Chapter VIII: Part 8

“Everybody being agreeable, we hauled down the staysails and backed the foretopsail. There was no watches, the crew hadn’t been divided; however, we formed ourselves into two gangs, and agreed to keep watch and watch till the morning; then, if things remained as they was, we arranged for some of us to go aft to the captain, and, if he refused to do his duty, to hoist a distress signal, and ’splain our situation to the first ship as came along. The deuce of it was, ye see, there was ne’er a man forrards as knew anything of navigation. Had we turned to and seized the skipper’s instruments and charts they’d have been of no use to us. Well, next morning arrived, and found the barque still drifting and the weather as thick as mud in a wine-glass. All hands assembled, and we held a sort o’ parliament, and then it was agreed that I and another should go aft and inquire of the captain what he meant by this conduct. ’Cordingly we lay aft, and going into the cabin found the mate lying there drunk, though not incapable. He asked us what we wanted; but we took no notice, pushing on to the captain’s berth. We hammered on the door, but getting no answer opened it, and saw him lying sound asleep and kinder stupefied in his bunk. We laid hold of him and hauled till we’d roused him up.

“‘Captain,’ says I, ‘we’ve come aft to ask what you mean to do with the barque. She’s drifting anyhow, and all hands feel their lives to be in danger.’

“‘Pooh, pooh!’ says he, stretching his arms and gaping, ‘it’s all right. Have a glass of grog?’

“‘No,’ I says firmly; ‘we don’t want no grog. What we require is to know what you mean to do?’

“Instead of answering, he lay back, turned over and shut his eyes; so, seeing that there was no satisfaction to be got, we came away and went forrards again. The men were now thoroughly scared. They said they warn’t going to stand skylarking of this kind, and if the captain didn’t turn to and take charge and sail the ship back to Liverpool, they’d knock off work. I went aft once more with this message, but though I nearly dragged the captain out of his bed, I couldn’t make him understand, nor even rouse him up. So I walked up to the mate and told him of the men’s resolution.

“‘I don’t care,’ says he; ‘it’s no business of mine. I’m not going to do anything without the captain’s orders.’

“We was in a regular fix. The weather was so thick that it would need a ship to come very close to make out any signal we might hoist; we none of us knew where we were, in what direction to steer, what to do with the barque if we took charge of her. Whilst we were debating, the mate came out, and orders us to square the yards.

“‘What for?’ says the crew.

“‘Why, for Liverpool,’ he answers.

“We turned to with a will, the mate standing at the cabin door looking at us. We held on E.S.E. till about midnight, when we spied a light on the port quarter, and the mate said it was the Chickens off the Calf o’ Man. It proved to be nothing of the kind, but Morecambe Bay light. At daybreak the land was plain to be seen about four miles distant, and the captain, who was now on deck, gave orders for the helm to be put up to let her drive ashore, which she did, the lifeboat coming out when we was close on to the beach, and taking us all off. The first to drop into the boat was the skipper; he wasn’t too drunk to do that.

“What d’ye say to this tale of the sea, sir? What’ll the public think of merchant sailors after hearing it? Should you think proper to print it, I’ll allow that there’ll not be a landsman as won’t reckon it an out-and-out twister, spun from the winch o’ your own invention. But, that there may be no doubt about it, just add what the finding of the Court was as inquired into this business: ‘Neither the master nor the mate attended properly to his duties in navigating the vessel. They were both under the influence of drink during the voyage. The vessel was not navigated with proper and seaman-like care. She was stranded owing to the utter neglect from drunkenness of both master and mate. The Court considered that this was about as gross a case as ever came before a court of inquiry, and found both master and mate grievously and wrongfully in default.’

“Mild enough, sir. Had the Court been aboard, you may take your oath they’d have drawed it considerably stronger.”

_A SAILOR’S CLUB._

Not very far from the London Docks, and within a stone’s throw of that refined and odoriferous thoroughfare known as Leman Street, Whitechapel, there is situated a large, fine building, with entrances commanding two streets, and a summit that towers very nobly among the adjacent roofs. Once upon a time the Royal Brunswick Theatre stood where that house now stands, and vestiges of the old structure still linger in the form of some pillars or columns at the main entrance, and various underground avenues, in whose atmosphere, despite forty years of very strong marine flavouring, there seems to lurk to this hour a kind of ghostly smell of ancient orange-peel. The house is known far and wide as the Well Street Home for Sailors, and I once accepted an invitation from the manager to overhaul the premises, and judge for myself to what extent the Home improves upon the comforts and privileges the sailor flatters himself he may obtain at a common seamen’s boarding or lodging house. I must own that I approached the place with a certain amount of foregone prejudice. Establishments known as Harbours of Refuge, Seaman’s Sheet Anchor, Ports of Call, and the like, all mariners who will not sham piety for the sake of a coat, or a plug of tobacco, or a meal of bread and meat will keep to windward of. Jack objects to this kind of classification. He dislikes to be dealt with as something apart from the ordinary run of mortals; to be preached to in language which the minister may fondly imagine to be the dialect of the sea; to have tracts doled out to him in the form of marine allegories, as if he could comprehend no other allusions to life and death, and sin and virtue, than those which referred to heaving billows and storm-driven barks and broken tackle; and when ashore, to make one of a flock of seamen, to meet nobody but seamen, to go to prayers in a church filled with seamen;--to be treated, indeed, as if he ought to carry a badge or number on his back, as if his whole class were socially tabooed. So, thinking this Well Street Home to have something of the old unpleasant and ill-judging form of charity mixed up in its composition, and considerably disturbed in mind by the first four lines of its forty-seventh annual report, I entered the Dock Street entrance, never doubting but that I should meet with plenty of features to account for the sailor’s preference for the grimy, frowsy, and squalid lodging-houses, of which there were some dozens in the neighbourhood.

I found myself in a very large hall filled with seamen. There was perhaps hardly a nationality that was not represented. Englishmen and Scandinavians were plentiful; but in numerous places were black and yellow skins, the sight of which carried the mind thousands of miles east and south, and brought up visions of skies different indeed from the brown heavens which were careering in gloomy folds over the chimney-pots visible through the windows. In a few moments I was joined by the manager, and we proceeded to inspect the premises. In a manner it was like surveying St. Paul’s Cathedral. Big as the building looked outside, it seemed four times as large again when I began to roam about it. Room led into room, wing conducted into wing, until methought Whitechapel itself might seem to lack area enough for the accommodation of this most ramified and capacious interior. Behind a glass front stood a porter wading through several huge piles of letters in search of those expected by some dozen men, who eagerly waited while he looked.

“The correspondence here must be enormous,” said I, “judging by those samples.”

“It is enormous,” answered the manager. “Thousands upon thousands of letters and telegrams are received and distributed in the course of the year.”

We entered a large room with a circular counter in it, behind which were several clerks hard at work over their ledgers, while a number of seamen were drawing or paying in money.

“This is the bank,” said the manager; “here we receive such moneys as the men choose to deposit, and credit them with the wages which they have to receive from the ships they have been discharged from. Here, too, we cash their allotment notes, and what we do in that way you may guess by looking at that long box there, that is full of allotment notes which are maturing at various dates.”

“But,” said I, “I thought the allotment note was only made payable to a relative or to a savings-bank. This is not a savings-bank?”

“Oh,” he exclaimed drily, “there are two kinds of allotment notes. One is, as you say, payable only to a relative or a savings-bank; the other is an illegal document, sanctioned by the Board of Trade, February, 1868--here it is in the corner: you see their imprimatur?” said he, handing me one of the notes.

“What is the meaning of this,” said I, “at the bottom of the note?--‘Caution.--The Merchant Shipping Act does not provide summary remedy in the case of this note.’”

“Only a confession that a blunder was made,” he answered, “when the Act was passed. The advance note was said to encourage crimping; accordingly the allotment note was substituted. The seaman protested, as he found the note practically useless. Instead of rescinding or modifying the Act, an illegal concession was made by the issue of notes payable to anybody, like the old advance note. The issue is sanctioned by the Board of Trade, who compromise with their official conscience by giving the holder of the note to understand that he cannot recover upon the note by summary remedy. The old advance note was made payable three days after the man had sailed in the ship; in the present note the shipowner protects himself by making the note payable fifteen days, or in some instances thirty days, after the man has sailed. This may not increase the risk, but the delay in payment causes the holder to charge a heavier rate of interest for cashing the note, so that practically the Act leaves the sailor as much at the mercy of the boarding-house keeper as he was in the days of the advance note. We have hitherto charged nothing for cashing these notes; but we shall have to do so in self-protection, for we are perpetually losing money by them, and the law, which sanctions their issue, yet deprives the holder of all means of recovering on them.”

So much for British maritime legislation, thought I. Here are people, willing to pay the sailor the amount his note is worth without any deduction whatever, obliged to own that they can no longer act in this liberal manner, because the law prevents them from dealing with the dishonest clients who rob them! Will the day never come when the hidden part of our gigantic marine interests will be capably represented in the House of Commons?

“And pray,” said I to the manager, “where are your bedrooms?”

He led me a short distance, and presently we came to a stand at the bottom of what I may call a shaft of galleries of a very curious skeleton-like appearance. The highest tier was probably about seventy feet. Every fibrine-looking gallery or platform ran the whole length of the wing, and was flanked on either hand with rows of little bulkheaded rooms called cabins, all of them numbered, and every one containing an exceedingly comfortable wire-wove spring mattress, slung by a species of metal triangle from the ceiling. I found that there were three of these gallery shafts situated in wings of the building, and capable of comfortably accommodating and bedding between five and six hundred persons. One of those gigantic ranges of cabins, dedicated to the late Admiral Hope, struck me as exceedingly handsome and curious. The lower berths here are devoted to the mates and captains. They are large, airy, superbly ventilated; but these are the characteristics of all the cabins. At one end of this fine division is a marble tablet inscribed to Admiral Hope, with handsomely carved coloured flags on either side. To see these cabins, the manner in which they are poised one above another, the stairs leading up to them, the delicate tracery of the platforms, and observe the seamen coming out of their rooms and descending the steps fifty and sixty feet above your head, is to get a new theory of human existence. I never saw anything more comfortable, more clever, more strange. I mounted to one of these galleries with the manager, and seeing a cabin door open put my head in. The place was in gloom, and I was about to withdraw, when to my astonishment I observed what looked like two little half-moons glimmering in the dusk. I stared, and was amazed to find a negro lying upon a chest, reading. I saw the whites of his eyes the moment he rolled them up to look at me, but the rest of him being black was not to be discerned at once. I asked him what he was reading.

“The Bible,” said he, showing the book.

He was newly arrived at Hull from Barbadoes, he said, and had come to London to look for a berth as steward aboard a ship bound to the West Indies. He was a handsomely spoken, well-mannered young fellow, pronouncing his words with the finish of a man of culture.

We next visited the dining-room. This was a great department with rows of tables stretched along it, all covered with white linen and hospitably furnished with good glass and cutlery. At a large centre heating contrivance stood a carver flourishing an immense knife over a big pile of joints of roast beef. Sirloins, ribs, topsides, were mixed up, but the manager said that did not matter, as there would be little enough to be seen of them presently. A number of waiters ran in and out, setting dishes of potatoes, vegetables, puddings, bowls of soup, and such matters, on the table, and it needed nothing but a loving cup and a flourish of trumpets to make the thing look like a civic feast. Presently a bell was beaten, the seamen came tumbling in, and in a trice every table was crowded, and all hands eating their hardest.

“There is plenty of independence here, apparently,” said I, looking round at the rows of “shell-backs”--and I appreciated the term when I marked the taut curve of their shoulders--working away with spoons and knives and forks.

“Independence!” exclaimed the manager. “Why, no hotel confers more privileges. We are in reality a club. We were originally called a Home, and have stuck to the name; but I think it would be better had we borne the title of Club, for there is something in the sound of a home that savours of charity, and charity is a thing most seamen object to.”

“What are your charges?”

“Fifteen shillings a week to the men, and eighteen shillings to mates, who eat in a room to themselves.”

“Do you mean to say,” I exclaimed, “that you give these men a bedroom apiece and feed them after the fashion I now see for fifteen shillings a week?”

“Yes,” said he, smiling at my surprise. “And we go a little further even than that; for if a sailor arrives here without clothes or means, we dress him and put money in his pocket, and repay ourselves by deducting the amount, without a farthing of extra charge, from the allotment note he receives from the ship in which, in numerous instances, we procure him a berth.”

“And may the men do as they like here?”

“As if they were in their own house. We close at half-past twelve; but there is a night porter, and a man is admitted at any hour.”

“So that, practically, this is nothing but a first-class hotel worked at a cost that enables the very poorest seamen to use it?”

“Exactly. Our sole object is to provide the sailor with a comfortable home while he is on shore, help him in every way that he will allow, and so keep him clear of the boarding-house people--the wretched men and still more wretched women--who prey upon him, drug him with vile drinks, cruelly rob him, and often turn him adrift with scarcely a stitch on his back. Come, sir; more remains to be seen.”

He took me downstairs into a ready-made clothing shop belonging to the Home.

“The tailors in the neighbourhood,” said he, laughing, “more especially those who pay women commission to bring sailors to their shops, don’t love us for this invasion of their rights or wrongs; for our charge for clothes is very little above the price they cost us, and a man may get here for two pounds ten a suit he would have to pay eight or nine guineas for to a boarding-house tailor. I may say the same thing of the bar we have opened. There were some murmurs at first among the directors; but, sir, we found lemonade and coffee would not do. They drove the sailors to the public-houses; for the men would have their glass, and if they could not get it here they would go to low places for it. Jack must be treated sensibly, as a man with brains. To stop his grog at sea is one thing, but to put him upon cold water ashore is merely to drive him to those who live by plundering him. The result of opening a bar here has been to extinguish half the public-houses in the neighbourhood, and you may believe me when I say that our people know their business too well to suffer any approach to intemperance in this Home.”

“Well,” said I, “I came here expecting to find a lot of false and mischievous sentiment mixed up in the administration of the place. I see that Jack’s character is understood among you. You treat him as a rational man, and he respects you for it. No wonder the same people return again and again.”

“There is no need for a man to do anything here he does not like,” said the manager. “We have serious, sober, steady fellows among us; for them there are prayers morning and evening, and all may attend who will. But there is no obligation to be present. So at church--yonder it is, close to the Home, you see--we muster a good congregation; but there is no compulsion. Whatever can be done to reclaim those who need it, to help to set men right, to teach them to lift up their thoughts, we attempt; but there is no forcing of religion--nothing to induce hypocrisy on the one hand, nor to excite aversion on the other. We say, ‘My lads, here are your opportunities, take them if you will; but take them or leave them, we wish to do our duty by you, to make your lives ashore happy and comfortable, to keep you to windward of the low and nauseous snares which are everywhere set about for you, to come between your simplicity and the acts of the miscreants who find their account in your easy-going natures.’ That is about the amount of our theory,” said the manager; “and if we are not greatly successful, it is because the job we have set ourselves to perform is a very, very large one.”

From the dining-room we went to the basement, where I was shown a number of capital bath-rooms, fitted with a plentiful supply of hot and cold water; a laundry and drying-rooms; store-rooms filled with joints of meat, loaves of bread baked on the establishment, white as milk and of a flavour that made one think of farmhouses and Mrs. Poyser; sacks of flour, potatoes, and other things of that kind; and an immense kitchen, with a wonderful array of ovens and boilers for cooking by steam; everything as polished and bright as a new bell, and not the smallest feature anywhere discernible that did not exhibit the completest signs of anxious and attentive supervision. This Well Street building may be called a Home, and in a sense may answer to that character, but in reality it is nothing but a fine, admirably managed marine hotel or club, filled with bedrooms a good deal more comfortable than many a one in a hotel that a man has had to pay five or six shillings a night for; providing liberal meals in the shape of breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper, and furnishing the seaman with all the comforts of a first-rate club for the extraordinary moderate charge of fifteen shillings a week. What does such an institution replace--or rather what is it designed to replace? I suppose there is no part of the sailor’s shore doings more talked about and less understood than the life he leads at the greasy little boarding-house kept by a crimp or a tailor, or, worse still, by old women and abandoned daughters. I stood gazing at one of these houses--a broken-down bit of a hole, with an evil, swaggering look in the posture of its door, and with dirty, stained white blinds in the windows--and thought what a wonderful, dreadful book might be made of the scenes that had taken place in it. A sailor-man was at my side, and I fell into a short talk with him.

“Do you regularly stop at the club?” I asked.

“Yes; it is my home whenever I am in London. I have used it for years, and so have scores of the men you see.”

“A pity all sailors are not equally alive to their own interests,” said I. “Here they are made really comfortable for a few shillings a week; money is advanced to them, clothes furnished to them at cost price, a hundred little comforts placed within their reach, and friends are at hand to help them to a berth if they find difficulty in getting a ship.”

“Perfectly true,” said my companion.

“What attraction beyond the privileges and happiness a residence in this club-house offers can they discover,” said I, pointing to the miserable little boarding-house we confronted, “in such a den as that?”

“Most of the men you find in such places are forced into them,” replied the man. “All about here is filled with touts and runners and their bullies. Sailors are watched coming ashore. They may want to put up at this Home; but the boarding-house runners are at hand to tumble ’em into cabs, drink is given them, the girls--and such girls!--are called in to help, and if the men are obstinate they are fallen upon and beaten; and, to such an extent is this kind of intimidation carried on, that, however anxious a man may be to rescue a shipmate from the hands of those rascals, he’ll think twice before he does it, for so sure as he attempts to interfere and bring a man to this Home, so sure is he of being fallen upon and half killed when he’s alone and the night’s come. There’s not a policeman hereabouts but is full of stories of such work.”

“And what, pray, is the sailor’s life in the low sort of lodging-house?”

“A vile debauch, as a rule, caused by the temptation thrust upon him. It would be difficult to make respectable people understand how he’s robbed. I knew a man who was brought to one of these dens and asked to ‘shout’--that is, to stand a drink all round. He did so, and was made drunk. Next day he was charged for eight ‘shouts,’ the people swearing he had ordered the liquor, and that it was not their fault if he was too intoxicated to remember. That’s only one sample. Abandoned women are kept in the pay of the slop tailors to bring seamen to their shops and press them to buy, and a single purchase at such places is enough to ruin a poor man. There are, no doubt, respectable boarding-houses, but they are few and far between; the most of them are kept by rascally men and women, who, taking the sailor as a simple-hearted fellow, fresh from a spell of salt water, and willing for a bit of a frisk, ply him until they have peeled him, and then kick him out. It was not long ago that a pencil-scrawl was brought to this Home. It had been chucked out of a lodging-house window by a man to a friend who was passing. It stated that the people of the house had stolen all the writer’s clothes, and it begged the manager to send up a suit that the man might get away.”

“Such things must be known to sailors?” said I.

“Ay,” he replied, “and a good deal more.”

“And yet many of them persist in putting up at those haunts?”

“I can’t account for it,” said he. “Here’s such a chance as any gentleman with plenty of money in his pocket might be glad to take; and yet there are sailors who’ll carry their bags or chests to the lodging-houses, as certainly knowing that they are going there to be robbed of all they have as that their feet are upon dry ground.”

I have only ventured to write down a very little part of what I was told about these lodging-houses. I will not pretend to be ignorant of much of the inner life of those places; but I own that some of the stories related to me filled me with horror and astonishment that such deeds should still be doing in this enlightened age of marine progress. But is it not strange that so truly valuable an institution as this Well Street Home, which counts bishops, marquises, admirals, and captains in abundance among its directors, should be deliberately neglected, and even viewed hostilely, by the Board of Trade, whose efforts to promote the interests of the sailor it helps to a degree no one would credit without close and careful investigation of its theory and practice? Why, for instance, should the Board of Trade decline to licence a shipping-master in connection with this Home? Surely the directorate should abundantly guarantee the character of the duties such an official would discharge. What conceivable object can the Board of Trade have in objecting to the Home endeavouring, by legal means, to obtain employment on board ship for the numerous highly respectable men who use the institution, and who must often want help to obtain a berth? The Home asks for no State help; it is self-supporting; it has extinguished a number of low public-houses and crimps’ haunts in its neighbourhood; it is doing a great work; and no man who values the sailor can read the list of gentlemen whose names are associated with it without an emotion of gratitude to them for the generous, wise and humane part they are playing. Surely it is the duty of the State to co-operate with the endeavours which the working of this Home exemplifies, and to omit nothing that may tend to lighten the labours of its exemplary officials and advance the truly national purpose for which it was originally established.

_THE PERILS OF HUMANITY._

“Sir,” said a middle-aged master of a merchantman to me a few days since, laying down his pipe in order to grope with both hands at once in his waistcoat-pockets, “I should very much like,” said he, looking now at one hand and now at another as he produced a number of odds and ends before lighting upon the things he wanted, “to have your opinion upon some documents which I cut out of a morning newspaper, and must have stowed away somewhere with such uncommon carefulness, that dash my wig if I know where I’ve put ’em!”

I waited whilst he groped and slapped himself, and explored a weather-beaten pocket-book. Finally returning again to his waistcoat, he produced with an air of triumph three newspaper cuttings, which, after putting on a pair of spectacles to read them first himself, he handed to me one at a time.

One was headed “Thanks.” The writer said that he considered it a portion of his duty to publicly express his deep gratitude and that of his surviving shipmates to Captain Townshend and the crew of the barque _M. J. Foley_, “who not only rescued us from a miserable death by frost and starvation, but did everything in their power, by the kindest possible treatment and self-sacrifice, to mitigate our intense suffering and supply our many wants.” The writer added that nautical men would fully appreciate the meaning of the addition of nineteen persons to a small crew in the winter-time; “but in this case my men were well fed, and we were sorry to be the means of every one being put on a limited supply of water.” The writer of this letter, brimful of honest, sailorly thanks, signed himself, “Abraham Evans, chief officer of the late _Bath City_ (s).”

My friend the shipmaster kept his gaze attentively fixed upon me whilst I read this newspaper extract, and on my putting it down called out, “Kindly now cast your eye over this document,” and handed me a second cutting.

This was headed “_Elba_, brig,” and was a request to be allowed to thank Captain Jacob Backer, of the Norwegian barque _Sarpen_, for rescuing the eight men who signed the letter “from our water-logged vessel, when only 2 lbs. of putrid meat stood between us and starvation. He gave us food, clothing, medicine, and every attendance, and was most ably seconded by his kind-hearted crew; and in the seven days we were on board his vessel he made us in a great measure forget the privations we had undergone.”

The third extract was of a similar character, signed by three survivors of a crew of fourteen souls.

“Well, sir,” said the shipmaster, as I handed him back the third and last cutting, “what do you think of these documents?”

I replied that they were expressions of gratitude honourable to the saved and to the savers, and that it was a pity such illustrations of the humanity and gratitude of seamen did not obtain more publicity than was generally given them, as not only was there nothing nobler in the world than the marine stories which the letters he had given me to read touchingly testified to, but that the interest of the sailor could never be better served than by landsmen again and again dwelling upon the bitter perils of his vocation, and upon the scores of illustrations of the magnanimity and generosity of his simple heart.

My friend the shipmaster listened to me very attentively, as though I had given him a new view of the subject; but, shaking his head suddenly, as if to clear his mind of all matter that was not in it before, he said, “Ay, it may be as you observe, and I’m not the man to tell you that sailors are likely to get more than what they ought to want. The point’s this: If it’s a beautiful thing to read such pieces of gratitude as these documents contain, how much more beautiful would the reading of them be if it was to be known what impediments, that have grown up like mangrove bushes from the lack of a proper Christian civilization to cut ’em down, a ship’s captain has to contend with in order to gratify his instincts as a man of feeling and compassion. It’s all very well,” said he, striking a match and holding a flame in the hollow of his hand as though a stiff breeze were blowing, “for landsmen to read those letters of thanks and to feel touched, and to talk of the generosity of sailors and the like. Why--since the laws which govern folks are made ashore, and not at sea--why, after they’ve done wiping their eyes over the humble thanks poor sailors give to them who save their lives, don’t they turn to and give a hand to the cause of humanity on the ocean by letting captains know that the laws of the British nation, anyway--leaving other countries out--will never let a man who does a noble act suffer for it as much, ay, and sometimes more than if he did a wrong? You hear of ships passing vessels in distress--taking no notice--pushing on, as if in a hurry to get out of sight. There is nothing in the marine reports which set my teeth more on edge than those yarns--nothing! But I’m master of a ship; I know the duties and responsibilities of that position. I’ve tried to do good, have hauled some fellow-mortals out of the very jaws of death, and have been so made to suffer for my humanity that when I think of it there comes into my mind a bitterness that makes me curse the ill-luck which drove me into the track of the sinking ship and her perishing crew. These are strong words, but if I don’t justify them you shall force me to eat ’em. Give me your attention for five minutes. I’ll try not to keep you longer; and if I should lose my temper and talk a bit stronger than you may think there’s need for, take no notice, but just quietly go on listening till I’ve done; and then, should I fall a-swearing, maybe I’ll have got you into a frame of mind fit to join me.

“In the middle of last October my ship sailed from a certain port--there’s no need to give any names--in ballast, bound on a voyage across the Atlantic. The weather was promising enough for three or four days after we got away; moderate, north-easterly winds which, crank as we were, enabled us to carry a fore-topmast studding-sail, and we drove along prettily enough, nothing happening to call for remark. But this sort of thing was too good to last; accordingly, at midnight or thereabouts on the fifth day of sailing, I was roused by the mate, and, hurrying on deck, found half a gale of wind blowing, everything in confusion, vessel almost on her beam ends, everything let go, and as much shindy aloft as would furnish out noise for a battle-field. It was a squall with a storm behind it. However, bit by bit we managed to roll up the canvas and save our spars, and when daylight broke we found ourselves under a lower maintop-sail, tumbling upon as savage a sea as was ever rolled up in a few hours by a gale in the Atlantic.

“This was the beginning of a deal of delay. The gale kept us humbugging about in one place--allowing for that lee drift which you’ll expect of a ship in ballast--for hard upon a week: then better weather came. We shook out reefs, mast-headed the yards, and crawled a trifle to wind’ard; but the slant was a short one; another gale came along and lasted three days; and so it went on, sometimes fine and most often foul, until at the end of thirty-six days we found ourselves a good deal closer to Europe than we were to America.

“Well, sir, the thirty-seventh day proved moderate; a breeze from the W.N.W., a heavy swell running to show that either a gale had been blowing or was coming, and pretty clear weather, with a little glimmer of sunshine now and again streaming through the cloud-rifts; enough to improve our spirits. I came on deck at half-past seven, and was taking a look at the weather and wondering if the swell that was making the ship roll like an empty cask was to signify more bother, when I was hailed by the mate, who sung out that there was a dark object upon the water, a point on the lee bow. I took the glass and made out the hull of a totally dismantled vessel--apparently a barque, but all that was left of her masts were three stumps barely showing above her topgallant bulwarks. She was water-logged--like a pancake on the swell that hid her with every send; and after taking another look at her, and not doubting from her appearance that she was abandoned, I put the glass down, waterlogged vessels being by no means rare objects in the North Atlantic.

“We were swarming along over the swell at about three to four knots an hour, and as we should pass the hulk pretty close to windward, I reckoned that if there was any poor miserable creature aboard her we were bound to see him as we drove by. However, I had scarcely put the glass down five minutes, and was standing looking over the taffrail, when the mate again hailed me, and on my going to where he stood peering through the telescope, he put the glass into my hand and told me to look yonder, for there was a boat full of men, heading directly for us. I looked, and sure enough saw a whole boat-load of human beings lifting and falling and coming towards us. It was more like an apparition than a real thing, for when I examined the wreck again I could not conceive how such a number of men had managed to keep by a hull which offered them no refuge aloft, and over whose decks the water rolled in shining masses, as she swung into the hollows.

“As the boat approached, we backed the mainyards, and lay waiting for her to come alongside. By this time I could make out no less than fourteen men, and a sadder freight of human beings I never want to see again. Their white faces, their streaming clothes, their gaunt, hollow looks, the languid movement of the oars, and, above all, the manner in which those who rowed kept their faces turned towards us upon their shoulders, as if they feared we should vanish if they did not keep their eyes fixed upon us, was a sight the most iron-hearted man could not have viewed without pain and grief. We hove them the end of a rope, and dragged the boat alongside; and I wanted no better assurance of the character of their sufferings and of the lamentable condition they were then in than their slow, weak motions as they caught the line, and got their oars in and stood up. One by one we lifted or helped them over the side--fourteen of them, sir. Some of them were too weak to answer our questions. My men took the seamen forward, holding them up as they walked, for they could scarcely use their limbs; and I carried the captain and the two mates into the cabin, where we furnished them with food and dry clothing, and then got them to bed.

“All this while we remained hove to with the wreck bearing about a mile distant from us on our lee bow. My own crew consisted of eleven hands only, and the job of helping the rescued men forward had given them work enough until the poor fellows were below. I went on deck, and found the mate singing out to the hands to swing the main-topsail and get way upon the ship. I stood looking on, full of thought. Presently the sails were trimmed, and I called the mate over to me.

“‘Do you know,’ said I, ‘that we have been very nearly forty days at sea?’

“‘Ay, sir,’ he answered, ‘I know it only too well.’

“‘We’re provisioned, Mr. ----,’ said I, giving him his name, ‘for one hundred and ten days, counting for our crew only. But if you add fourteen to eleven you get twenty-five, and that’s the number of people our provisions must now serve for.’

“He grew very thoughtful, and took a long look round at the weather.

“‘I fear,’ continued I, ‘that it will merely be tempting Providence to pursue our voyage with all these extra men aboard in the face of the ill-luck that’s dogged us for near upon forty days. If we’re to make no more headway than we’ve already done in the same time, I’m afraid,’ said I, pointing to the wreck that was slowly drawing abeam of us, ‘we shall be as badly off here as if we turned to and shipped ourselves aboard yonder hulk.’

“‘That’ll be about it, sir,’ said he. ‘The harness cask, to say nothing of the scuttle-butts, is much too small for fourteen extra hands, unless we’re to get a gale of wind astern of us.’

“‘Which we’ve got no right to expect,’ I answered.

“However, before I decided I thought I’d first take counsel with the captain we had rescued, and, on his waking up much refreshed in the afternoon, I put my position before him, and asked him for his opinion. He never hesitated when he heard how long we had been at sea and for how many days we had been provisioned. But I’m not sure that even his advice would have settled my resolution--for what can be more trying than to have to give up and go back, after beating about and toiling to get across for over a month?--had it not that same evening breezed up ahead with a stormy appearance. It was just as if the weather said, ‘No, you don’t.’ I took a look, listened a moment or two at the men singing out as they clewed up the topgallant-sails, and then told the mate to get his helm over and head the ship for the homeward passage.

“Now, sir, though it was disagreeable enough to have to go back after consuming so much time in getting forward, I was a good deal comforted by reflecting upon the cause that was sending me home. It was a cheerful thing, likewise, to see the men who had come aboard half-dead gradually recovering their health and spirits, and testifying their gratefulness by not only lending a hand with a will, but by striving to take all the work they could come at out of the hands of my crew. Besides, I will frankly own to you, sir, that I was buoyed up by the belief that any money difficulty that must follow my useless trip into the Atlantic--useless, I mean, in the commercial sense of that word--would be in some degree met by the owners of the craft whose people I had saved, and if not by them, then by the ‘authorities’--a sort of strange people who come into one’s head when one falls into an expecting mood, and stop there as if they were real and had all the disposition and power you fancy of ’em, though to my mind there’s no illusion to equal ’em, and ne’er a word in the English dictionary that makes a man fiercer to come across after he’s got, by writing letters and calling, to find out the true meaning of it.

“The nearest port was a French port, and there we arrived after a pretty quick run, and landed the rescued men, of whom I’ll say this--that their gratitude was such, that if they could have turned their bodies into gold so that we could have made sovereigns out of their flesh they’d have done it cheerfully. Well, sir, after I arrived in England, the first thing I did was to represent what I had done to the owners of the barque whose crew I had saved. I told them that I had been obliged to abandon my voyage in consequence of the assistance I had rendered, and that by so doing I had not only lost a voyage, but consumed the whole of my stores. No notice was taken of me; and when I complained to a friend who knows a good deal about the law, he said the wonder would have been if any notice _had_ been taken, as I had no claim whatever on the owners of the barque for the rescue of the crew.

“‘But,’ said I, ‘d’ye mean to tell me that there’s no Act of Parliament, no statute, no sort of general understanding, no kind of provision--call it by what name you will--to protect a man from suffering heavily in his pocket because he goes out of his way to save fourteen human lives?’

“‘No,’ says he.

“‘And must I,’ says I, ‘be compelled to pay off my crew--which I’ve done--and ship another--also done--and accept a twopenny freight to the West Indies to enable me to reprovision my ship--all which I’ve had to do--with never a living being in this whole wide world made responsible, either as the manager of a fund set apart for such cases, or as the owner of the wrecked vessel, or as the British Government itself, whose business it should be to encourage acts of humanity shown to those sailors it’s always bragging about and leisurely looking after, for the loss I’ve been put to?’

“‘Well,’ says he, ‘on reflection I think ye might drop a line to the “authorities”’--you know who he meant, sir: ‘there’s a fund called the Mercantile Marine Fund, out of which, I think--mind, I only think--the “authorities” may, if they think fit, pay a certain sum, whatever it be, in satisfaction of salvage where nothing more valuable has been saved than fourteen human lives.’

“‘Well,’ says I, ‘I’ll write to them;’ and so I did. And what do you think was the result?”

“I cannot imagine,” I replied.

“I got no answer,” said he. “I got no answer,” he repeated, passionately; “and there’s no more chance of my getting an answer than there is of----” he paused, and added, “I was going to say than there is of my stopping to pick up more shipwrecked mariners--but God forgive me for the fancy! It’s not in my head, sir. But, putting all sentiment aside, wouldn’t you consider mine a hard case? And is my loss made the lighter to me because I am asked to reflect whether I _ought_ to expect the authorities, or the owners, or anybody else to pay me for saving fourteen men from a dreadful death? Here, sir, you have one of the difficulties--one of the hundred difficulties--master-mariners have to contend with, as little known to or understood by landsmen as Jack comprehends the business of an attorney. It’s not for me to suggest what should be done. But when next you hear of shipwrecked sailors being abandoned by a passing ship, don’t be too quick to condemn the captain as a coward and a villain for leaving his fellow-beings to perish miserably, but say to yourself, ‘His heart was with them, and he’d have saved them if he had dared; but British civilization said, “Whatever you do you do at your own risk. If no harm befalls you, good and well; you shall pass by and nothing more be said or heard of your act; but if you lose money, don’t look to _me_,” says British civilization, “for the only answer you’ll get will be that you’re an impudent fellow to expect to recover any loss you incur in the service of humanity;”’ and so the skipper, knowing this to be true, sails away, holding that his wife and children at home must not be beggared that a perishing crew may be rescued.”

Thus speaking, my friend the shipmaster rose abruptly from his chair, pulled his hat down to his ears, and impetuously wishing me good day, left me to lapse into a very brown, I may almost say a very black, study.

_SMACK APPRENTICES._

“I don’t know what country he hailed from, I’m sure; but, thank the Lord, he wasn’t an Englishman,” said a smacksman, in the most fervent manner, to me the other day, speaking of Osmond Otto Brand, who was executed on the 23rd of May for the murder of an apprentice named William Papper or Pepper. At any other time than this I believe the story of that miscreant’s barbarity would have deeply stirred the public mind; but of late days[C] murder has become a common thing, much talked of and freely practised. People’s capacity of being horrified gets dulled by iteration of shocking news, and the significance of any one item in a blood-red catalogue loses value as a particular impression. Whatever effect, however, may have been produced by Brand’s crime on the lay mind outside the district where the murderer and his victim were known, there can be no doubt of the impression it has made upon smack-owners and smacksman all round the coast. There is scarcely a fisherman who has not the horrible story off by heart, who does not view the atrocious cruelties practised by the foreign smack-master as a foul disgrace to the fishing industries, and who does not indignantly lament that the men who helped Brand to slowly kill the miserable apprentice were not hanged along with their skipper. One result of Brand’s crime was to cause some questions to be asked in the House of Commons. There was also some talk about the whole subject of fishing apprentices being considered by Government. If it is to be dealt with it will be as well, perhaps, first to give the Hull murder time to drop out of memory. To adopt it as a text for legislation would assuredly be to mislead honourable members who vote without looking very deep into the matters on which their opinions are challenged. If the condition of the smack apprentice is an improvable feature of current life, it is not so merely because Brand slowly tortured Pepper to death. We must shelve all thoughts of that murder, and ask questions without the least reference to it. What is the life of a fishing apprentice at sea? What is it ashore? How is he fed and clothed? What is the nature of his relations with the owners’ interests? What is the average character of the men with whom he is thrown? These and other questions I will endeavour to answer from inquiries I have made into the inner or hidden part of the lives of a body of lads of whom the public know less than they know of any other kind of seafaring people.

I once wrote an account of a voyage in a smack in the North Sea. One such journey is enough for a lifetime, and the recollection of it makes me here declare--and I am sure there is not a sailor living who will contradict me--that of all the several forms of seafaring life there is absolutely none comparable in severity, exposure, hardship, and stern peril to that of the smacksman. His vessel is a small one; his cabin a little darksome hole; his working hours are full of harsh toil; he has to give battle to the wildest weather, to struggle on for bread through storm and snow and frost, through the long blackness of the howling winter’s night, through the grey wilderness of a foaming ocean swept by winds as pitiless as the hand of death. No legislation can alter these conditions of his life. Philanthropy will have its cod and sole and turbot. The fish must be caught, but caught in such a manner that those who shoot their trawls for them catch other things besides--a wild roughness of bearing, a defiance of civilized instincts, a sense of outlawed and neglected life that brings with it a fixed conviction of social immunity. “I’m a fisherman myself, sir,” a man once said to me; “and I’ll allow that there are many well-mannered, sober, steady men among us; but, taking us all round, you’ll not find a coarser set of human beings in the world; and, if you want to know the reason, you’ve only got to look at yonder smack, heading away into the North Sea, where, maybe, she’ll be heaving and tossing about for weeks, with ne’er a proper influence in the shape of books or company for the men to come at.”