!But in that instant ‘Ugly’ had time to break the silence that had existed between us since our fight on the forecastle of theSaint Vincentand my rescue of him aboard the same ship later on.He spoke to me, at last, now.“To-am Bowlin’,” whispered he hoarsely, “two chaps can’t hang on yere fur long. I’ll give oop fur ’ee, me lad. Here goes!”
“Hullo, my lads! This won’t do, this won’t do!” shouted out a petty officer just then, as he came tacking about the deck and trying to make a straight course for the hatchway. “There’d be a fine row if Number One came along here and saw that theer mess on the deck!”
“Faith, we couldn’t hilp it, row or no row,” said Mick, whose temper was a little bit heated from the recollection of ‘Ugly’s’ conduct, and the fright he really had experienced on my account in spite of his trying to treat it as a joke. “Sure, sor, the toob toombled down atop ov this poor bhoy here, an’ a’most made gammy duff ov him!”
“Well, well, p’raps y’ll have better luck next time,” replied the man jokingly; and, turning to me, he said in a kindly way, “A miss is as good as a mile, my lad; but, accident or no accident, you’ll have to clear up that mess there, or there’ll be ructions aboard, I can tell you!”
“All roight, sor,” said Mick, as he clutched hold of a swab which we had brought with us, in case of such an emergency. “Oi’ll make it roight, sure, in a brace ov shakes, sor.”
I, too, bore a hand with another swab, as did Finlayson; and we soon made the place all shipshape again, another wave, which washed down the hatchway when we had finished, putting a polish on our work.
Nothing further was seen of ‘Ugly,’ however, either by Mick or myself, the ill-tempered brute evidently keeping out of our way; and it was not till late in the afternoon that I saw him again aft, when both watches were called to treble-reef the topsails, and we boys belonging to the ship had to go aloft to take in the mizzen.
We had not weathered Finisterre yet, though we had been bucketing about in the Bay now for over three days; the wind, which had been blowing in strong squalls from the north’ard and west’ard, suddenly backing to the south-east and coming on to blow harder than ever.
The sea got up also in a corresponding degree, its huge billows, as they rolled onward propelled by the gale, rearing themselves up in mid-air till they seemed sometimes to be level with the top of our mainmast, surpassing in height even those which my old friend Larrikins had described as ‘mountings ’igh.’
I had seen already in my trips in theMartinup and down Channel what I fancied at the time to be rough weather; but, never in my life previously had I ever seen such a scene of grandeur as the ocean presented that stormy afternoon!
Far and wide, it seethed and boiled like a huge cauldron, its surface covered with foam as white as snow, which the dark setting of inky clouds along the horizon brought out in whiter relief.
Above, masses of ragged wrack scudded aimlessly across the sky, whose leaden hue was cheerless and grim, save where, in the west, the sun went down suddenly in a wrath of crimson majesty, the darkness of night descending on the scene as if a curtain ofcrêpe, had been let down the moment after he vanished beneath the waste of angry waters, unlightened by a single ray of his customary after-glow.
Apparently the tempest-loving demons of the deep were only waiting for the shades of night in order to carry on their revels with the greater ‘go’ at our expense; for no sooner had the evening closed in than the gale increased in force, and the sea waxed even angrier, so that by Four Bells in the first watch, that is at ten o’clock, in landsman’s parlance, the ship had to lie-to under storm staysails—pitching and plunging bows under, and taking in some of the huge rollers occasionally over her forecastle, that swept down into the waist to such an extent that it was as much as the scuppers could do to get rid of the water as she rolled.
Fortunately, we did not get any of this below, the hatches having been battened down early in the afternoon, subsequently to our mishap with the ‘gashing-tub’; but, although this saved us some wet, it was far from pleasant on our mess-deck, the steam from the wet clothes of the fellows belonging to the watch just relieved, and the smell of the bilge from the place being shut up, making it resemble towards morning something like what I have read of an African slaver’s hold being in the middle latitudes.
When day broke, I found, on turning out of my hammock, our ship riding a little easier, the rolling having abated considerably; and, on going on deck shortly afterwards, though there was no order as usual to ‘lash up and stow,’ the weather being too rough for that, the reason for this change for the better, so far as the uneasy motion was concerned, became apparent enough.
The commodore had ordered a storm jib to be set, as well as the after-trysail, which was about the size of a good old-fashioned pocket-handkerchief; and, instead of laying-to as we had been when I turned in close on midnight, the ship was now running before the south-easter and making good progress, too, out of the neighbourhood of the treacherous Bay.
By breakfast-time we were making so much better weather of it that we were able to open the hatches, and the windsails were rigged up to let down some fresh air below, which enabled us to have a better meal than we expected; so our hot cocoa and bread possessed an additional relish, not only from this circumstance, but also from the fact of our not having enjoyed anything hot since the previous day at dinner, the galley fires having been swamped out just before tea-time, thus forcing us to turn in supperless.
Later on, as the gale slackened, we set our topsails close-reefed, and more ‘fore-and-aft’ sail; and, when the sun had got above our foreyard, the commodore ordered the topgallant-masts to be sent up, these having been housed when it came on to blow heavily. Our topgallants were consequently set above our close-reefed topsails, which some of the young seamen on board appeared to think a most extraordinary proceeding; but one of the quarter-masters, who was an old hand, said he had often seen it done when sailing “under old Fitzroy on the Pacific station,” when their ship would be bowling along under this sail before a stiff nor’-easter, in the run down from Vancouver to Callao, past the inhospitable Californian coast.
At noon that day, the navigating officer, who took the sun on the poop, surrounded by a lot of the young midshipmen we had on board for instruction during the training cruise, like us boys on the lower deck each in our respective billet, gave out that we were in latitude 44 degrees 10 minutes north, and longitude 10 degrees 15 minutes west, thus showing that we were well to the westward of the ill-omened Cape Finisterre and now safely out of the Bay of Biscay!
The navigator also told our commanding officer, in the usual stereotyped nautical formula, that it was twelve o’clock.
“All right,” replied the commodore. “Make it so!”
Accordingly, the sentry on the forecastle struck Eight Bells, and the men were piped down to dinner; the boatswain’s mates sounding their shrill calls through the ship as the echo of the last stroke of the clapper on the side of the ship’s bell ceased to reverberate in the noisy air, which was filled with the creaking of the blocks aloft and the hum of the wind, the sea breaking against our counter alongside in a sullen fashion as if old Neptune were disappointed at letting us slip out of his clutches!
At One Bell, half-an-hour later, when the grog was served out to the men—we boys, of course, having none of this, nor wanting it either—a rather amusing incident occurred.
Some of the chaps on board, though passed for ordinary seamen, were ‘green hands’; and the older sailors that leavened the company, used to crack jokes on these and ‘pull their legs’ pretty considerably, until the green ones got too knowing to be taken in.
One fellow we had with us in the starboard watch, however, seemed to be so naturally ‘raw’ that nothing served to ‘salt’ him; and he was the butt not only of his own mess, but of the whole ship’s company.
On this occasion Harris, a leading seaman, took a fine rise out of him.
“Say, Joblins,” he called out, as he was going to light his pipe to have a smoke forwards, we boys having set out the spittoons for the men along the ‘’tween decks,’ “got your grog all right, old ship?”
“Oh ay,” answered the other. “I’se droonk un.”
“But I means yer second ’lowance.”
“Hay?” said Mr Johnny Raw, his eyes beginning to visibly brighten. “What fur be that?”
“Yer second ’lowance,” repeated the joker Harris. “All the noo hands can git it if they axes fur it.”
“Now, yer bean’t a-joking?”
“No,” declared Harris unblushingly, winking to the others around. “Joking—why should I, man?”
The greenhorn grew quite excited at the prospect of another tot of grog after his pipe.
“Say, shipmate,” said he, rising from the bench at the mess-table where he had been sitting having a whiff, “tell us wot I shall do fur to get un?”
“Take hold on that ‘spud-net’ there,” said Harris, pointing to the net in which the potatoes had been boiled for the mess, the other fellows near turning their backs so that Joblins couldn’t see them laugh as he proceeded to carry out the joker’s suggestion. “Ah, ye’ve got it all right, then? Now, Joblins, ye can take that to the upper deck, where they’re now sarvin’ out the grog for the port watch, and tell the ‘Jaunty’ that yer come fur yer second ’lowance.”
Would you believe it?
Well, whether you do so or not, all I have to say is that the innocent yokel actually went up on deck with the potato-net in his hand, holding it out in front of him as he took his station beside those standing round the grog-tub.
“Hullo!” exclaimed the ship’s steward, who acts as master of the ceremonies in this daily allowance of drink to the ship’s company, assisted by one of the corporals, and sometimes even by the master-at-arms himself, the purveyor of the grog recognising him as having previously received his quota. “What do you want here? You’ve had your ’lowance already!”
Joblins, however, was reluctant to give up the chance of getting an additional supply without a struggle for it, so, he would not accept this rebuff.
“They sez below, sir,” explained he, still holding out the spud-net straight in front of him, “as how I wer to tell yer, sir, as I wur a noo hand, an’ yer would give I a second ’lowance.”
“Oh, you’re a new hand are you?”
“Ay,” replied Joblins, in a very satisfied tone, thinking the matter was now satisfactorily settled. “That I be, sir.”
“I thought so,” said the ship’s steward drily. “What are you going to put the grog in if I gave it to you?”
Joblins did not reply in words, but held out the net.
“Well,” exclaimed the steward, with a grin on his face that was reflected in that of every one standing by, “I’ve heard of green hands and greenhorns before; but of all the raw johnnies I ever saw on board ship you take the cake!”
Strange to say, such was his denseness, that even then, the yokel could not see the point of the joke and the steward had to order him away.
“Now, clear out of this,” he cried, getting a bit angry when his laugh was out. “Don’t you see, you fool, if you can see anything at all, that the rum would run out of the net like water out of a sieve? Be off with you!”
Then at last the poor chap recognised the fact that Harris had been ‘taking him in,’ and darted down the ladder with the obvious intention of ‘taking it out’ of his tormentor; but the shout of merriment with which he was received when he got forward amongst the men again, stopped his saying anything, and the watch being just then called, his anger had time to evaporate before he had any further chance of calling his tormentor to account.
The weather continuing on the mend, the commodore gave orders to the officer of the watch, soon after dinner, to shape a course for Madeira, that being the appointed rendezvous of the squadron in the event of their parting company at any time in this first part of our cruise; for we had seen nothing of any of them since the beginning of the gale, the littleRubybeing the last we had sighted shortly before our being forced to lie-to.
During the afternoon, however, the horizon clearing to the nor’ard and a gleam of sunshine lighting up the sea, a distant sail was seen hull down on our lee quarter.
“Signalman,” hailed the officer of the watch, “what do you make her out to be?”
“Can’t say yet, sir,” replied the man, with the glass screwed to his eye, squinting to leeward. “She’s too fur off, sir.”
After a short pause the officer repeated his question.
“Make her out yet, Jones?”
“No, sir,” replied the signalman; “but she’s rising now, sir, an’ I thinks she’s closing us.”
“Ay.”
Another short interval elapsed; and then, being down in the waist, right under the break of the poop, the quarter-master having set me to work flemishing down the slack ends of some of the sheets that he did not think were tidily arranged, I heard the signalman mumble some exclamation or other which he could not get out properly from his excitement.
“What is it, you say?” said the officer of the watch, who had gone to the binnacle to look at the compass and did not quite catch what the man said. “Speak distinctly, my man. I can’t hear you!”
“It’s theRuby, sir!” shouted out the signalman, in a voice that could be heard, I believe, at the distance by which our consort was separated from us, making the officer of the watch, Lieutenant Robinson, jump off the deck, he having come up quite close in the meantime. “I knows her by the clew on her tops’l.”
“All right, my man,” blurted out the lieutenant, who was a crusty, ill-tempered, sour sort of chap, one always speaking to the men as if he had a bad liver and who couldn’t look a chap square in the eye if he stood up before him, having underhung brows and a nasty way of looking from under them. “You needn’t roar at me like a grampus, Jones. I’ve a great mind to put you in the list for disrespectful conduct to your superior officer! What did you say?”
“TheRuby, sir,” repeated the signalman, as tenderly now as a sucking dove. “It’s the gallant littleRubysure enough, sir.”
The irate lieutenant did not appear, though, to share the enthusiasm of Jones; and I afterwards heard that he had some grudge against the ‘boss’ of theRuby, as indeed he had against most people with whom he came in contact; and I don’t think many were sorry when he left the service subsequently to our cruise, starting in some line of civil life where his uncivil demeanour has probably gained him as many friends as he got afloat!
“I don’t want any of your opinions, my man,” said he; “and, if you talk of gallantry, I don’t think she has stuck to us as she might have done in the gale. Probably, though, she couldn’t help this; for she’s a wretched tub and has the misfortune of having a nincompoop for a commander besides!”
Luckily for the sour-tempered chap, whom I had time to reckon up since I had been on board the corvette, the commodore did not hear what he said, or he would most probably, officer of the watch though he might be, have given him a ‘dressing down’ before us all.
The fact of our having sighted theRubyhad already been communicated by one of the midshipmen to our chief, who was down in his cabin having a rest, never having left the deck either day or night, I believe, since the gale overtook us; and, as soon as we got within signalling distance, he ordered the yeoman at the signal halliards to make our number.
Although the weather was becoming finer, as I have said, the wind was still gusty and chopping about between the east and nor’-east quadrants; and, hardly had our pennant been run up to the mizzen truck than the ‘fly’ of the flag got foul of the halliards.
“Hi, boy!” cried Lieutenant Robinson, wishing to be very smart, now the commodore was on deck. “’Way aloft there and free that flag!”
I thought he spoke to me, and jumped towards the weather shrouds to obey the order, but as I got into the rigging I saw ‘Ugly’ was before me.
He was in the chains and on his way up to the top before the lieutenant spoke, and naturally he had first addressed him.
‘Ugly,’ however, was so sluggish in his movements through the corvette rolling a bit and the ratlines being none too steady, that Lieutenant Robinson grew impatient.
“Here, you boy!” he roared at me even louder than Jones had spoken to him shortly before. “See if you can’t teach that lubber how to climb aloft and free a flag when he is told, without taking a month of Sundays over the job!”
Almost before he had spoken I had sprung into the rigging after ‘Ugly’; and by the time the lieutenant’s last word was uttered I was more than half-way up to the top, overhauling ‘Ugly’ at the crosstrees.
From thence, he and I proceeded upward, he on one side of the mast, I on the other, and neither speaking a word as we shinned up the ‘Jacob’s ladder.’
So we climbed up to the cap of the topgallant-mast in company; but, as far apart as the poles, though so close together.
Then, each of us set about in his own fashion, without minding the other, to disentangle the fly of the pennant, which had been whipped by the wind round the halliards till it had formed itself into half a dozen granny’s knots.
We were holding on to the royal lift and brace, both of us, each with one hand while with the other we tried to unloose the closely knotted bunting, our faces almost touching each other, and still without ever saying a word; when, all at once, through some one having neglected his duty when the topgallant-mast was sent aloft after the gale, the ends of the lift and brace slipped off the jack, to which they had been only loosely secured, leaving ‘Ugly’ and I suspended in the air partly by the signal halliards and partly by the flag, which latter parted with a ripping sound that I hear now in my ears as I speak of it. Aye, and as I always shall hear it, I believe!
I heard also at the time, confused cries and orders from below, singing out I know not what.
My companion’s face was close to mine as we swung from the feeble cord and more fragile stuff that interposed between us and eternity; a fall to the deck beneath or into the sea meaning death in one way or the other, either by drowning or by a more cruel fate.
I could see into his very soul, I think, at that awful moment, and he into mine!
It all occurred in an instant, recollect!
But in that instant ‘Ugly’ had time to break the silence that had existed between us since our fight on the forecastle of theSaint Vincentand my rescue of him aboard the same ship later on.
He spoke to me, at last, now.
“To-am Bowlin’,” whispered he hoarsely, “two chaps can’t hang on yere fur long. I’ll give oop fur ’ee, me lad. Here goes!”
Chapter Sixteen.“His Last Muster!”On that, the noble fellow, who thus unselfishly sacrificed his life for mine, fell with a whiz through the air that seemed to send the wind up into my face, down to the deck below.Cannoning against the rigging on the port side, he was caught up in the belly of the mizzen-top sail, which slightly stopped the impetus of his descent, but, the concussion broke his spine, and when I, pale, trembling, and almost as lifeless as he, coming down from aloft, I hardly know how, reached his side, the doctor, who was bending over him and applying stimulants, said he had only a few moments longer to live.The chaplain, too, was there, having been hastily summoned from his duties of instructing the young middies in the wardroom; as also was the commodore, with a graver face on him than I had ever seen before.I don’t know whether he heard my step, or the cry I ejaculated when the doctor spoke of his approaching end.Whatever it was, something made my dying shipmate open his eyes just then, his glance wandering round the circle of those near.“What is it, my poor lad?” asked the chaplain kindly, stooping down, so as to hear better any request he might make. “Is there anything you would like done or said for you?”He was thinking, good man, no doubt, of offering up a prayer.But the mind of Moses Reeks—to call him by his right name, and drop the somewhat opprobrious sobriquet by which I have hitherto styled the poor fellow, and by which, indeed, he was always known on board—was still bent on things terrestrial; though, possibly, his motive might have been as high and had as divine a source as anything the chaplain might have intended to say!His eyes lighted on me and their wandering ceased.“Coom here, lad,” he whispered very faintly, so very faintly that his lips seemed to give out no sound at all. “Coom here!”I heard, though, and went to his side, listening earnestly, for I could not speak.He did not notice this, however, making up, with his slowly ebbing senses, what he wished himself to say.“To-am Bowlin’,” he faltered out in lisping accents with his failing breath, “ye’ve done Oi a toorn wanst, lad, an’ I wer an oongrateful cur to ’ee, thet Oi wer, ez Oi didn’t warnt fur to be a-beholden to yer; but you a’ me, To-am, be naow quits, lad!”As he thus spoke, a smile irradiated his rough-hewn features, making them look positively beautiful; and, with the last word he uttered, his spirit fled, with a sigh that was stifled in its birth.The commodore uncovered his head in the presence of Death—the superior officer of even one flying the broad pennant and the personal representative of her Majesty wherever the broad red cross of Saint George, borne on that oblong flag, may float.At that moment the ship’s bugler forwards sounded the ‘assembly.’“Peace to his spirit, poor boy,” said our chief solemnly. “He’s gone to his last muster!”It was Two Bells in the first dog-watch before theRubyclosed with us sufficiently to speak with us; when she reported that she had parted with the other ships of the squadron even before she had lost sight of us at the commencement of the gale, not seeing anything of them since.Her commander also informed the commodore that they had lost two men overboard while reefing topsails in a squall, the sea running so high that it was impossible to lower a boat to save them.We, in our turn, told of poor ‘Ugly’s’ heroic end: and, as it was approaching sunset, his body was sewn up in his hammock, with a shot fastened to the feet, and committed to the deep.All hands were present while the chaplain read the funeral service on the quarter-deck: and, as the grating on which the poor fellow’s remains rested, covered for the moment with the Union Jack, was canted through the port and its lifeless burden went below with a splash, to its last resting-place until the sea shall give up its dead, the waning sun dipped below the horizon.We then squared yards and bore away straight for Madeira, with theRubykeeping company on our lee beam; the wind having sobered down now to a good ten-knot breeze, and the weather all that one could wish, getting warmer with every hour of south latitude that we made.Everybody was jolly that evening as we bowled along before the spanking breeze, fresh sail being set every watch, until the corvette was presently clothed in canvas from truck to keelson, the commodore wishing to take every advantage of the fair wind we had; but, though all the rest, sailor-like, were laughing and joking on the mess-deck forwards, I could not so soon forget the poor chap who had gone, his noble self-sacrifice being ever in my mind.It was strange that reserved, unforgiving, and yet not unforgetful temperament of his!I saw now, when too late, that he had not been quite oblivious of my having saved him that time on board theSaint Vincentwhen he so nearly tumbled from aloft. He had not been ungrateful, as Mick and I thought him, evidently.On the contrary, the obligation he believed himself to be under to me had so weighed upon him that he was too proud to speak until he had cleared it off, so, he apparently fancied, to be able to treat with me on level terms.Mick Donovan had not been on deck when the tragic occurrence happened; but he was almost as much impressed as myself when I told him of our shipmate’s last words.“Begorrah, Tom,” cried he, wiping his eye with the sleeve of his jumper, “Oi wudn’t ’a belaved it, sure, if ye hadn’t towld me, mabouchal, wid yer own potato trap! Faith, the poor chap samed quoite a t’other sort. Sure, Tom, me darlint, as he’s bin an’ gone an’ saved the noomber ov yer mess, be the powers, Oi’ll spake to Father O’Flannagan whin I git back to Porchmouth an’ ax him fur to say a mass, sure, fur the poor beggar, so that his sowl may rest in paice. May the saints protict him!”Three days afterwards, without any further adventure, we anchored in Funchal Roads.Here the squadron remained a week, the other ships having joined us when within a day’s sail of Madeira; and, as we were going to make such a comparatively long stay, the men were granted leave to go ashore, watch and watch in turn.Just before we left, the commodore gave a grand picnic to all the officers at the Grande Curral, when I had the luck of accompanying the party that went from our ship, a piece of good fortune shared by Mick, my chum.This Curral, a name which means, I’m told, in the Spanish language a ‘sheepfold,’ is an immense valley, completely surrounded by hills, that lies a few miles to the north-west of Funchal, the capital of the island.The hills encircling the natural plateau of the Curral are literally perpendicular, being in no part less than a thousand feet high; while round a part of the cliffs there is a narrow road leading to the ‘garden houses’ of the rich folk having business premises in the town, and a number of plantations, which is cut out of the solid rock and is about ten or twelve feet high.As the picnic party went along over this road, the view presented to our eyes on looking down below was that of an unfathomable abyss, filled up by a mass of clouds and vapours, all rolling about in constant motion, and tumbling the one on top of another.Mick and I were each aboard a mule and enjoyed ourselves to rights, racing against one another all the way; though we took precious good care to keep in the rear of our officers, amongst whom was Lieutenant Robinson, whose liver must have been particularly out of sorts that morning, for he was in a grumpier and more fault-finding mood than usual.He did catch sight of us once as we were turning a sharp point in the road round a projection of a cliff; but, through the fortunate circumstance of the mule which the lieutenant was riding happening to bolt at the moment, the joker had too much to do in taking care of his own valuable carcass to have much time to growl at us.The lieutenant, though, did not forget the incident: for, on Mick chancing to trip over one of his legs as he sat on the grass while handing him a plate of salad, the pleasant gentleman called him as many names as some of the watermen at Point are in the habit of using when they are put out of temper by being cheated of a fare.“Bedad, Tom,” whispered Mick to me, when he got out of range of the lieutenant’s grapeshot, and we were having a feed ourselves in a quiet corner, “Oi wush thet blissid ould baist he wor roidin’ hed run away wid him, sure, over the cliff an’ made an ind ov the spalpeen! Faith, it isn’t mesilf thet wud cry me oyes out, or wear mournin’ fur him!”On leaving Madeira, which we did with much regret, the people being very hospitable and most good-naturedly disposed towards all sailors, especially to British bluejackets, we fetched a compass for Teneriffe, where we arrived some three or four days afterwards; the commodore occupying the additional time in exercising the ships under his command, and matching them one against another.In sailing on a wind theActive, I’m glad to say, beat all the rest of the squadron; though, in running before the wind, the littleRubyweathered on us and theVolage, our sister ship, ran us pretty close.When nearing Teneriffe and close in to the African coast, we saw a splendid tight in the sea, between a big black whale on the one side, and a ‘thrasher’ or fox-shark on the other, aided by a swordfish, with which latter he had just apparently struck up an alliance offensive and defensive for the time.The thrasher, which has a back as elastic as an india-rubber ball, would jump clean out of the water and give the whale a whack in the ribs that must have taken all the elasticity out of him; and then, on the poor leviathan of the deep fluking his tail to dive so as to escape from his aerial antagonist, his chum the swordfish would tickle up the whale from below by sending a yard or two of his long saw-like snout into his tenderest part.Presently, as we luffed up to see the end of the fun, the sea in the vicinity of the fray became tinged with blood, the colour of carmine, showing that somebody at all events was having a bad time of it.“By the powers, it bates Bannagher,” cried Mick, who was watching the fight alongside of me on the upper deck, springing up on to the hammock nettings in his excitement to see the finish, unthinking of the breach of discipline he was committing. “Go it, ye cripples. Sure, Tom, the little wun’ll win—what d’ye call him?”“He’s a thrasher,” I replied, jumping up, too, on the top of the nettings. “A sort of shark, I think. Father has one stuffed at home, stowed away somewhere, that looks like that chap. If so, he’s a fox-shark.”“A fox-shark, begorrah!” repeated Mick, with a grin. “Faith, Tom, he’s goin’ fur thet ould whale theer ez if he wor not ownly a fox, sure, but a pack of hounds as will, alannah!”“Hi, there, you boys,” roared out a voice at this juncture, which we had little difficulty in recognising as belonging to Lieutenant Robinson, who was again officer of the watch this afternoon, his turn of duty having once more come round. “Get off that netting at once and go below, both of you. Master-at-arms, take those boys’ names down and put them in the report, and bring them up on the deck after ‘divisions’ to-morrow!”The ‘Jaunty,’ who was standing below the break of the poop, looked up at the scowling lieutenant, saluting him.“Very good, sir,” said he, with another touch of his hat, in recognition of the authority of the speaker. “I will see to it, sir.”But, a ‘Deus ex machina,’ or ‘God from the bathing-machine,’ as our old captain of theSaint Vincentwould have said in his Latin lingo, just then intervened on our behalf.Mick Donovan and I were sneaking down the main hatch, like a pair of whipped dogs with their tails between their legs—though I must say we were more chagrined at losing the best part of the fight going on in the water, which was rapidly approaching a climax, than dismayed at having incurred the displeasure of the lieutenant—when, if you please, we heard somebody shout out something behind us, and the master-at-arms, who had followed in our wake, called out to us to stop.“Belay there, you boys,” he shouted down the hatchway. “Ye’re to return on deck!”In obedience to this order, we ascended the ladder-way again, retracing our steps at an even slower pace than we had gone down at; for we both expected, the same thought having flashed across our minds when the ‘Jaunty’ hailed us, that Lieutenant Robinson had, on more mature consideration, fancied he had let us off too lightly for the heinous offence we had committed, and had ordered us to be brought back to give us ‘four dozen’ apiece at least, there and then!The result, however, was very different to our sad anticipations; for when we reached the deck the old commodore was standing by the poop rail, close to the ladder on the port side leading down from thence into the waist of the ship.
On that, the noble fellow, who thus unselfishly sacrificed his life for mine, fell with a whiz through the air that seemed to send the wind up into my face, down to the deck below.
Cannoning against the rigging on the port side, he was caught up in the belly of the mizzen-top sail, which slightly stopped the impetus of his descent, but, the concussion broke his spine, and when I, pale, trembling, and almost as lifeless as he, coming down from aloft, I hardly know how, reached his side, the doctor, who was bending over him and applying stimulants, said he had only a few moments longer to live.
The chaplain, too, was there, having been hastily summoned from his duties of instructing the young middies in the wardroom; as also was the commodore, with a graver face on him than I had ever seen before.
I don’t know whether he heard my step, or the cry I ejaculated when the doctor spoke of his approaching end.
Whatever it was, something made my dying shipmate open his eyes just then, his glance wandering round the circle of those near.
“What is it, my poor lad?” asked the chaplain kindly, stooping down, so as to hear better any request he might make. “Is there anything you would like done or said for you?”
He was thinking, good man, no doubt, of offering up a prayer.
But the mind of Moses Reeks—to call him by his right name, and drop the somewhat opprobrious sobriquet by which I have hitherto styled the poor fellow, and by which, indeed, he was always known on board—was still bent on things terrestrial; though, possibly, his motive might have been as high and had as divine a source as anything the chaplain might have intended to say!
His eyes lighted on me and their wandering ceased.
“Coom here, lad,” he whispered very faintly, so very faintly that his lips seemed to give out no sound at all. “Coom here!”
I heard, though, and went to his side, listening earnestly, for I could not speak.
He did not notice this, however, making up, with his slowly ebbing senses, what he wished himself to say.
“To-am Bowlin’,” he faltered out in lisping accents with his failing breath, “ye’ve done Oi a toorn wanst, lad, an’ I wer an oongrateful cur to ’ee, thet Oi wer, ez Oi didn’t warnt fur to be a-beholden to yer; but you a’ me, To-am, be naow quits, lad!”
As he thus spoke, a smile irradiated his rough-hewn features, making them look positively beautiful; and, with the last word he uttered, his spirit fled, with a sigh that was stifled in its birth.
The commodore uncovered his head in the presence of Death—the superior officer of even one flying the broad pennant and the personal representative of her Majesty wherever the broad red cross of Saint George, borne on that oblong flag, may float.
At that moment the ship’s bugler forwards sounded the ‘assembly.’
“Peace to his spirit, poor boy,” said our chief solemnly. “He’s gone to his last muster!”
It was Two Bells in the first dog-watch before theRubyclosed with us sufficiently to speak with us; when she reported that she had parted with the other ships of the squadron even before she had lost sight of us at the commencement of the gale, not seeing anything of them since.
Her commander also informed the commodore that they had lost two men overboard while reefing topsails in a squall, the sea running so high that it was impossible to lower a boat to save them.
We, in our turn, told of poor ‘Ugly’s’ heroic end: and, as it was approaching sunset, his body was sewn up in his hammock, with a shot fastened to the feet, and committed to the deep.
All hands were present while the chaplain read the funeral service on the quarter-deck: and, as the grating on which the poor fellow’s remains rested, covered for the moment with the Union Jack, was canted through the port and its lifeless burden went below with a splash, to its last resting-place until the sea shall give up its dead, the waning sun dipped below the horizon.
We then squared yards and bore away straight for Madeira, with theRubykeeping company on our lee beam; the wind having sobered down now to a good ten-knot breeze, and the weather all that one could wish, getting warmer with every hour of south latitude that we made.
Everybody was jolly that evening as we bowled along before the spanking breeze, fresh sail being set every watch, until the corvette was presently clothed in canvas from truck to keelson, the commodore wishing to take every advantage of the fair wind we had; but, though all the rest, sailor-like, were laughing and joking on the mess-deck forwards, I could not so soon forget the poor chap who had gone, his noble self-sacrifice being ever in my mind.
It was strange that reserved, unforgiving, and yet not unforgetful temperament of his!
I saw now, when too late, that he had not been quite oblivious of my having saved him that time on board theSaint Vincentwhen he so nearly tumbled from aloft. He had not been ungrateful, as Mick and I thought him, evidently.
On the contrary, the obligation he believed himself to be under to me had so weighed upon him that he was too proud to speak until he had cleared it off, so, he apparently fancied, to be able to treat with me on level terms.
Mick Donovan had not been on deck when the tragic occurrence happened; but he was almost as much impressed as myself when I told him of our shipmate’s last words.
“Begorrah, Tom,” cried he, wiping his eye with the sleeve of his jumper, “Oi wudn’t ’a belaved it, sure, if ye hadn’t towld me, mabouchal, wid yer own potato trap! Faith, the poor chap samed quoite a t’other sort. Sure, Tom, me darlint, as he’s bin an’ gone an’ saved the noomber ov yer mess, be the powers, Oi’ll spake to Father O’Flannagan whin I git back to Porchmouth an’ ax him fur to say a mass, sure, fur the poor beggar, so that his sowl may rest in paice. May the saints protict him!”
Three days afterwards, without any further adventure, we anchored in Funchal Roads.
Here the squadron remained a week, the other ships having joined us when within a day’s sail of Madeira; and, as we were going to make such a comparatively long stay, the men were granted leave to go ashore, watch and watch in turn.
Just before we left, the commodore gave a grand picnic to all the officers at the Grande Curral, when I had the luck of accompanying the party that went from our ship, a piece of good fortune shared by Mick, my chum.
This Curral, a name which means, I’m told, in the Spanish language a ‘sheepfold,’ is an immense valley, completely surrounded by hills, that lies a few miles to the north-west of Funchal, the capital of the island.
The hills encircling the natural plateau of the Curral are literally perpendicular, being in no part less than a thousand feet high; while round a part of the cliffs there is a narrow road leading to the ‘garden houses’ of the rich folk having business premises in the town, and a number of plantations, which is cut out of the solid rock and is about ten or twelve feet high.
As the picnic party went along over this road, the view presented to our eyes on looking down below was that of an unfathomable abyss, filled up by a mass of clouds and vapours, all rolling about in constant motion, and tumbling the one on top of another.
Mick and I were each aboard a mule and enjoyed ourselves to rights, racing against one another all the way; though we took precious good care to keep in the rear of our officers, amongst whom was Lieutenant Robinson, whose liver must have been particularly out of sorts that morning, for he was in a grumpier and more fault-finding mood than usual.
He did catch sight of us once as we were turning a sharp point in the road round a projection of a cliff; but, through the fortunate circumstance of the mule which the lieutenant was riding happening to bolt at the moment, the joker had too much to do in taking care of his own valuable carcass to have much time to growl at us.
The lieutenant, though, did not forget the incident: for, on Mick chancing to trip over one of his legs as he sat on the grass while handing him a plate of salad, the pleasant gentleman called him as many names as some of the watermen at Point are in the habit of using when they are put out of temper by being cheated of a fare.
“Bedad, Tom,” whispered Mick to me, when he got out of range of the lieutenant’s grapeshot, and we were having a feed ourselves in a quiet corner, “Oi wush thet blissid ould baist he wor roidin’ hed run away wid him, sure, over the cliff an’ made an ind ov the spalpeen! Faith, it isn’t mesilf thet wud cry me oyes out, or wear mournin’ fur him!”
On leaving Madeira, which we did with much regret, the people being very hospitable and most good-naturedly disposed towards all sailors, especially to British bluejackets, we fetched a compass for Teneriffe, where we arrived some three or four days afterwards; the commodore occupying the additional time in exercising the ships under his command, and matching them one against another.
In sailing on a wind theActive, I’m glad to say, beat all the rest of the squadron; though, in running before the wind, the littleRubyweathered on us and theVolage, our sister ship, ran us pretty close.
When nearing Teneriffe and close in to the African coast, we saw a splendid tight in the sea, between a big black whale on the one side, and a ‘thrasher’ or fox-shark on the other, aided by a swordfish, with which latter he had just apparently struck up an alliance offensive and defensive for the time.
The thrasher, which has a back as elastic as an india-rubber ball, would jump clean out of the water and give the whale a whack in the ribs that must have taken all the elasticity out of him; and then, on the poor leviathan of the deep fluking his tail to dive so as to escape from his aerial antagonist, his chum the swordfish would tickle up the whale from below by sending a yard or two of his long saw-like snout into his tenderest part.
Presently, as we luffed up to see the end of the fun, the sea in the vicinity of the fray became tinged with blood, the colour of carmine, showing that somebody at all events was having a bad time of it.
“By the powers, it bates Bannagher,” cried Mick, who was watching the fight alongside of me on the upper deck, springing up on to the hammock nettings in his excitement to see the finish, unthinking of the breach of discipline he was committing. “Go it, ye cripples. Sure, Tom, the little wun’ll win—what d’ye call him?”
“He’s a thrasher,” I replied, jumping up, too, on the top of the nettings. “A sort of shark, I think. Father has one stuffed at home, stowed away somewhere, that looks like that chap. If so, he’s a fox-shark.”
“A fox-shark, begorrah!” repeated Mick, with a grin. “Faith, Tom, he’s goin’ fur thet ould whale theer ez if he wor not ownly a fox, sure, but a pack of hounds as will, alannah!”
“Hi, there, you boys,” roared out a voice at this juncture, which we had little difficulty in recognising as belonging to Lieutenant Robinson, who was again officer of the watch this afternoon, his turn of duty having once more come round. “Get off that netting at once and go below, both of you. Master-at-arms, take those boys’ names down and put them in the report, and bring them up on the deck after ‘divisions’ to-morrow!”
The ‘Jaunty,’ who was standing below the break of the poop, looked up at the scowling lieutenant, saluting him.
“Very good, sir,” said he, with another touch of his hat, in recognition of the authority of the speaker. “I will see to it, sir.”
But, a ‘Deus ex machina,’ or ‘God from the bathing-machine,’ as our old captain of theSaint Vincentwould have said in his Latin lingo, just then intervened on our behalf.
Mick Donovan and I were sneaking down the main hatch, like a pair of whipped dogs with their tails between their legs—though I must say we were more chagrined at losing the best part of the fight going on in the water, which was rapidly approaching a climax, than dismayed at having incurred the displeasure of the lieutenant—when, if you please, we heard somebody shout out something behind us, and the master-at-arms, who had followed in our wake, called out to us to stop.
“Belay there, you boys,” he shouted down the hatchway. “Ye’re to return on deck!”
In obedience to this order, we ascended the ladder-way again, retracing our steps at an even slower pace than we had gone down at; for we both expected, the same thought having flashed across our minds when the ‘Jaunty’ hailed us, that Lieutenant Robinson had, on more mature consideration, fancied he had let us off too lightly for the heinous offence we had committed, and had ordered us to be brought back to give us ‘four dozen’ apiece at least, there and then!
The result, however, was very different to our sad anticipations; for when we reached the deck the old commodore was standing by the poop rail, close to the ladder on the port side leading down from thence into the waist of the ship.
Chapter Seventeen.A Study in Black and White.“Lieutenant Robinson,” said he to our persecutor, who looked ill at ease as he stood before him, the sextant which he had snatched up in a hurry to calculate the angle of distance of the whale and its antagonists now hanging listlessly in his hand, “be good enough, sir, to tell those boys that they may remain on the upper deck and look over the side, but that they must not stand on the hammock nettings. I like discipline to be preserved on board the ship I may have the honour to command, but I never allow any unnecessary severity being shown to the men or boys of the ship’s company!”Much against his will, the lieutenant, thus rebuked on the quarter-deck in the presence not only of his own brother-officers, but in that of all of us on the deck below as well, had now to ‘eat humble pie’ and give us the commodore’s message; and, though Mick and I could not repress a grin on his bowing to us with mock politeness, we could see from the look in his underhung eyes that he intended to pay us out bye-and-bye when he had the chance for having been obliged to beg our pardon, as he had to do almost then.Unhappily, though, the permission for us to look over the side again came too late; for the thrasher and the swordfish had been too much for the poor whale, whose huge lifeless body was now floating away to leeward, half a cable’s length astern of the ship, surrounded by an eddy of bloody water, while its assailants had both disappeared.“Begorrah,” cried Mick, much disgusted at this, “sure, we’re jist in toime to be too late!”In our passage from Madeira to the Canary Islands we steered south by west, in order to avoid the Salvages.These are a number of rocky islets, named the ‘Great Piton,’ the ‘Little Piton,’ and ‘Ilha Grande,’ lying in latitude 30 degrees 8 minutes north, and longitude 15 degrees 55 minutes west. The largest island is covered with bushes, amongst which thousands of sea-fowl make their nests; and, from the fact of its not being seen until a ship be close in to it, when these very birds tell of its propinquity, by darkening the air almost as they rise, it is a great danger to mariners.A little farther to the eastward is Lanzarote, which is very mountainous, possessing a volcano of its own, where a violent eruption took place not very long ago, when a stream of lava from two hundred to three hundred yards broad spread out into the sea like a river, the floating pumice-stone being picked up by passing vessels miles away.For this piece of information I am indebted to the navigating officer, who happened to be telling one of the young midshipmen all about the place as I was attending to a job the boatswain had set me to aft.I also heard him tell the same young gentleman a queer yarn about a buried treasure which is supposed to be concealed near a little cove on the southern extremity of the island, called ‘Janubio.’ The story goes that, in the beginning of the century—I think the navigator said it was in the year 1804, but I am not quite certain—the crew of a South American Spanish treasure ship, bound to Cadiz from Lima with produce and which had besides over two millions of dollars in chests aboard, mutinied, and murdered their captain and officers; the rascals then making off in the long boat with this treasure towards an island, which, from the description given, must have been either Lanzarote or one of the Salvages.On this island, whichever it was, the dollars were carried ashore and buried above high-water mark in a snug little bay to the south; the mutineers, according to the prevailing superstition of such gentry, burying the body of their murdered captain on top of the treasure, so that his ghost might prevent any unprivileged intruders from meddling with their cache.The navigator said, just as I was going down below after finishing my job, that this tale was told to an English sailor by one of the surviving mutineers; and he added that the Admiralty were so much impressed by its appearance of truth that Admiral Hercules Robinson, the grandfather, I believe, of our present High Commissioner at the Cape of Good Hope, was actually sent out to make a search for the treasure when in command of HMSPrometheus, in 1813.We coaled at Teneriffe, putting into the harbour of Santa Cruz for this purpose; and Mick and I were much struck by the fact of the black ladies who carried the baskets of coal on their heads along the jetty from the shore to the ship, doing the job, too, in first-rate style and as good as any gang of wharfingers at home, all of them wearing the most expansive crinolines, which, with their thin dresses and black stockings, of nature’s own provision, had a very comical effect!“Faith!” exclaimed Mick, after watching these dusky belles with much interest for some time, the lot of them chattering and laughing away, showing their teeth, which a dentist would have given something to possess for his showcase, “Oi’d loike Father O’Flannagan jist for to say thim quare craychurs, Tom, me hearty, if ownly to say him toorn oop the whoites ov his oyes. Bedad, he’d be afther sprinklin’ ’em wid howly wather an’ exorcisin’ on ’em, ez if he’d sayn the divvle, sure!”Jones the signalman, who was standing near when Mick said this, laughed.“Your old priest would have his work cut out for him in more ways than that,” said he, with a very significant wink to one of the other hands, “if he’d only go to Grand Canary instead of Teneriffe!”The name he mentioned at once made Mick cock his ear.“Grand Canary,” repeated my chum after the signalman, with a puzzled look on his face. “Ain’t thet the place, Tom, whare thim yaller burds yer sisther Jenny has, sure, at home comes from? She s’id they wor canaries, Oi’d take me davy!”“Of course, they are, Mick,” said I, in reply to this. “Why, mother must have a hundred of them in the shop at this very minute, besides those little ones she brought up herself which Jenny used to act as nurse to!”“Och, sure, Oi rimimber thim will enuff,” answered Mick, with a melancholy look on his face, as if his mind had turned back from Santa Cruz to Bonfire Corner all of a sudden and to our little house there. “An’ thet little chap ov a canary thet had a crist on the top ov his hid, loike a crown, sure, thet yer sisther Jenny used fur to make so much ov—the little darlint!”Whether this term of endearment of his was meant by Mick to apply to Jenny or the bird, I can’t say; but I could see clearly enough in what direction his thoughts were concentrated.“Begorrah, Tom,” he said after a pause, during which his eyes were apparently fixed on the celebrated ‘Peak’ for which Teneriffe is better known in the present day than on account of its canaries; for it is over four hundred years since these little songsters were first discovered by the Spaniards and imported into Europe, so that any novelty that might have been attached to them has long since disappeared, “Oi’ll git some ov the purty craychurs fur yer sisther if we’re ’lowed ashore afore we lave.”“I don’t think you will be able to do that,” said the signalman, who had remained alongside of us looking at the darkeys passing to and fro on the jetty below, from which a gangway of planks led through one of the midship ports to the coal-bunkers. “We’re not likely to stop here after we’ve coaled ship.”Mr Jones was mistaken, however; for we remained at Santa Cruz some four-and-twenty hours longer, so that Mick and I had the opportunity of landing with the wardroom steward the next morning, when he went to buy some fresh milk and other things for the officers’ mess.We then, during a short walk we had in the vicinity of the town, saw numbers of canaries flitting about amid the trees, just like you see sparrows at home; and it seemed very strange, to me especially, accustomed as I was to mother’s bird-shop and its live stock, that the little things should be uncaged and roaming about there free, at their own will and pleasure!The birds, though, did not have anything like the bright plumage of those bred in captivity at home; and I would have backed, so far as their looks went, a splendid little chap Jenny had called ‘Tubby,’ against the lot of them; while ‘Corry,’ another canary of a more reflective character and retiring disposition than the first, could have afforded a dust of the golden hue of his feathers to make his Teneriffean cousins more presentable without being much less yellow himself—their hue, so far as Mick and I noticed, being more of a dingy white than chrome.As to bringing any of them to England, however, that we found an impossibility; for there were so many young midshipmen and other youngsters aboard the various ships of the squadron, that if all of them had been free to take birds into their cabins, the ships would have been so many floating aviaries!So, to prevent this, the commodore had issued strict orders that no pets of any description were to be taken on board by any one.“I s’pose, though, my corns don’t count,” observed the wardroom steward, as we were stepping into the boat on our return to the ship and one of his assistants trod on his foot. “I’ve a favourite one on my starboard toe, Smith, as might be called a pet o’ mine; and, by jingo, you lubber, you just then made marmalade of it. You wait till we get aboard and I’ll put you on short rations! See if I don’t!”Later on in the afternoon the squadron sailed for Barbados, starting off out of Santa Cruz harbour before a spanking ten-knot breeze in line of single column ahead, the oldActiveleading and showing her heels to our less speedy consorts.This was early in the month of December, the weather being beautiful and balmy, as it continued all the time we were bowling across the Atlantic on our way to our goal, the West Indies; and, as we enjoyed the warmth of the southern latitudes through which our good ship ploughed her way, Mick and I could not help contrasting our surroundings with those of the poor folk at home shivering in all the dreariness of an English mid-winter, when, if it isn’t freezing or snowing or hailing, it is bound to be raining—a cold, raw, nasty sort of rain—and damp and foggy and dirty, at all events, such being the pleasurable conditions of our delightful climate usually at that time of year!With us, now, things were very different!A blue sky above, unflecked by a single cloud, was reflected in a sea that was yet more blue, its hue turning to azure as we approached farther west in the tropics; until, on reaching the confines of the Caribbean Sea, the colour of the water verged into that of the purest ultramarine.Day after day the scene was ever the same—blue sky above, blue sea below; while a bright sun shone down, ever lighting up both sky and sea with a sort of opal glow and lending warmth to the buoyant, exhilarating, champagne air.Under these circumstances, washing decks every morning used to be a positive pleasure to everybody on board, as we careered about in our bare feet with our trousers rolled up above the knee, when the cold water, instead of being ‘moighty onpleasint,’ as Mick would have said, was gratifying in the extreme.Such of the officers, too, who had not been on duty keeping the middle watch, used to turn out in their oldest pyjamas, accompanied by most of the midshipmen, when we were at this task and have a regular sluice down on the forecastle; some of them catching hold of the hose and playing it on each other in turn, skylarking and making no end of fun.Our drills, of course, went on all the time in the usual clockwork fashion observed on board ship, ‘quarters’ and ‘divisions’ and all the rest; all of the men and boys belonging to the ship’s company being polished up quite as smartly as the brasswork and drilled to the highest state of efficiency.It was not all work, though, on board theActive; for our commodore, taut disciplinarian as he was and as anxious to lick us all into shape as he was to make the ships of his squadron manoeuvre handily, exercising them at all hours both of day and night to this end, did not forget the old adage that a bow should not always be bent.No, he always allowed us plenty of time for relaxation and enjoyment, besides permitting us to fish overboard, which some commanders would not have allowed.This was rare sport, I can tell you, the bonetta, a fish common to the tropics and eating uncommonly well when fried, biting freely at a piece of white bunting or any other attractive object attached to a hook, as did the many-hued dolphin, and many a hearty supper did we have on the lower deck through the kindly aid of these beneficent denizens of the deep.One of the foretopmen who hailed from Newfoundland was an expert with the harpoon, spearing with that weapon as many dolphins as he liked; these beggars being in the habit of plying to and fro under the corvette’s cutwater as she sailed onward, delighting apparently in showing us the dexterity with which they could wheel about and leap athwart the ship’s course as they pleased, keeping up with her or going ahead according to their bent.We saw lots of flying-fish also; and they, when we had the chance of catching the few that came aboard, were even better fare for hungry sailor-boys of an evening than the dolphins and bonetta.These latter used to hunt the poor flying-fish like a pack of hounds after some prey on land, the fish leaping out of the sea and making short flights by the aid of the membraneous fins they have, which they extended like wings, flying for some twenty yards or so till exhaustion compelled their return to their native element—a characteristic feature that has gained the ‘flying-fish’ its name.Unfortunately for the poor beggars, however, they have an enemy aloft as well as one below; and, when they leave the water to escape the bonetta, they fall into the clutches of the sea-hawks that hover over the surface on the watch for them; and so, thus situated ‘between two stools,’ as it were, ‘their lot,’ like that of the ‘Bobby’ in the song, being ‘not a happy one!’Amid such varied changes of life and scene, our three weeks’ voyage from Teneriffe to Barbados passed quickly and pleasantly enough, all hands being surprised one fine morning when we cast anchor in Carlisle Bay, the harbour of ‘Little England,’ as the Barbadians proudly style their happy island, which is of the same size and shape nearly as the Isle of Wight and is the gem of the Antilles!Here we had a rare time of it for a week, it being Christmastide, and the inhabitants, who are English to the backbone, black, mongrel, and copper-coloured, as well as white, keeping up that festival with like enthusiasm to what we do at home.As at Madeira, the ship’s company were allowed leave to go on shore, watch and watch in turn: so, belonging as we both did to the starboard division, Mick and I were amongst those who had the first go-off.I recollect, as if it were but yesterday, our landing alongside the jetty on the carenage, right in front of one of Da Costa’s big warehouses, whose green jalousies relieved the effect of the staring white building under the hot West Indian sun; the glare of which, cast back by the rippling translucent water that laved the stone jetty, through which one could see the little fishes gliding about as clearly as in the Brighton Aquarium, almost blinded us with its intensity.There were a lot of negro women hanging round the wharf in front of Da Costa’s place, all of whom had big baskets, either balanced on their heads or put down on the ground by their side, which were filled with huge melons and pine-apples and bananas, besides many other tropical fruits the names of which are unknown to me.Of course, we made for these at once; and there was a lot of chaffering and bargaining between our fellows and the negresses, who were all laughing and showing their white teeth, trying their best to wheedle the ‘man-o’-war buckras’ to buy their luscious wares at double the price, probably, such would fetch in open market from regular customers in Bridgetown.Presently, we all got skylarking and pitching the fruit about; when a big mulatto, who was along with one of the fruit-sellers—her husband most likely and doing nothing just as likely, like most of his colour, for the household of which he was the head, save to collect the money his better half in every respect earned—seemed very much aggrieved at some damage Mick did to a bunch of ripe bananas, claiming a ‘bit’ or fourpence as compensation.Mick, who, you must know, had grown a strapping fellow by now, took the tawny-complexioned gentleman’s demand very good-humouredly.“All roight, ould Patchwork,” he called out, with a laugh. “Thare’s a shellin’ fur ye, which is more, bedad, than yer howl sthock-in-thrade is worth! Changee fur changee, black dog fur whoite moonkey, sure, as my ould fayther used fur to say!”Whatever mollifying effect the sight of the silver coin might have produced on the mulatto’s mind was entirely swamped by Mick’s unfortunate quotation from his paternal archives.“Say, you sailor buckra, who dat you call one black dog, hi!” said he, coming up to my chum in a threatening manner, brandishing his arms and working his head about like a teetotum in a fit. “I’se no niggah slabe, you white trash! I’se free ’Badian born, an’ ’low no man make joke ob me!”Mick roused up in a minute.“Faith, ye oogly yaller-faced raskil,” he cried, putting up his fists in the scientific way we had learnt from long practice on board with the gloves under our gymnasium instructor, “Oi’ll knock ye into the middle of nixt Soonday wake, ef ye don’t kape a civil toongue in yer hid an’ put yer owld dhrumsticks behint ye!”Instead of acting on Mick’s advice, however, the mulatto, screaming with rage, and his whole face distorted with passion, made a wild rush at him, trying to butt him in the stomach.
“Lieutenant Robinson,” said he to our persecutor, who looked ill at ease as he stood before him, the sextant which he had snatched up in a hurry to calculate the angle of distance of the whale and its antagonists now hanging listlessly in his hand, “be good enough, sir, to tell those boys that they may remain on the upper deck and look over the side, but that they must not stand on the hammock nettings. I like discipline to be preserved on board the ship I may have the honour to command, but I never allow any unnecessary severity being shown to the men or boys of the ship’s company!”
Much against his will, the lieutenant, thus rebuked on the quarter-deck in the presence not only of his own brother-officers, but in that of all of us on the deck below as well, had now to ‘eat humble pie’ and give us the commodore’s message; and, though Mick and I could not repress a grin on his bowing to us with mock politeness, we could see from the look in his underhung eyes that he intended to pay us out bye-and-bye when he had the chance for having been obliged to beg our pardon, as he had to do almost then.
Unhappily, though, the permission for us to look over the side again came too late; for the thrasher and the swordfish had been too much for the poor whale, whose huge lifeless body was now floating away to leeward, half a cable’s length astern of the ship, surrounded by an eddy of bloody water, while its assailants had both disappeared.
“Begorrah,” cried Mick, much disgusted at this, “sure, we’re jist in toime to be too late!”
In our passage from Madeira to the Canary Islands we steered south by west, in order to avoid the Salvages.
These are a number of rocky islets, named the ‘Great Piton,’ the ‘Little Piton,’ and ‘Ilha Grande,’ lying in latitude 30 degrees 8 minutes north, and longitude 15 degrees 55 minutes west. The largest island is covered with bushes, amongst which thousands of sea-fowl make their nests; and, from the fact of its not being seen until a ship be close in to it, when these very birds tell of its propinquity, by darkening the air almost as they rise, it is a great danger to mariners.
A little farther to the eastward is Lanzarote, which is very mountainous, possessing a volcano of its own, where a violent eruption took place not very long ago, when a stream of lava from two hundred to three hundred yards broad spread out into the sea like a river, the floating pumice-stone being picked up by passing vessels miles away.
For this piece of information I am indebted to the navigating officer, who happened to be telling one of the young midshipmen all about the place as I was attending to a job the boatswain had set me to aft.
I also heard him tell the same young gentleman a queer yarn about a buried treasure which is supposed to be concealed near a little cove on the southern extremity of the island, called ‘Janubio.’ The story goes that, in the beginning of the century—I think the navigator said it was in the year 1804, but I am not quite certain—the crew of a South American Spanish treasure ship, bound to Cadiz from Lima with produce and which had besides over two millions of dollars in chests aboard, mutinied, and murdered their captain and officers; the rascals then making off in the long boat with this treasure towards an island, which, from the description given, must have been either Lanzarote or one of the Salvages.
On this island, whichever it was, the dollars were carried ashore and buried above high-water mark in a snug little bay to the south; the mutineers, according to the prevailing superstition of such gentry, burying the body of their murdered captain on top of the treasure, so that his ghost might prevent any unprivileged intruders from meddling with their cache.
The navigator said, just as I was going down below after finishing my job, that this tale was told to an English sailor by one of the surviving mutineers; and he added that the Admiralty were so much impressed by its appearance of truth that Admiral Hercules Robinson, the grandfather, I believe, of our present High Commissioner at the Cape of Good Hope, was actually sent out to make a search for the treasure when in command of HMSPrometheus, in 1813.
We coaled at Teneriffe, putting into the harbour of Santa Cruz for this purpose; and Mick and I were much struck by the fact of the black ladies who carried the baskets of coal on their heads along the jetty from the shore to the ship, doing the job, too, in first-rate style and as good as any gang of wharfingers at home, all of them wearing the most expansive crinolines, which, with their thin dresses and black stockings, of nature’s own provision, had a very comical effect!
“Faith!” exclaimed Mick, after watching these dusky belles with much interest for some time, the lot of them chattering and laughing away, showing their teeth, which a dentist would have given something to possess for his showcase, “Oi’d loike Father O’Flannagan jist for to say thim quare craychurs, Tom, me hearty, if ownly to say him toorn oop the whoites ov his oyes. Bedad, he’d be afther sprinklin’ ’em wid howly wather an’ exorcisin’ on ’em, ez if he’d sayn the divvle, sure!”
Jones the signalman, who was standing near when Mick said this, laughed.
“Your old priest would have his work cut out for him in more ways than that,” said he, with a very significant wink to one of the other hands, “if he’d only go to Grand Canary instead of Teneriffe!”
The name he mentioned at once made Mick cock his ear.
“Grand Canary,” repeated my chum after the signalman, with a puzzled look on his face. “Ain’t thet the place, Tom, whare thim yaller burds yer sisther Jenny has, sure, at home comes from? She s’id they wor canaries, Oi’d take me davy!”
“Of course, they are, Mick,” said I, in reply to this. “Why, mother must have a hundred of them in the shop at this very minute, besides those little ones she brought up herself which Jenny used to act as nurse to!”
“Och, sure, Oi rimimber thim will enuff,” answered Mick, with a melancholy look on his face, as if his mind had turned back from Santa Cruz to Bonfire Corner all of a sudden and to our little house there. “An’ thet little chap ov a canary thet had a crist on the top ov his hid, loike a crown, sure, thet yer sisther Jenny used fur to make so much ov—the little darlint!”
Whether this term of endearment of his was meant by Mick to apply to Jenny or the bird, I can’t say; but I could see clearly enough in what direction his thoughts were concentrated.
“Begorrah, Tom,” he said after a pause, during which his eyes were apparently fixed on the celebrated ‘Peak’ for which Teneriffe is better known in the present day than on account of its canaries; for it is over four hundred years since these little songsters were first discovered by the Spaniards and imported into Europe, so that any novelty that might have been attached to them has long since disappeared, “Oi’ll git some ov the purty craychurs fur yer sisther if we’re ’lowed ashore afore we lave.”
“I don’t think you will be able to do that,” said the signalman, who had remained alongside of us looking at the darkeys passing to and fro on the jetty below, from which a gangway of planks led through one of the midship ports to the coal-bunkers. “We’re not likely to stop here after we’ve coaled ship.”
Mr Jones was mistaken, however; for we remained at Santa Cruz some four-and-twenty hours longer, so that Mick and I had the opportunity of landing with the wardroom steward the next morning, when he went to buy some fresh milk and other things for the officers’ mess.
We then, during a short walk we had in the vicinity of the town, saw numbers of canaries flitting about amid the trees, just like you see sparrows at home; and it seemed very strange, to me especially, accustomed as I was to mother’s bird-shop and its live stock, that the little things should be uncaged and roaming about there free, at their own will and pleasure!
The birds, though, did not have anything like the bright plumage of those bred in captivity at home; and I would have backed, so far as their looks went, a splendid little chap Jenny had called ‘Tubby,’ against the lot of them; while ‘Corry,’ another canary of a more reflective character and retiring disposition than the first, could have afforded a dust of the golden hue of his feathers to make his Teneriffean cousins more presentable without being much less yellow himself—their hue, so far as Mick and I noticed, being more of a dingy white than chrome.
As to bringing any of them to England, however, that we found an impossibility; for there were so many young midshipmen and other youngsters aboard the various ships of the squadron, that if all of them had been free to take birds into their cabins, the ships would have been so many floating aviaries!
So, to prevent this, the commodore had issued strict orders that no pets of any description were to be taken on board by any one.
“I s’pose, though, my corns don’t count,” observed the wardroom steward, as we were stepping into the boat on our return to the ship and one of his assistants trod on his foot. “I’ve a favourite one on my starboard toe, Smith, as might be called a pet o’ mine; and, by jingo, you lubber, you just then made marmalade of it. You wait till we get aboard and I’ll put you on short rations! See if I don’t!”
Later on in the afternoon the squadron sailed for Barbados, starting off out of Santa Cruz harbour before a spanking ten-knot breeze in line of single column ahead, the oldActiveleading and showing her heels to our less speedy consorts.
This was early in the month of December, the weather being beautiful and balmy, as it continued all the time we were bowling across the Atlantic on our way to our goal, the West Indies; and, as we enjoyed the warmth of the southern latitudes through which our good ship ploughed her way, Mick and I could not help contrasting our surroundings with those of the poor folk at home shivering in all the dreariness of an English mid-winter, when, if it isn’t freezing or snowing or hailing, it is bound to be raining—a cold, raw, nasty sort of rain—and damp and foggy and dirty, at all events, such being the pleasurable conditions of our delightful climate usually at that time of year!
With us, now, things were very different!
A blue sky above, unflecked by a single cloud, was reflected in a sea that was yet more blue, its hue turning to azure as we approached farther west in the tropics; until, on reaching the confines of the Caribbean Sea, the colour of the water verged into that of the purest ultramarine.
Day after day the scene was ever the same—blue sky above, blue sea below; while a bright sun shone down, ever lighting up both sky and sea with a sort of opal glow and lending warmth to the buoyant, exhilarating, champagne air.
Under these circumstances, washing decks every morning used to be a positive pleasure to everybody on board, as we careered about in our bare feet with our trousers rolled up above the knee, when the cold water, instead of being ‘moighty onpleasint,’ as Mick would have said, was gratifying in the extreme.
Such of the officers, too, who had not been on duty keeping the middle watch, used to turn out in their oldest pyjamas, accompanied by most of the midshipmen, when we were at this task and have a regular sluice down on the forecastle; some of them catching hold of the hose and playing it on each other in turn, skylarking and making no end of fun.
Our drills, of course, went on all the time in the usual clockwork fashion observed on board ship, ‘quarters’ and ‘divisions’ and all the rest; all of the men and boys belonging to the ship’s company being polished up quite as smartly as the brasswork and drilled to the highest state of efficiency.
It was not all work, though, on board theActive; for our commodore, taut disciplinarian as he was and as anxious to lick us all into shape as he was to make the ships of his squadron manoeuvre handily, exercising them at all hours both of day and night to this end, did not forget the old adage that a bow should not always be bent.
No, he always allowed us plenty of time for relaxation and enjoyment, besides permitting us to fish overboard, which some commanders would not have allowed.
This was rare sport, I can tell you, the bonetta, a fish common to the tropics and eating uncommonly well when fried, biting freely at a piece of white bunting or any other attractive object attached to a hook, as did the many-hued dolphin, and many a hearty supper did we have on the lower deck through the kindly aid of these beneficent denizens of the deep.
One of the foretopmen who hailed from Newfoundland was an expert with the harpoon, spearing with that weapon as many dolphins as he liked; these beggars being in the habit of plying to and fro under the corvette’s cutwater as she sailed onward, delighting apparently in showing us the dexterity with which they could wheel about and leap athwart the ship’s course as they pleased, keeping up with her or going ahead according to their bent.
We saw lots of flying-fish also; and they, when we had the chance of catching the few that came aboard, were even better fare for hungry sailor-boys of an evening than the dolphins and bonetta.
These latter used to hunt the poor flying-fish like a pack of hounds after some prey on land, the fish leaping out of the sea and making short flights by the aid of the membraneous fins they have, which they extended like wings, flying for some twenty yards or so till exhaustion compelled their return to their native element—a characteristic feature that has gained the ‘flying-fish’ its name.
Unfortunately for the poor beggars, however, they have an enemy aloft as well as one below; and, when they leave the water to escape the bonetta, they fall into the clutches of the sea-hawks that hover over the surface on the watch for them; and so, thus situated ‘between two stools,’ as it were, ‘their lot,’ like that of the ‘Bobby’ in the song, being ‘not a happy one!’
Amid such varied changes of life and scene, our three weeks’ voyage from Teneriffe to Barbados passed quickly and pleasantly enough, all hands being surprised one fine morning when we cast anchor in Carlisle Bay, the harbour of ‘Little England,’ as the Barbadians proudly style their happy island, which is of the same size and shape nearly as the Isle of Wight and is the gem of the Antilles!
Here we had a rare time of it for a week, it being Christmastide, and the inhabitants, who are English to the backbone, black, mongrel, and copper-coloured, as well as white, keeping up that festival with like enthusiasm to what we do at home.
As at Madeira, the ship’s company were allowed leave to go on shore, watch and watch in turn: so, belonging as we both did to the starboard division, Mick and I were amongst those who had the first go-off.
I recollect, as if it were but yesterday, our landing alongside the jetty on the carenage, right in front of one of Da Costa’s big warehouses, whose green jalousies relieved the effect of the staring white building under the hot West Indian sun; the glare of which, cast back by the rippling translucent water that laved the stone jetty, through which one could see the little fishes gliding about as clearly as in the Brighton Aquarium, almost blinded us with its intensity.
There were a lot of negro women hanging round the wharf in front of Da Costa’s place, all of whom had big baskets, either balanced on their heads or put down on the ground by their side, which were filled with huge melons and pine-apples and bananas, besides many other tropical fruits the names of which are unknown to me.
Of course, we made for these at once; and there was a lot of chaffering and bargaining between our fellows and the negresses, who were all laughing and showing their white teeth, trying their best to wheedle the ‘man-o’-war buckras’ to buy their luscious wares at double the price, probably, such would fetch in open market from regular customers in Bridgetown.
Presently, we all got skylarking and pitching the fruit about; when a big mulatto, who was along with one of the fruit-sellers—her husband most likely and doing nothing just as likely, like most of his colour, for the household of which he was the head, save to collect the money his better half in every respect earned—seemed very much aggrieved at some damage Mick did to a bunch of ripe bananas, claiming a ‘bit’ or fourpence as compensation.
Mick, who, you must know, had grown a strapping fellow by now, took the tawny-complexioned gentleman’s demand very good-humouredly.
“All roight, ould Patchwork,” he called out, with a laugh. “Thare’s a shellin’ fur ye, which is more, bedad, than yer howl sthock-in-thrade is worth! Changee fur changee, black dog fur whoite moonkey, sure, as my ould fayther used fur to say!”
Whatever mollifying effect the sight of the silver coin might have produced on the mulatto’s mind was entirely swamped by Mick’s unfortunate quotation from his paternal archives.
“Say, you sailor buckra, who dat you call one black dog, hi!” said he, coming up to my chum in a threatening manner, brandishing his arms and working his head about like a teetotum in a fit. “I’se no niggah slabe, you white trash! I’se free ’Badian born, an’ ’low no man make joke ob me!”
Mick roused up in a minute.
“Faith, ye oogly yaller-faced raskil,” he cried, putting up his fists in the scientific way we had learnt from long practice on board with the gloves under our gymnasium instructor, “Oi’ll knock ye into the middle of nixt Soonday wake, ef ye don’t kape a civil toongue in yer hid an’ put yer owld dhrumsticks behint ye!”
Instead of acting on Mick’s advice, however, the mulatto, screaming with rage, and his whole face distorted with passion, made a wild rush at him, trying to butt him in the stomach.