Chapter C: Arthur Pearson, Ltd (2)

From that time forward I was never fortunate enough to have a cat for my very own for a long time. Nearly every ship I was in had a cat, or even two, but they were common property, and their attentions were severely impartial. Then it came to pass that I joined a very large and splendid ship in Adelaide as second mate. Going on board for the first time, a tiny black kitten followed me persistently along the wharf. It had evidently strayed a long way and would not be put off, although I made several attempts to escape from it, feeling that perhaps I might be taking it away from a better home than I could possibly give it. It succeeded in following me on board, and when I took possession of the handsome cabin provided for me in the after end of the after deckhouse facing the saloon, it installed itself therein, purring complete approval of its surroundings. Now, in spite of the splendour of the ship and the natural pride I felt in being an officer on board of her, it must be confessed that I was exceedingly lonely. The chief officer was an elderly man of about fifty-five who had long commanded ships, and he considered it beneath his dignity to associate with such a mere lad as he considered me. Besides, he lived in the grand cabin. I could not forgather with the saloon passengers, who rarely came on the main-deck at all where I lived, and I was forbidden to go forward and visit those in the second saloon. Therefore during my watch below I was doomed to solitary state, cut off from the companionship of my kind with the sole exception of the urbane and gentlemanly chief steward, who did occasionally (about once a week) spend a fraction of his scanty leisure in conversation with me. Thus it came about that the company of “Pasht,” as I called my little cat, was a perfect godsend. He slept on my pillow when I was in my bunk, when I sat at my table writing or reading he sat close to my hand. And if I wrote long, paying no attention to him, he would reach out a velvety paw and touch the handle of my pen, ever so gently, looking up at my face immediately to see if my attention had been diverted. Often I took no notice but kept on with my work, quietly putting back the intruding paw when it became too troublesome. At last, as if unable to endure my neglect any longer, he would get up and walk on to the paper, sitting down in the centre of the sheet with a calm assurance that now I must notice him that was very funny. Then we would sit looking into the depths of each other’s eyes as if trying mutual mesmerism. It generally ended by his climbing up on to my shoulder and settling into the hollow of my neck, purring softly in my ear, while I wrote or read on until I was quite stiff with the constrained position I kept for fear of disturbing him. Whenever I went on deck at night to keep my watch he invariably came with me, keeping me company throughout my four hours’ vigil on the poop. Always accustomed to going barefoot, from which I was precluded during the day owing to my position, I invariably enjoyed the absence of any covering for my feet in the night watches. My little companion evidently thought my bare feet were specially put on for his amusement, for after a few sedate turns fore and aft by my side, he would hide behind the skylights and leap out upon them as I passed, darting off instantly in high glee at the feat he had performed. Occasionally I would turn the tables on him by going a few feet up the rigging, when he would sit and cry, baby-like, until I returned and comforted him. I believe he knew every stroke of the bell as well as I did. One of the apprentices always struck the small bell at the break of the poop every half-hour, being answered by the look-out man on the big bell forward. “Pasht” never took the slightest notice of any of the strokes until the four pairs announced the close of the watch. Then I always missed him suddenly. But when, after mustering the mate’s watch and handing over my charge to my superior, I went to my berth, a little black head invariably peeped over the edge of my bunk, as if saying, “Come along; I’m so sleepy!” So our pleasant companionship went on until one day, when about the Line in the Atlantic, I found my pretty pet lying on the grating in my berth. He had been seized with a fit, and under its influence had rushed into the fo’c’s’le, where some unspeakable wretch had shamefully maltreated him under the plea that he was mad! I could not bear to see him suffer--I cannot say what had been done to him--so I got an old marline-spike, looped the lanyard about his neck, and dropped him overboard. And an old lady among the passengers berated me the next day for my “heartless brutality”!

As a bereaved parent often dreads the thought of having another little one to lose, so, although many opportunities presented themselves, I refused to own another cat, until I became an unconsenting foster-parent again to a whole family. I joined a brig in the St. Katharine Docks as mate, finding when I took up my berth that there was both a cat and a dog on board, inmates of the cabin. They occupied different quarters during the night, but it was a never-waning pleasure to me to see them meet in the morning. The dog, a large brown retriever, would stand perfectly still, except for his heavy tail, which swayed sedately from side to side, while “Jane” would walk round and round him, arching her back and rubbing her sides against him, purring all the time a gentle note of welcome. Presently their noses would meet, as if in a kiss, and he would bestow a slavering lick or two upon her white fur. This always ended the greeting, sending “Jane” off primly to commence her morning toilet. But alas! a blighting shadow fell upon this loving intercourse. One of the dock cats, a creature of truculent appearance, her fur more like the nap of a door-mat than anything else, blind of one eye, minus half her tail, with a hare-lip (acquired, not hereditary), and her ears vandyked in curious patterns, stalked on board one afternoon, and took up her abode in the cabin without any preliminaries whatever. Both the original tenants were much disturbed at this graceless intrusion, but neither of them felt disposed to tackle the formidable task of turning her out. So “Jane” departed to the galley, and “Jack,” with many a loud and long sniff at the door of the berth wherein the visitor lay, oscillated disconsolately between the galley and the cabin, his duty and his inclination. The new-comer gave no trouble, always going ashore for everything she required, and only once, the morning her family arrived, deigning to accept a saucer of milk from me. As soon as she dared she carried the new-comers ashore one by one, being much vexed when I followed and brought them back again. However, her patience was greater than mine, for she succeeded in getting them all away except one which I hid away and she apparently forgot. Then we saw her no more; she returned to her duty of rat-catching in the warehouses, and never came near us again. Meanwhile “Jane” would scarcely leave my side during the day, asking as plainly as a cat could, why, oh why, didn’t I turn that shameless hussy out? Couldn’t I see how things were? or was I like the rest of the men? Her importunity was so great that I was heartily glad when the old “docker” was gone, and I lost no time in reinstalling “Jane” in her rightful realm. It was none too soon. For the next morning when I turned out, a sight as strange as any I have ever seen greeted me. There, in the corner of my room, lay “Jack” on his side, looking with undisguised amazement and an occasional low whine of sympathy at his friend, who, nestling close up to his curls in the space between his fore and hind legs, was busily attending to the wants of two new arrivals. The dog’s bewilderment and interest were so great, that the scene would have been utterly ludicrous had it not been so genuinely pathetic and pretty. How he managed to restrain himself I do not know, but there he lay perfectly quiet until pussy herself released him from his awkward position by getting up and taking possession of a cosy box I prepared for her. Even then his attentions were constant, for many times a day he would walk gravely in and sniff at the kittens, bestow a lick on the mother, and depart with an almost dejected air, as of a dog that had met with a problem utterly beyond his wisdom to solve. A visitor claiming one of the new kittens, I filled its place with the one I had kept belonging to the old “docker,” and “Jane” accepted the stranger without demur. While we were in dock I gave them plenty of such luxuries as milk and cat’s-meat, so that the little family prospered apace. As the kittens grew and waxed frolicsome, their attachment to me was great,--quite embarrassing at times, for while standing on deck giving orders, they would swarm up my legs and cling like bats to my coat, so that I moved with difficulty for fear of shaking them off. “Jane” was a perfect “ratter,” and I was curious to see whether her prowess was hereditary in her offspring. A trap was set and a rat speedily caught, for we were infested with them. Then “Jane” and her own kitten were called, the latter being at the time barely two months old. As soon as the kitten smelt the rat she growled, set up her fur, and walked round the trap (a large wire cage) seeking a way in. “Jane” sat down a little apart, an apparently uninterested spectator. We opened the door of the trap, the kitten darted in, and there in that confined space slew the rat, which was almost her equal in size, with the greatest ease. She then dragged it out, growling like a miniature tiger. Her mother came to have a look, but the kitten, never loosing her bite, shot out one bristling paw and smote poor “Jane” on the nose so felly that she retired shaking her head and sneezing entire disapproval. The other kitten, a “tom,” could never be induced to interfere with a rat at all. My space is gone, much to my disappointment, for the subject is a fascinating one to me. But I hope enough has been said to show what a large amount of interest clusters around cats on board ship.

THE OLD EAST INDIAMAN

An enthusiastic crowd of workmen and seafarers gathered one day long ago at Blackwall to witness the launching of the _Lion_. Every man among them felt a personal interest in the majestic fabric that, under the proud labours of those skilful shipwrights, had gradually grown up out of the trim piles of oak, greenheart, and teak, and taken on the splendid shape of an East Indiaman, in the days when those grand vessels were queens of the wide sea. Green’s renowned draughtsmen had lavished all their skill upon her design, every device known to men whose calling was their pride, and to whom the Blackwall Yard was the centre of the shipbuilding world, had been employed to make the _Lion_ the finest of all the great fleet that had been brought into being there. Decked with flags from stem to stern, the sun glinting brightly on the rampant crimson lion that towered proudly on high from her stem, she glided gracefully from the ways amid the thunder of cannon and the deafening shouts of exultant thousands. And when, two months later, she sailed for Madras with eighty prime seamen forrard and a hundred passengers in her spacious cuddy, who so proud as her stately commander? His eye flashed as he watched the nimble evolutions of his bonny bluejackets leaping from spar to spar, and he felt that, given fitting opportunity, he would have no overwhelming task to tackle a French line-of-battle ship, even though he _was_ but a peaceful merchantman. For ranged on either side of her roomy decks were ten 18-pounders, under the charge of a smart gunner, whose pride in his new post was a pleasant thing to see. And besides these bulldogs there were many rifles and boarding-pikes neatly stowed in a small armoury in the waist. But above and beyond all these weapons were the men who would use them,--sturdy, square-set British sea-dogs, such as you may now see any day swarming upon the deck of a British man-o’-war, but may look for almost in vain on board the swarming thousands of vessels that compose our merchant fleet.

The _Lion_ soon justified all the high hopes of her builders and owners. In spite of her (then) great size and the taut spread of her spars, she was far handier than any “Billy-boy” that ever turned up the Thames estuary against a head wind, and by at least a knot and a half the fastest ship in the East India trade. Her fame grew and waxed exceedingly great. There was as much intriguing to secure a berth in the _Lion_ for the outward or homeward passage as there was in those days for positions in the golden land she traded to. Almost all the hierarchy of India spoke of her affectionately as one speaks of the old home, and the newly-arrived in her knew no lack of topics for conversation if they only mentioned her name in any company. For had she not borne safely and pleasantly over the long, long sea-road from home hundreds and hundreds of those pale-faced rulers of dusky millions, bringing them in their callow boyhood to leap at a bound to posts of trust and responsibility such as the proud old Romans never dreamed of? She was so tenderly cared for, her every want so immediately supplied, that this solicitude, added to the staunchness and honesty of her build, seemed to render her insusceptible of decay. Men whose work in India was done spoke of her in their peaceful retirement on leafy English countrysides, and recalled with cronies “our first passage out in the grand old _Lion_.” A new type of ship, a new method of propulsion, was springing up all around her. But whenever any of the most modern fliers forgathered with her upon the ocean highway, their crews felt their spirits rise in passionate admiration for the stately and beautiful old craft whose graceful curves and perfect ease seemed to be of the sea _sui generis_, moulded and caressed by the noble element into something of its own mobility and tenacious power.

It appeared almost a loss of dignity when the Company took her off the India route and held her on the Australian berth. But very soon she had taken the place that always appeared to be hers of right, and she was _the_ ship of all others wherein to sail for the new world beneath us. And in due course the sturdy Empire-builders scattered all over the vast new country were speaking of her as the Anglo-Indians had done a generation ago, and the “new chum” who had “come out in the _Lion_” found himself welcome in far-away bush homes, from Adelaide to Brisbane, as one of the same family, a protégé of the benevolent old ship. She held her own well, too, in point of speed with the new steel and iron clippers, in spite of what foolish youngsters sneeringly said about her extended quarter-galleries, her far-reaching head, and immense many-windowed stern. But gradually the fierce stress of modern competition told upon her, and it needed no great stretch of the imagination to suppose that the magnificent old craft felt her dignity outraged as voyage after voyage saw her crew lists dwindle until instead of the eighty able _seamen_ of her young days she carried but twenty-two. The goodly company of officers, midshipmen, and artificers were cut down also to a third of their old array, and as a necessary consequence much of her ancient smartness of appearance went with them. Then she should have closed her splendid career in some great battle with the elements, and found a fitting glory of defeat without disgrace before the all-conquering, enduring sea. That solace was not to be hers, but as a final effort she made the round voyage from Melbourne to London and back, including the handling of two cargoes, in five months and twenty days, beating anything of the kind ever recorded of a sailing-vessel.

Then, oh woeful fall! she was sold to the Norwegians, those thrifty mariners who are ever on the look-out for bargains in the way of ships who have seen their best days, and manage to succeed, in ways undreamed of by more lavish nations, in making fortunes out of such poor old battered phantoms of bygone prosperity. Tenacious as the seaman’s memory is for the appearance of any ship in which he has once sailed, it would have been no easy task for any of her former shipmates to recognise the splendid old _Lion_ under her Scandinavian name of the _Ganger Rolf_, metamorphosed as she was too by the shortening of her tapering spars, the stripping of the yards from the mizen-mast, and the rigging up of what British sailors call the “Norwegian house-flag,” a windmill pump between the main and mizen masts. Thus transformed she began her degraded existence under new masters, crawling to and fro across the Atlantic to Quebec in summer, Pensacola or Doboy in winter, uneasily and spiritless as some gallant hunter dragging a timber waggon in his old age. Unpainted, weather-bleached, and with sails so patched and clouted that they looked like slum washing hung out to dry, she became, like the rest of the “wood-scows,” a thing for the elements to scoff at, and, seen creeping eastward with a deck-load of deals piled six feet high fore and aft above her top-gallant rail, was as pathetic as a pauper funeral. Eight seamen now were all that the thrift of her owners allowed to navigate her, who with the captain, two mates, carpenter, and cook, made up the whole of her crew, exactly the number of the officers she used to carry in her palmy days.

One day when she was discharging in London there came alongside an old seaman, weather-worn and hungry-looking. Something in the build of the old ship caught his eye, and with quivering lips and twitching hands he climbed on board. Round about the deck he quested until, half hidden by a huge pile of lumber, he found the bell and read on it, “Lion, London, 1842.” Then he sat down and covered his face with his hands. Presently he arose and sought the grimy mate purposefully. At an incredibly low wage he obtained the berth of cook,--it was either that or starve, although now he had found his old ship, he felt that he would go for nothing rather than miss another voyage in her. Soon after they sailed for the “fall voyage” to Quebec, making a successful run over, much to the delight of the ancient cook, who was never weary of telling any one who would listen of the feats of sailing performed by the _Lion_ when he was quartermaster of her “way back in the fifties.” Urged by greed, for he was part-owner, and under no fear of the law, the skipper piled upon her such a deck-load of deals that she no longer resembled a ship, she was only comparable to a vast timber stack with three masts. She was hardly clear of Newfoundland on her homeward passage, when one of the most terrible gales of all that terrible winter set in. Snow and sleet and frost-fog, a blinding white whirl of withering cold, assailed her, paralysing the hapless handful of men who vainly strove on their lofty platform to do their duty, exposed fully to all the wrath of that icy tempest. One after one the worn-out sails, like autumn leaves, were stripped from yard and stay; day after day saw the perishing mariners die. The sea froze upon her where it fell, so that now she resembled an iceberg; and though the remnant of the crew tried many times to get at the fastenings of the chains that secured the deck-load so as to send it adrift, they could not. At last only one man was left alive, and he, strangely enough, was the old cook. And while still the gale was at its height, he suddenly seemed to renew all his lost strength. Buckling tight his belt with firm fingers, a new light gleaming in his eyes, he strode aft and seized the long-disused wheel. Standing erect and alert he conned her gravely, getting her well before the wind. Onward she fled, as if knowing the touch of an old friend. Gradually the lean fingers stiffened, the fire died out of the eyes, until, just as the last feeble drops in that brave old heart froze solid, the _Lion_ dashed into a mountainous berg and all her shattered timbers fell apart. Lovely and pleasant had she been in her life, and in her death she was no danger to her wandering sisters.

THE FLOOR OF THE SEA

Who is there among us that has ever seen a lake, a pond, or a river-bed laid dry that has not felt an almost childish interest and curiosity in the aspect of a portion of earth’s surface hitherto concealed from our gaze? The feeling is probably universal, arising from the natural desire to penetrate the unknown, and also from a primitive anxiety to know what sort of an abode the inhabitants of the water possess, since we almost always consider the water-folk to live as do the birds, really on land with the water for an atmosphere. But if this curiosity be so general with regard to the petty depths mentioned above, how greatly is it increased in respect of the recesses of the sea. For there is truly the great unknown, the undiscoverable country of which, in spite of the constant efforts of deep-sea expeditions, we know next to nothing. Here imagination may (and does) run riot, attempting the impossible task of reproducing to our minds the state of things in the lightless, silent depths where life, according to our ideas of it, is impossible,--the true valley of the shadow of death.

Suppose that it were possible for some convulsion of Nature to lay bare, let us say, the entire bed of the North Atlantic Ocean. With one bound the fancy leaps at the prospect of a rediscovery of the lost continent, the fabled Atlantis whose wonders have had so powerful an effect upon the imaginations of mankind. Should we be able to roam through those stupendous halls, climb those towering temple heights reared by the giants of an elder world, or gaze with stupefied wonder upon the majestic ruins of cities to which Babylon or Palmyra with all their mountainous edifices were but as a suburban townlet! Who knows? Yet maybe the natural wonders apparent in the foundations of such soaring masses as the Azores, the Cape Verde Islands, or the Canaries; or, greater still, the altitude of such remote and lonely pinnacles as those of the St. Paul’s Rocks, would strike us as more marvellous yet. To thread the cool intricacies of the “still vext Bermoothes” at their basements and seek out the caves where the sea-monsters dwell who never saw the light of day, to wander at will among the windings of that strange maze of reefs that cramp up the outpouring of the beneficent Gulf Stream and make it issue from its source with that turbulent energy that carries it, laden with blessings, to our shores; what a pilgrimage that would be! Imagine the vision of that great chain of islands which we call the West Indies soaring up from the vast plain 6000 feet below, with all the diversity of form and colour belonging to the lovely homes of the coral insects, who build ceaselessly for themselves, yet all unconsciously rear stable abodes for mankind.

It would be an awful country to view, this suddenly exposed floor of the sea. A barren land of weird outline, of almost unimaginable complexity of contour, but without any beauty such as is bestowed upon the dry earth by the kindly sun. For its beauty depends upon the sea, whose prolific waters are peopled with life so abundantly that even the teeming earth is barren as compared with the ocean. But at its greatest depths all the researches that man has been able to prosecute go to prove that there is little life. The most that goes on there is a steady accumulation of the dead husks of once living organisms settling slowly down to form who knows what new granites, marbles, porphyries, against the time when another race on a reorganised earth shall need them. Here there is nothing fanciful, for if we know anything at all of prehistoric times, it is that what is now high land, not to say merely dry land, was once lying cold and dormant at the bottom of the sea being prepared throughout who can say what unrealisable periods of time for the use and enjoyment of its present lords. Not until we leave the rayless gloom, the incalculable pressures and universal cold of those tremendous depths, do we find the sea-floor beginning to abound with life. It may even be doubted whether anything of man’s handiwork, such as there is about a ship foundering in mid-ocean, would ever reach in a recognisable form the bottom of the sea at a depth of more than 2000 fathoms. There is an idea, popularly current among seafarers, that sunken ships in the deep sea only go down a certain distance, no matter what their build or how ponderous their cargo. Having reached a certain stratum, they then drift about, slowly disintegrating, derelicts of the depths, swarming with strange denizens, the shadowy fleets of the lost and loved and mourned. In time, of course, as the great solvent gets in its work they disappear, becoming part of their surroundings, but not for hundreds of years, during which they pass and repass at the will of the under-currents that everywhere keep the whole body of water in the ocean from becoming stagnant and death-dealing to adjacent shores. A weird fancy truly, but surely not more strange than the silent depths about which it is formulated.

In his marvellously penetrative way, Kipling has touched this theme while singing the “Song of the English”:--

“The wrecks dissolve above us; their dust drops down from afar--
Down to the dark, the utter dark, where the blind white sea-snakes
are.
There is no sound, no echo of sound, in the deserts of the deep,
On the great grey level plains of ooze where the shell-burred cables
creep.

Here in the womb of the world--here on the tie-ribs of earth,
Words, and the words of men, flicker and flutter and beat--
Warning, sorrow and gain, salutation and mirth--
For a Power troubles the Still that has neither voice nor feet.”

Surely the imagination must be dead indeed that does not throb responsive to the thought of that latter-day workmanship of wire and rubber descending at the will of man into the vast void, and running its direct course over mountain ranges, across sudden abysses of lower depth, through the turbulence of up-bursting submarine torrents where long-pent-up rivers compel the superincumbent ocean to admit their saltless waters; until from continent to continent the connection is made, and man holds converse with man at his ease as though distance were not. Recent investigations go to prove that chief among the causes that make for destruction of those communicating cables are the upheavals of lost rivers. In spite of the protection that scientific invention has provided for the central core of conducting wire, these irresistible outbursts of undersea torrents rend and destroy it, causing endless labour of replacement by the never-resting cable-ships. But this is only one of the many deeply interesting features of oceanography, a science of comparatively recent growth, but full of gigantic possibilities for the future knowledge of this planet. The researches of the _Challenger_ expedition, embodied in fifty portly volumes, afford a vast mass of material for discussion, and yet it is evident that what they reveal is but the merest tentative dipping into the great mysterious land that lies hidden far below the level surface of the inscrutable sea.

That veteran man of science, Sir John Murray, has in a recent paper (_Royal Geographical Society’s Journal_, October 1899) published his presidential address to the geographical section of the British Association at Dover, and even to the ordinary non-scientific reader his wonderful _résumé_ of what has been done in the way of exploring the ocean’s depths must be as entrancing as a fairy tale. The mere mention of such a chasm as that existing in the South Pacific between the Kermadecs and the Friendly Islands, where a depth of 5155 fathoms, or 530 feet more than five geographical miles, has been found, strikes the lay mind with awe. Mount Everest, that stupendous Himalayan peak whose summit soars far above the utmost efforts of even the most devoted mountaineers, a virgin fastness mocking man’s soaring ambition, if sunk in the ocean at the spot just mentioned would disappear until its highest point was 2000 feet below the surface. Yet out of that abyss rises the volcanic mass of Sunday Island in the Kermadecs, whose crater is probably 2000 feet above the sea-level. But in no less than forty-three areas visited by the _Challenger_, depths of over 3000 fathoms have been found, and their total area is estimated at 7,152,000 square miles, or about 7 per cent. of the total water-surface of the globe. Within these deeps are found many lower deeps, strangely enough generally in comparatively close proximity to land, such as the Tuscarora Deep, near Japan, one in the Banda Sea, that is to say, in the heart of the East India Archipelago, &c. Down, down into these mysterious waters the ingenious sounding-machine runs, taking out its four miles and upwards of pianoforte wire until the sudden stoppage of the swift descent marks the dial on deck with the exact number of fathoms reached. And yet so vast is the ocean bed that none can say with any certainty that far greater depths may not yet be found than any that have hitherto been recorded, amazing as they are.

The character of the ocean floor at all these vast depths as revealed by the sounding-tube bringing specimens to the surface is identical--red clay--which strikes the fancy queerly as being according to most ancient legends the substance out of which our first ancestor was builded, and from whence he derived his name. Mingled with this primordial ooze is found the débris of once living forms, many of them of extinct species, or species at any rate that have never come under modern man’s observation except as fossils. The whole story, however, demands far more space than can here be allowed, but one more instance must be given of the wonders of the sea-bed in conclusion. Let a violent storm displace any considerable body of warm surface water, and lo! to take its place up rises an equal volume of cold under layers that have been resting far below the influence of the sun. Like a pestilential miasma these chill waves seize upon the myriads of the sea-folk and they die. The tale of death is incalculable, but one example is mentioned by Sir John Murray of a case of this kind off the eastern coast of North America in the spring of 1882, when a layer of dead fish and other marine animals six feet in thickness was believed to cover the ocean floor for many miles.

SHAKESPEARE AND THE SEA

Quite recently it was suggested by the writer of an article in the _Spectator_ that Shakespeare was now but little read,--that while his works were quoted from as much as ever, the quotations were obtained at second hand, and that it would be hard to find to-day any reader who had waded through all that wonderful collection of plays and poems. This is surely not a carefully made statement. If there were any amount of truth in it, we might well regard such a state of things as only one degree less deplorable than that people should have ceased to read the Bible. For next to the Bible there can be no such collection of writings available wherein may be found food for every mind. Even the sailor, critical as he always is of allusions to the technicalities of his calling that appear in literature, is arrested by the truth of Shakespeare’s references to the sea and seafaring, while he cannot but wonder at their copiousness in the work of a thorough landsman. Of course, in this respect it is necessary to remember that Elizabethan England spoke a language which was far more frequently studded with sea-terms than that which we speak ashore to-day. With all our vast commerce and our utter dependence upon the sea for our very life; its romance, its expressions take little hold of the immense majority of the people. Therein we differ widely from Americans. In every walk of life, from Maine to Mexico, from Philadelphia to San Francisco, the American people salt their speech with terms borrowed from the sailor, as they do also with other terms used by Shakespeare, and often considered by Shakespeare’s countrymen of the present day, quite wrongly, to be slang.

In what is perhaps the most splendidly picturesque effort of Shakespeare’s genius, “The Tempest,” he hurls us at the outset into the hurly-burly of a storm at sea with all the terror-striking details attendant upon the embaying of a ship in such weather. She is a passenger ship, too, and the passengers behave as landsmen might be expected to do in such a situation. The Master (not Captain be it noted, for there are no Captains in the merchant-service) calls the boatswain. Here arises a difficulty for a modern sailor. Where was the mate? We cannot say that the office was not known, although Shakespeare nowhere alludes to such an officer; but this much is certain, that for one person who would understand who was meant by the mate ten would appreciate the mention of the boatswain’s name, and that alone would justify its use in poetry. In this short colloquy between the Master and boatswain we have the very spirit of sea service. An immediate reply to the Master’s hail, and an inquiry in a phrase now only used by the vulgar, bring the assurance “Good”; but it is at once followed by “Speak to the mariners, fall to’t yarely, or we run ourselves aground; bestir, bestir.” Having given his orders the Master goes--he has other matters to attend to--and the boatswain heartens up his crew in true nautical fashion, his language being almost identical with that used to-day. His “aside” is true sailor,--“Blow till thou burst thy wind, if [we have] room enough.” This essentially nautical feeling, that given a good ship and plenty of sea-room there is nothing to fear, is alluded to again and again in Shakespeare. He has the very spirit of it. Then come the meddlesome passengers, hampering the hard-pressed officer with their questioning and advice!--until, exasperated beyond courtesy, he bursts out: “You mar our labour. Keep your cabins. You do assist the storm.” Bidden to remember whom he has on board, he gives them more of his mind, winding up by again addressing his crew with “cheerly good hearts,” and as a parting shot to his hinderers, “Out of our way, I say.”

But the weather grows worse; they must needs strike the topmast and heave-to under the main-course (mainsail), a manœuvre which, usual enough with Elizabethan ships, would never be attempted now. Under the same circumstances the lower main-topsail would be used, the mainsail having been furled long before because of its unwieldy size. Still the passengers annoy, now with abuse, which is answered by an appeal to their reason and an invitation to them to take hold and work. For the need presses. She is on a lee shore, and in spite of the fury of the gale sail must be made. “Set her two courses [mainsail and foresail], off to sea again, lay her off.” And now the sailors despair and speak of prayer, their cries met scornfully by the valiant boatswain with “What, must our mouths be cold?” Then follows that wonderful sea-picture beginning Scene 2, which remains unapproachable for vigour and truth. A little further on comes the old sea-superstition of the rats quitting a foredoomed ship, and in Ariel’s report a spirited account of what must have been suggested to Shakespeare by stories of the appearance of “corposants” or St. Elmo’s fire, usually accompanying a storm of this kind. And in answer to Prospero’s question, “Who was so firm?” &c., Ariel bears incidental tribute to the mariners,--“All, but mariners, plunged in the foaming brine and quit the vessel,” those same mariners who are afterwards found, their vessel safely anchored, asleep under hatches, their dangerous toil at an end.

In the “Twelfth Night” there are many salt-water allusions no less happy, beginning with the bright picture of Antonio presented by the Captain (of a war-ship?) breasting the sea upon a floating mast. Again in Act I., Scene 6, Viola answers Malvolio’s uncalled-for rudeness, “Will you hoist sail, sir?” with the ready idiom, “No, good _swabber_, I am to hull [to heave-to] here a little longer.” In Act V., Scene 1, the Duke speaks of Antonio as Captain of a “bawbling vessel--for shallow draught, and bulk, unprizable”; in modern terms, a small privateer that played such havoc with the enemy’s fleet that “very envy and the tongue of loss cried fame and honour on him.” Surely Shakespeare must have had Drake in his mind when he wrote this.

Who does not remember Shylock’s contemptuous summing-up of Antonio’s means and their probable loss?--“Ships are but boards, sailors but men, there be land rats and water rats, water thieves and land thieves--I mean, pirates; and then there is the peril of waters, winds, and rocks” (Act I., Scene 3). In this same play, too, we have those terrible quicksands, the Goodwins, sketched for us in half-a-dozen lines: “Where the carcases of many a tall ship lie buried” (Act III., Scene 1); and in the last scene of the last act Antonio says his “ships are safely come to _road_,” an expression briny as the sea itself.

In the “Comedy of Errors,” Act I., Scene 1, we have a phrase that should have been coined by an ancient Greek sailor-poet: “The always-wind-obeying deep”; and a little lower down the page a touch of sea-lore that would of itself suffice to stamp the writer as a man of intimate knowledge of nautical ways: “A small spare mast, such as seafaring men provide for storms.” Who told Shakespeare of the custom of sailors to carry spare spars for jury-masts?

In “Macbeth,” the first witch sings of the winds and the compass card, and promises that her enemy’s husband shall suffer all the torments of the tempest-tossed sailor without actual shipwreck. She also shows a pilot’s thumb “wrack’d, as homeward he did come.” Who in these days of universal reading needs reminding of the allusion to the ship-boy’s sleep in Act III., Scene 1, of “Henry IV.,” a contrast of the most powerful and convincing kind, powerful alike in its poetry and its truth to the facts of Nature? Especially noticeable is the line where Shakespeare speaks of the spindrift: “And in the visitation of the winds who take the ruffian billows by the top, curling their monstrous heads, and hanging them with deaf’ning clamours in the slippery clouds.”

“King Henry VI.,” Act V., Scene 1, has this line full of knowledge of sea usage: “Than bear so low a sail, to strike to thee.” Here is a plain allusion to the ancient custom whereby all ships of any other nation, as well as all merchant ships, were compelled to lower their sails in courtesy to British ships of war. The picture given in “Richard III.,” Act I., Scene 4, of the sea-bed does not call for so much wonder, for the condition of that secret place of the sea must have had peculiar fascination for such a mind as Shakespeare’s. Set in those few lines he has given us a vision of the deeps of the sea that is final.

A wonderful passage is to be found in “Cymbeline,” Act III., Scene 1, that seems to have been strangely neglected, where the Queen tells Cymbeline to remember--

“The natural bravery of your isle; which stands
As Neptune’s park, ribbed and palèd in
With rocks unscaleable and roaring waters;
With sands that will not bear your enemies’ boats,
But suck them up to the top-mast.”

And again, in the same scene, Cloten speaks of the Romans finding us in our “salt-water girdle.”

But no play of Shakespeare’s, except “The Tempest,” smacks so smartly of the brine as “Pericles,” the story of that much enduring Prince of Tyre whose nautical mishaps are made to have such a miraculously happy ending. In Act II., Scene 1, enter Pericles, wet, invoking Heaven that the sea having manifested its sovereignty over man, may grant him one last boon,--a peaceful death. To him appear three fishermen characteristically engaged in handling their nets, bullying one another, and discussing the latest wreck. And here we get a bit of sea-lore that all sailors deeply appreciate. “_3rd Fish._ Nay, master, said not I as much, when I saw the porpus how he bounced and tumbled? they say, they are half fish, half flesh; a plague on them! they ne’er come but I look to be wash’d.” Few indeed are the sailors even in these steamship days who have not heard that the excited leaping of porpoises presages a storm. The whole scene well deserves quotation, especially the true description of the whale (rorqual) “driving the poor fry before him and at last devours them all at a mouthful.” Space presses, however, and it will be much better for those interested to read for themselves. Act III., Scene 1, brings before us a companion picture to that in the opening of “The Tempest,” perhaps even more vivid; where the terrible travail of the elements is agonisingly contrasted with the birth-wail of an infant, and the passing of the hapless Princess. Beautiful indeed is the rough but honest heartening offered by the labouring sailors, broken off by the sea-command to--

“_1st Sailor._ Slack the bolins there; thou wilt not, wilt thou?
Blow and split thyself.

_2nd Sailor._ But sea-room, an’ the brine and cloudy billow kiss
the moon, I care not.”

Bolins, modern “bowlines,” were anciently used much more than now. At present they are slight ropes which lead from forward to keep the weather edges (leaches) of the courses rigid in light winds when steering full and bye. But in olden days even topgallant sails had their bolins, and they were among the most important ropes in the ship. Then we have the sea-superstition creating the deepest prejudice against carrying a corpse. And, sympathetic as the mariners are, the dead woman must “overboard straight.” Reluctantly we must leave this all too brief sketch of Shakespeare’s true British sea-sympathies, in the hope that it may lead to a deeper appreciation of the sea-lore of our mightiest poet.

THE SKIPPER OF THE “AMULET”

It has been my lot, in the course of a fairly comprehensive experience of sea-life in most capacities between lamp-trimmer and chief officer, to serve under some queer commanders, but of all that I ever endured, the worthy of whom I am about to tell was, without doubt, the most amazing specimen. I have been told, on good authority, that the tag about fact being stranger than fiction is all bosh, but for once I am going to disregard that statement. No fiction that I have ever read has told me anything half so strange, in my poor judgment, as the career of Captain Jones during the time that I was unfortunate enough to be his mate, and therefore I shall stick to fact, at least as much of it as I can tell that will be fit for publication.

In order to launch my story fairly it is necessary to go back a little. On my return to London from my last voyage, with a pay-day of some £20, I had done two important things, though with the easy confidence of youth, and especially seafaring youth, their gravity had not impressed me. I got married and “passed” for chief mate. Neither my wife nor myself had a friend in the world, any certain employment or a stick of “plenishing.” And after a honeymoon of a day or two the tiny group of sovereigns nestling at the bottom of my right-hand trousers pocket dwindled so that I could hardly jingle them. There were plenty of ships in London at the time, but although I walked the soles fairly off my boots around the dreary docks never a one could I find where a second mate even was wanted. I found a good many where the officers were foreigners; Germans or Scandinavians; still more “where they didn’t keep the officers by the ship in dock,” and one day I was offered a _chance_ to go first mate of a 1500 ton tramp to the Baltic at £5 a month! In spite of the shameful inadequacy of the salary I rushed off to the Surrey Commercial Docks after the berth, and arrived on board of her breathless, only to find that another man had got to windward of me, having earlier information. Sadly I trudged back again and recommenced my search, my funds all but gone and no credit obtainable. But now I couldn’t even get a ship before the mast! Gangs of ruffianly dock-wallopers fought like tigers at the “chain-locker,” whenever a skipper seeking a hand or two poked his head out of one of the doors, flourishing their discharges (?) in the air as they surged around the half-scared man. Anxious and indeed almost despairing as I was, I could not compete with that crowd, and I don’t believe I should ever have got a ship, but that one day a stalwart, pleasant-faced man opened the door. When the gang began to mob him he roared, “I don’ want navvies--I want a sailor-man: git t’ hell out o’ that, and let one o’ them behind ye come here.” Instantly I flung myself into the crowd and thrust my way up to him. He took my proffered discharge, but handed it back at once saying, “I don’t want no steamboat sailors.” He didn’t understand the thing, being a Nova Scotiaman. I screamed back the truth at him, and pushed my way past him into the office, my heart fairly thumping with excitement at the prospect of £3 a month to go to Nova Scotia in the middle of winter. I winced a little when I found that she was only a brigantine, but the advance note for £3 was such a godsend that I could only be thankful.

Of the passage across in the _Wanderer_ I need say nothing here except that the sea kindliness of the little craft (the smallest I had ever sailed in) amazed me, while, except for a disaster in the shape of a cook, the general conditions of life on board were most comfortable. After twenty days we arrived at Sydney, Cape Breton, and upon entering the harbour noticed a vessel lying disconsolately apart from the little fleet at anchor there. She was a brig belonging to Workington, exactly like an exaggerated barge as to her hull, and bearing all over unmistakable evidences of utter neglect. In fact her general appearance suggested nothing so much to me as the nondescript craft common on the Indian coast, and called by sailors “country-wallahs.” She provided us with plenty of material for our evening chat, but in the morning other matters claimed our attention and we soon forgot all about her. As we had come over in ballast our stay was to be short, and on the second day after our arrival news came that we were to proceed to Lingan, a small port down the coast, in the morning, and there load soft coal for St. John, New Brunswick. But, much to my surprise, just after supper, as I was leaning over the rail enjoying my pipe, the mate approached me mysteriously and beckoned me aft. As soon as we were out of hearing of the other men, he told me that if I liked to put my dunnage over into the boat, he would pull me ashore, the skipper having intimated his willingness to let me go, although unable to discharge me in the regular way. He had heard that there was a vessel in the harbour in want of a mate, and hoped that thus I might be able to better myself. Being quite accustomed to all vicissitudes of fortune I at once closed with the offer, and presently found myself on the beach of this strange place without one cent in my pocket, in utter darkness and a loneliness like that of some desert island.