The Honour of the Flag Part 4

"'No.' said the captain, letting fall his binocular, 'look for yourself. Yet, it's not a man, either.' He burst into a laugh as though for relief. 'It's a huge, hairy baboon, one of the biggest I ever saw in my life. He'll be as fierce as a mutinous crew, and strong as a frigate's complement. What's to be done with him?'

"'How in Egypt did he come on board?' said the mate, viewing the beast through the gla.s.s.

"'By that, maybe, sir,' exclaimed the second mate, pointing to some object floating flat and yellow, faint and far out upon the starboard quarter.

"The captain levelled the s.h.i.+p's telescope. 'A large raft!' he exclaimed, after some minutes of silent examination. 'Take a boat and examine it.'

"A quarter-boat was lowered, and the second mate and four men pulled away for the raft in the distance. It was a very large raft, manifestly launched by some country wallah in the last throes: a complicate huge grating, or floating platform, of immensely thick bamboos and spare spars, secured by turns of Manilla or coir rope. It was clean swept; not a rag was to be seen. Whether the sufferers had been taken off, leaving the baboon behind them, whether they had died, and the wash of the ocean had slipped their bodies overboard, the baboon holding on to the raft, who was to tell? 'At sea,' said Lord Nelson, 'nothing is impossible and nothing improbable.'

"The raft had floated to the bows of the s.h.i.+p in the silent midnight, and the baboon sprang aboard and aloft.

"The creature on high was a clear picture in the bright suns.h.i.+ne. It made many dreadful grimaces, by the exhibition of its teeth, and when the boat drew alongside it moved and stood up, and showed a great tail, then hung with one fist, looking down. It next descended with the velocity of wind into the foretop.

"The captain said: 'The beast don't seem faint, but I guess he's thirsty, and he may fall mad, come down, and bite some of us. So,'

says he to the chief officer, 'send a hand aloft with a bucket of fresh water for the poor brute and a pocketful of s.h.i.+p's bread. If we can civilise him, so much the better.'

"But it never came to it," said the grey-haired respectable seaman.

"The creature fled to the cross-trees nimble as light when he saw a couple of seamen mounting to the top, then descended, and ate and drank ravenously when they had come down, which feeding murdered him, and ruined the captain's hopes of carrying the fellow to London and selling him at a large price to the Zoological Gardens. For he refused to come on deck. He bared his teeth, and his eyes shone with the malice of h.e.l.l if the men attempted to approach him. It was impossible to let him rest aloft throughout the night to command the s.h.i.+p, so to speak; for he might sink to the deck stealthy as the shadow of a cloud blown by the wind, and he was strong enough and big enough to tear a sleeping man's throat out.

"'He must be shot,' said the captain, and he told the second mate to fetch his rifle.

"The second mate, that he might make sure of his aim, went aloft into the foretop. The beast was then sitting on the topgallant yard. He had been in command of the fabric of the fore all day. Had it come on to blow so as to oblige the captain to shorten sail, the deuce a seaman durst have gone aloft to stow the canvas. The second mate, standing in the top, was in the act of lifting his rifle, when the monster, running on all fours out to the dizzy topgallant yard-arm, stood erect a breathless instant, poised--in human posture--a marvellous picture of the man-beast against the liquid blue, then sprang into the air.

"'Come down,' roared the captain to the second mate, 'and shoot him through the head, for G.o.d's sake!'

"As the beast rose with a wild grin after having been so long out of sight through the frightful height he had jumped from, you'd have thought he'd have risen with a burst skin, the captain bawled out, 'Blessed if he's not making for his raft.'

"The baboon, with a fixed expression, and with eyes askew upon the s.h.i.+p as he drove past, swimming very finely with long easy flourishes of his arms and dexterous thrusts of his legs, whilst the end of his tail stood up astern of him as though it was some comical little man there steering,--the baboon, I say, was undoubtedly and with amazing sagacity making straight for the raft, having taken its bearings when aloft; but at the moment the second mate knelt to level his piece, meaning to murder the poor brute out of pure mercy, the thing uttered, oh, my G.o.d! what a horrible cry! and vanished, and a quant.i.ty of blood rose and dyed a bright patch upon the calm blue. No more was seen of the baboon, but a little later the black scythe-like fins of three sharks showed in the spot where he had disappeared."

_Plums from a Sailor's Duff._

It has been commonly expected of sailors in all ages that they should encounter nothing upon the ocean but hair-breadth escapes. The theory is that the mariner but half discharges his duties when his experiences are limited to his work as a seaman. That he may be fully and perfectly accomplished vocationally he must know what it is to have been cast away, to have barely come off with his life out of a s.h.i.+p on fire, to have been overboard on many occasions in heavy seas, to have chewed pieces of lead in open boats to a.s.suage his thirst--to have encountered, in short, most of the stock horrors of the oceanic calling. Considering, however, that the sailor goes to sea holding his life in his hands, I cannot but think that his mere occupation is perilous enough to satisfy the romantic demands of the sh.o.r.e-going dreamer. It is feigned that the sea-faring life is not one jot more dangerous than most of the laborious callings followed ash.o.r.e. Let no man credit this. The sailor never springs aloft, never slides out to a yard-arm, never gives battle to the thunderous canvas, scarcely performs a duty, indeed, that does not contain a distinct menace to his life. That the calling has less of danger in it in these days than it formerly held I will not undertake to determine. If in former times s.h.i.+ps put to sea dest.i.tute of the scientific equipment which characterises the fabrics of this age, the mariner supplied the deficiencies of the s.h.i.+pyard by caution and patience. He was never in a hurry. He waited with a resigned countenance upon the will of the wind. He plied his lead and log-line with indefatigable diligence.

There was no prompt despatch in his day, no headlong thundering, through weather as thick as mud in a winegla.s.s, to reach his port. We have diminished many of the risks he ran through imperfect appliances, but, on the other hand, we have raised a plentiful stock of our own, so that the balance between then and now shows pretty level.

My sea-faring experiences covered about eight years, and they hit a traditional period of immense moment--I mean the gradual transformation of the marine fabric from wood into iron. I was always afloat in wood, however, and never knew what it was to have an iron plate between me and the yearning wash of the brine outside until I went on a voyage to Natal and back in a big ocean steamer that all day long throbbed to the maddened heart in her engine room, like some black and gleaming leviathan rendered hysterical by the lances of whalers feeling for its life, and all night stormed through the dark ocean shadow like a body of fire, faster than a gale of wind could in my time have driven the swiftest clipper keel that furrowed blue water.

What hair-breadth escapes did I meet with? I have been asked. Was I ever marooned? Ever cast away, as Jack says, on the top crust of a half-penny loaf? Ever overboard among sharks? Ever gazing madly round the horizon, the sole occupant of a frizzling boat, in search of a s.h.i.+p where I might obtain water to cool my blue and frothing lips?

Well, my duff is not a very considerable one, and the few plums in it I fear are almost wide enough apart to be out of hail of one another.

However a sample or two will suffice to enable me to keep my word and to write something at all events autobiographic.

So let us start off Cape Horn on a July day in the year of grace 1859.

The s.h.i.+p was a fine old Australian liner, a vessel of hard upon 1400 tons, a burden that in those days const.i.tuted a large craft. She was commanded by one Captain Neatby, something of a favourite I believe in the pa.s.senger trade--a careful old man with bow-legs and a fiery grog-blossom of a nose. He wore a tall chimney-pot hat in all weathers, and was reckoned a very careful man because he always furled his fore and mizzen royals in the first dog-watch every night. We were a long way south; I cannot remember the exact lat.i.tude, but I know it was drawing close upon sixty degrees. There was a talk in the mids.h.i.+pmen's berth amongst us that the captain was trying his hand at the great Circle course, but none of us knew much about it down in that gloomy, 'tween-decks, slush-flavoured cavern in which we youngsters lived. I was fourteen years old, homeward bound on my first voyage; a little bit of a mids.h.i.+pman, burnt dry by Pacific suns, with a mortal hatred and terror of the wild, inexpressibly bitter cold of the roaring ice-loaded parallels in whose Antarctic twilight our n.o.ble s.h.i.+p was plunging and rolling now under a fragment of maintopsail, now under a reefed foresail and double-reefed foretopsail, chased by the shrieking western gale that flew like volleys of scissors and thumbscrews over our taffrail, and by seas, whose glittering, flickering peaks one looked up at from the neighbourhood of the wheel as at the brows of tall and beetling cliffs. The gale was white with snow, and dark with the blinding fall of it too, when I came on deck at noon. I was in the chief mate's, or port watch, as it is called. The s.h.i.+p was running under a double-reefed topsail--in those days we carried single sails,--reefed foresail, close-reefed foretopsail, and maintopmast staysail. The snow made a London fog of the atmosphere; forward of the galley the s.h.i.+p was out of sight at times when it came thundering down out of the blackness aft, white as any smother of spume. She pitched with the majesty of a line-of-battle s.h.i.+p, as she launched herself in long floating rushes from gleaming pinnacle to seething valley with a heavy, melancholy sobbing of water all about her decks, and her narrow, distended band of maintopsail hovering overhead black as a raven's pinion in the flying h.o.a.riness. We were was.h.i.+ng through it at twelve or thirteen knots an hour, though the s.h.i.+p was as stiff as a madman in a strait-jacket, with the compressed wool in her hold and loaded down to her main-chain bolts besides. By two bells (one o'clock) forward of the break of the p.o.o.p the decks were deserted, though now and again, amidst some swiftly pa.s.sing flaw in the storm of snow, you might just discern the gleaming shapes of two men on the look-out on the forecastle, with the glimpse of a figure in the foretop, also on the watch for anything that might be ahead. The captain in his tall hat was stumping the deck to and fro close against the wheel, cased in a long pilot coat, under the skirts of which his legs, as he slewed round, showed like the lower limb of the letter O.

Through the closed skylight windows I could get a sort of watery view of the cuddy pa.s.sengers--as they were then called--reading, playing at chess, playing the piano, below. There were some scores of steerage and 'tween-deck pa.s.sengers, deeper yet in the bowels of the s.h.i.+p, but hidden out of sight by the closed hatches.

I know not why it should have been, but I was the only mids.h.i.+pman on the p.o.o.p, though the s.h.i.+p carried twelve of us, six to a watch. The other five were doubtless loafing about under cover somewhere. I stood close beside the chief mate to windward, holding to the bra.s.s rail that ran athwart the break of the p.o.o.p. This officer was a Scotchman, a man named Thompson, and I suppose no better seaman ever trod a s.h.i.+p's deck. He was talking to me about getting home, asking me whether I would rather be off Cape Horn in a snow-storm or making ready to sit down with my brothers and sisters at my father's table to a jolly good dinner of fish and roast beef and pudding, when all on a sudden he stopped in what he was saying, and fell a-sniffing violently.

"I smell ice," said he, with a glance aft at the captain.

"Smell ice!" thought I, with a half look at him, for I believed he was joking. For my part, it was all ice to me--one dense, yelling atmosphere of snow; every flake barbed, and the cold of a bitterness beyond words. He fell a-sniffing again, quickly and vehemently, and stepped to the side, sending a thirsty look into the white blindness ahead, whilst I heard him mutter, "There 's ice close aboard, there 's ice close aboard!" As he spoke the words, there arose a loud and fearful cry from the forecastle.

"Ice right ahead, sir!"

"Ice right ahead, sir!" repeated the chief mate, whipping round upon the captain.

"I see it, sir! I see it, sir!" roared the skipper. "Hard a starboard, men! Hard a starboard for your lives! Over with it!"

The two fellows at the helm sent the spokes flying like the driving-wheel of a locomotive; the long s.h.i.+p, upborne at the instant by a huge Pacific sea, paid off like a creature of instinct, sweeping slowly but surely to port just in time. For right on the starboard bow of us there leapt out into proportions terrible and magnificent, within a musket shot of our rail, an iceberg that looked as big as St. Paul's Cathedral, with stormy roaring of the gale in its ravines and valleys, and the white smoke of the snow revolving about its pinnacles and spires like volumes of steam, and a volcanic noise of mighty seas bursting against its base and recoiling from the adamant of its crystalline sides in acres of foam. We were heading for it at the rate of thirteen miles an hour as neatly as you point the end of a thread into the eye of a needle. In a few minutes we should have been into it, crumbled against it, dissolved upon the white waters about it, and have met a nameless end. Boy as I was, and bitter as was the day, I remember feeling a stir in my hair as I stood watching with open mouth the pa.s.sage of the mountainous ma.s.s close alongside into the pale void astern, whilst the s.h.i.+p trembled again to the blows and thumps of vast blocks of floating ice.

"Ice right ahead, sir!" came the cry again, nor could we clear the jumble of bergs until the dusk had settled down, when we hove-to for the night. No one was hurt, but I suppose no closer shave of the kind ever happened to a s.h.i.+p before.

Again, and this time once more off Cape Horn. It was my third voyage; I was still a mids.h.i.+pman, and in the second mate's watch. I came on deck at midnight and found the s.h.i.+p hove-to, breasting what in this age of steamboats, and, for the matter of that, perhaps in any other age, might be termed a terrific sea. She was making good weather of it--that is to say, she kept her decks dry, but she was diving and rolling most hideously, with such swift headlong shearing of her spars through the gale that the noises up in the blackness aloft were as though the spirits of the inmates of a thousand lunatic asylums had been suddenly enlarged from their bodies and sent yelling into limbo.

The wind blew with an unendurable edge in the sting and bite of it.

The second mate and I, each with a rope girdling his waist to swing by, stood m.u.f.fled up to our noses under the lee of a square of canvas seized to the mizzen shrouds. Presently he roared into my ear, "Sort of a night for a pannikin of coffee, eh, Mr. Russell?" "Ay, ay, sir,"

I replied, and with that, liberating myself from the rope, I clawed my way along the line of the hencoops--the decks sometimes sloping almost up and down to the heavy weather _scends_ of the huge black billows,--and descended into the mids.h.i.+pmen's berth. It was not the first time I had made a cup of coffee for myself and the second mate in the middle watch during cold weather. An old nurse who had lived in my family for years had given me an apparatus consisting of a spirit-lamp and a funnel-shaped contrivance of block tin, along with several pounds of very good coffee, and with this I used to keep the second mate and myself supplied with the real luxury of a hot and aromatic drink during wet and frosty watches. The mids.h.i.+pmen's berth was a narrow room down in the 'tween decks, bulkheaded off from the sides, fitted with a double row of bunks, one on top of another, the lower beds being about a foot above the deck. There were five mids.h.i.+pmen all turned in and fast asleep. The others, who were on watch, were cl.u.s.tered under the break of the p.o.o.p for the shelter there. A lonely one-eyed sort of slush lamp, with sputtering wick and stinking flame, swung wearily from a blackened beam, rendering the darkness but little more than visible. I slung my little cooking apparatus near to it, filled the lamp with spirits of wine, put water and coffee into the funnel, and then set fire to the arrangement. I stood close under it, wrapped from head to foot in gleaming oilskins--looking a very bloated little shape, I don't doubt, from the quant.i.ty of clothing I wore under the waterproofs,--waiting for the water to boil. The seas roared in thunder high above the scuttles to the wild and sickening dipping of the s.h.i.+p's side into the trough. The humming of the gale pierced through the decks with the sound of a crowd of bands of music in the distance, all playing together and each one a different tune. The mids.h.i.+pmen snored, and coats and smallclothes hanging from the bunk stanchions wearily swung sprawling out and in, like bodies dangling from gallows in a gale of wind.

All in a moment a sea of unusual weight and fury took the s.h.i.+p and hove her down to the height as you would have thought, of her topgallant rail; the headlong movement sent me sliding to leeward; the forethatch of my sou'wester struck the spirit-lamp; down it poured, in a line of fire upon the deck, where it surged to and fro in a sheet of flame, with the movements of the s.h.i.+p. I was so horribly frightened as to be almost paralysed by the sight of that flickering stretch of yellowish light, sparkling and leaping as it swept under the lower bunks and came racing back again to the bulkhead with the windward incline. I fell to stamping upon it in my sea-boots, little fool that I was, hoping in that way to extinguish it. A purple-faced mids.h.i.+pman occupied one of the lower bunks, and his long nose lay over the edge of it. He opened his eyes, and after looking sleepily for a moment or two at the coating of pale fire rus.h.i.+ng from under his bed, he snuffed a bit, and muttering, "Doocid nice smell; burnt brandy, ain't it?" he turned over and went to sleep again with his face the other way.

I was in an agony of consternation, and yet afraid of calling for help lest I should be very roughly manhandled for my carelessness. There was a deal of "raffle" under the bunks--sea-boots, little bundles of clothing, and I know not what else; but thanks to Cape Horn everything was happily as damp as water itself. There was therefore nothing to kindle, nor was there any aperture through which the burning spirit could run below into the hold; so by degrees the flaming stuff consumed itself, and in about ten minutes' time the planks were black again. I went on deck and reported what had happened to the second mate. All he said was "My G.o.d!" and instantly ran below to satisfy himself that there was no further danger. I can never recall that little pa.s.sage of my life without a shudder. There were a hundred and ninety-five souls of us aboard, and had I managed to set the s.h.i.+p on fire that night the doom of every living creature would have been a.s.sured, seeing that no boat could have lived an instant in such a sea as was then running.

In a very different climate from that of Cape Horn I came very near to meeting with an extremely ugly end. It was a little business entirely out of the routine of the ordinary ocean dangers, but the memory of it sends a thrill through me to this hour, though it is much past twenty years ago since it happened. I was making my second voyage aboard a small full-rigged s.h.i.+p that had been hired by the Government for the conveyance of troops to the East Indies. I was the only mids.h.i.+pman; the other youngsters consisted of five apprentices. We occupied a deck-house a little forward of the main-hatch. This house was divided by a fore and aft bulkhead; the apprentices lived in the port compartment, the third and fourth mates and myself slung our hammocks on the starboard side. The third mate was a man of good family, aged about twenty-one, a young Hercules in strength, with heavy under-jaws and the low, peculiar brow of the prize-fighter. He had been a mids.h.i.+pman in Smith's service, and was a good and active sailor, very nimble aloft and expert in his work about the s.h.i.+p, but of a sullen, morose disposition, and a heavy drinker whenever the opportunity to get drink presented itself. I think he was regarded by all hands as a little touched, but I was too young to remark in him any oddities which might strike an older observer. He was given to delivering himself of certain dark, wild fancies. I remember he once told me that if he owed a man a grudge he would not scruple to plant himself alongside of him on a yard on a black night and kick the foot-rope from under him when his hands were busy, and so let him go overboard.

But this sort of talk I would put down to mere boasting, and indeed I thought nothing of it.

We were in the Indian Ocean, and one evening I sat at supper (as tea, the last meal on board s.h.i.+p, is always called) along with this man and the fourth mate. We fell into some sort of nautical argument, and in the heat of the discussion I said something that caused the third mate to look at me fixedly for a little while, whilst he muttered under his breath, in a kind of half-stifled way, as though his teeth were set. I did not catch the words, but I am quite certain from the fourth mate's manner, that he had heard them, and that he knew what was in the other's mind. I say this because I recollect that very shortly afterwards the fellow rose and walked out on deck with an air about him as if he was willing to give the third mate a chance of being alone with me. It was a mean trick, but then he was a cowardly rogue, and when I afterwards heard that he had been dismissed from the service he had formerly entered for robbing his s.h.i.+pmates of money and tobacco and the humble trifles which sailors carry about with them in their sea-chests I was wicked enough, recalling how he had walked out of that deck-house, leaving me, a little boy, alone with a strong, brutal, crazy third mate, to hope that he might yet prove guilty of larger sins still, for I could not but regard him as a creature that deserved to be hanged. The instant this man stepped through the door the third mate jumped up and closed it. It travelled in grooves, and he whipped it to with a temper which caused the whole structure to echo again to the blow.

"Now, you young--" he exclaimed, turning his bulldog face, white with rage, upon me, yet speaking in a cold voice that was more terrifying to listen to than if he had roared out, "I have you and I mean to punish you," and with that he unclasped his heavy belt, and then clasped it again so as to make a double thong of the leather, and grasped me by the collar.

What my feelings were I am unable to state at this distance of time. I believe I was more astonished than frightened. I could not imagine that this huge creature was in earnest in offering to beat me for what I had said, and yet I was sensible too of an unnatural fire in his eyes--a glow that put an expression of savage exultation into them; and this look of his somehow held me motionless and speechless. He half raised his arm, but a sudden irresolution possessed him, as though my pa.s.sivity was a check upon his intentions.

"No, no," he exclaimed, after a little, "I'll manage better than this"; and still grasping me by the collar of my jacket he dropped his belt and ran me to the fore end of the compartment, threw me on my back, and knelt upon me. Within reach of his arm, kneeling as he was, were three shelves on which we kept such crockery and cutlery as we owned, along with our slender stores of sugar and flour and the cold remains of previous repasts. He felt for a knife; I could hear the blades rattle as his fingers groped past his curved wrist for one of them, and then flouris.h.i.+ng the black-handled weapon in front of my eyes he exclaimed, "Now I'm going to murder you." I lay stock-still; I never uttered a word; I scarcely breathed indeed. Again, I say that I do not know that I was terrified. My condition was one of semi-stupefaction, I think, with just enough of sense left in me to comprehend that if I uttered the least cry or struggled, no matter how faintly, I should transform him into a wild beast. Nothing but my lying corpse-like under the pressure of his knee saved me, I am certain. My gaze was fixed upon his face, and I see him now staring at me with his little eyes on fire, and the knife poised ready to plunge.

This posture maybe he retained for two or three minutes; it ran into long hours to me. Then on a sudden he threw the knife away backwards over his shoulder, rose and went to the door, where he stood a little staring at me intently. I continued to lie motionless. He opened the door and pa.s.sed out, on which I sprang to my feet and fled as nimbly as my legs would carry me to the p.o.o.p, where I found the chief mate.

He was a little Welshman of the name of Thomas, a brother of Ap Thomas, the celebrated harpist, and if he be still alive and these lines should meet his eyes, let him be pleased to know that my memory holds him in cordial respect as the kindest officer and the smartest seaman I ever had the fortune to be s.h.i.+pmates with. To him I related what had happened.

"O--ho," cried he, "attempted murder, hey? Our friend must be taught that we don't allow this sort of thing to happen aboard _us_."

He gave certain orders and shortly afterwards the third mate was seized and locked up in a spare cabin just under the break of the p.o.o.p. Two powerful seamen were told off to keep him company. How much the unfortunate man needed this sort of control I could not have imagined but for my hearing that he was locked up and my going to the cabin window that looked on to the quarter deck to take a peep at him if he was visible. He saw me and bounded to the window, bringing his leg-of-mutton fist against it with a blow that crashed the whole plate of gla.s.s into splinters. His face was purple, his eyes half out of their sockets. There was froth upon his lips, with such a general distortion of features that it would be impossible to figure a more horrible ill.u.s.tration of madness than his countenance. I bolted as if the devil had been after me, catching just a glimpse of the powerful creature wrestling in the grasp of the two seamen who were dragging him backwards into the gloom of the cabin. Such an escape as this I regard as distinctly more eventful, if not more romantic, than falling overboard and being rescued when almost spent, or being picked up after a fortnight's exposure in an open boat. My most sleep-murdering nightmares nearly always include the phantom form of that burly, crazed third mate kneeling upon my motionless little figure and feeling for a knife on one of the shelves just over my head.

Another little plum out of my plain sailor's pudding. This time my s.h.i.+p was an East Indian trader that whilst lying at Calcutta was chartered by the Government to convey troops to the North of China. It was in 1860. Difficulties had arisen, and John Chinaman was to be attacked. We proceeded to Hong Kong with the headquarters of the 60th Rifles on board, and thence to the Gulf of Peche-li, which I should say submitted one of the finest spectacles in the world, with its congregations of transports and English and French and Yankee s.h.i.+ps of war. It was an old-world scene which the sponge of time has obliterated for ever, and I behold again in memory those two n.o.ble frigates, the _Imperieuse_ and the _Chesapeake_, straining tightly at their cables, with smoke-stacks too modest in proportions to impair to the critical nautical eye the tack and sheet suggestions of the graceful, exquisitely symmetrical fabric of spars and yards and rigging soaring triumphantly aloft to where the long whip or pennant at the main flickered like a delicate line of fire against the hard cold blue of the Asiatic sky.

We lay for many months in that bay, and were obliged repeatedly to send ash.o.r.e for fresh meat, vegetables, and the like. On one occasion I recollect going with the mate in the long-boat some distance up the river Peiho, a rus.h.i.+ng, turbid stream at the mouth of which the Chinese had fixed a very _chevaux-de-frise_ of spikes, upon which they had fondly hoped our men-of-war would impale themselves, forgetting that the depth of water scarcely permitted the approach of a shallow gunboat. We were returning to the s.h.i.+p with a fair wind, and on top of the fierce rush of the river, when our helmsman run us plump against one of Johnny's huge impalers. The shock of the blow threw the mate into an immense basket of fresh eggs. He fell with a squelch past all power of forgetting, and lay wriggling in a very quagmire of yolk and white and fragments of sh.e.l.ls. We pulled him out blind and streaming with eggs. His aspect was so preposterously absurd that the helmsman, rendered almost imbecile by laughter, let the boat drive into a second pile, when, as I live to write it, the mate, who was cleaning himself near to the basket, was thrown a second time into the glutinous mess!

I will not attempt to repeat the sea-blessings he bestowed upon the steersman. Happily eggs were cheap, and a dollar might have represented a more considerable smash. Now it was two days following this that the captain sent the long-boat to procure some sheep and poultry from a little village situated close to the sh.o.r.es of the bay on the north of the river. The second mate took charge, and I and another mids.h.i.+pman and a couple of sailors went along with him. We landed and left the boat in charge of a seaman, and strolled towards the village. The second mate was a wild, dissolute young fellow, who, before he quitted China, became the recipient of more than one round dozen by order of the provost-marshal for looting. A little knot of Chinamen stood watching as we approached, whilst just beyond we caught sight of a couple of women hobbling nimbly away out of reach of our sight, as though they walked on stilts. Sherman--for such was the second mate's name,--approaching the Chinamen, began with them in pigeon English. They did not understand. He exhibited a few dollars, and traced the outline of a sheep upon the ground, and, with many surprising motions of his arms, sought to acquaint them with the object of his visit. All to no purpose. "What's to be done?" said Sherman, looking at us. "There's nothing that resembles a sheep hereabouts." His eyes suddenly brightened as they lighted on a large concourse of c.o.c.ks and hens pecking in tolerably close order at some fifty paces distant from us. "Boys," he shouted, "as these chaps can't be made to understand, let's help ourselves. Each one seize what he can get and make for the boat. Follow me." He sprang with incredible agility towards the fowls, and in a trice had a couple of them shrieking and fluttering in his grasp. In a breath the Chinamen--thirty or forty strong--uttering a long, peculiar shout, armed themselves with pitchforks--at all events, a species of weapon that to my young eyes resembled a pitchfork,--sticks, and stones, and gave chase. They tramped after us with the noise of an army in pursuit.

We flew towards the boat, screaming to the fellow in charge to haul in and receive us. A stone struck me in the small of my back, and urged me forwards faster than my legs were travelling. Down I should have tumbled on my nose, and in that posture have been straightway ma.s.sacred, but for the timely grip of a sailor who was running by my side. "Hold up, my hearty!" he roared, hooking his fingers into the back of my collar and jerking me backwards. In a few moments we gained the boat, wading waist-high to come at her, and rolling like drunken men over her gunwale into her bottom. A volley of stones rattled about our ears, but we were safe. Had the Chinamen carried firearms, not one of us but must have been shot down.

I could relate a score or more of such experiences: of ugly collisions with the police in Calcutta, of a narrow escape of being thrown overboard by a dinghy-wallah of the river Hooghley, of a desperate fight in the slings of the mizzen-topgallant yard with an apprentice of my own age, and the like; but the s.p.a.ce at my disposal obliges me to conclude. Very little of the heroic enters the sailor's life. The risks he runs, the adventures he encounters, have, as a rule, nothing of the romantic in them; they are mainly brought about by his own foolhardiness, by the proverbial carelessness that is utterly irreconcilable with the stern obligations of vigilance, alertness, and foresight imposed upon him by the nature of his calling, by the imbecility of s.h.i.+pmates, and much too often by drink. Yet no matter what the cause of most of the perils he meets with, his experiences, I take it, head the march of professional dangers. Small wonder that faith in the "sweet little cherub that sits up aloft" should still linger in the forecastle. For certainly were it not for the bright look-out kept over him by some sort of maritime angel, the mariner would rank foremost as amongst the most perishable of human products.