Chapter Seven.
A Pleasure Sail.
“Oh, mamma, I do hope the weather will be fine!” said pretty Miss Hodson.
“Well, my dear Clara, isn’t it fine? Why, a more delightful day could not well be imagined.”
“Yes, now, mamma; but I mean all along on this adventuresome voyage that we are about to take.”
“Don’t you bother your little head, my mouse,” said her father, fondling one of her little hands in his. “I know enough about the weather to give a forecast a week beforehand, and a good deal about the sea, too, though I confess I’ve never been on it much. Ahem!”
The speakers were seated in a cab that was rattling along the quay of Aberdeen on a lovely morning in April. There were monster boxes on top, another cab filled with luggage only came up behind, and still another containing three gentlemen.
Very distinguished men these were, indeed, though oddly ill-matched in appearance. Number 1, let me call him, was a true type of a middle-aged John Bull—tall, whiskered, stout, strong, yet calm and thoughtful withal. Number 2 might have been a Boston editor or an Edinburgh genius of the old school. He was medium in height, lanky rather, high in cheek-bone, deep in eye. He wore no beard, but had a bushy moustache and very long grey hair. Number 3 was evidently a fat Frenchman, rotund to a degree, black as to hair, which was cropped as short as a convict’s, and moustache, but so fat! You could best describe his outline by letters, thus—take a big O and a little o and two letters l. Now stick the little o on the top of the big O and you have his head and body. Then clap on the two l’s to represent his legs, and you have his lines complete. He was so stout that when he stuck out his little white hands, with their palms upwards, as Frenchmen have a habit of doing in argument, the finger-tips did not project an inch beyond him in front. But Number 1 was no less an individual than Sir Thomas Merino; Number 2 was the Baron de Bamber; and Number 3, Count Koskowiskey himself.
The little boys in Aberdeen had never before seen such a strange procession of cabs, nor such a strange crew inside, so that they felt constrained to run alongside and wave their ragged bonnets and shout themselves hoarse.
The savants, for such they were, thought to purchase peace with a shower of coppers. This only increased the crowd, and no beggars in Cairo ever yelled for backsheesh as did those boys for “bawbees.”
But things do not last for ever, and at length the cabs drew up, one by one, at a gangway that stretched from the shore to the quarter-deck of the good ship Icebear. The gangway was covered with scarlet cloth, a neatly dressed sailor stood at each side of the shore end to steady it, and Captain Claude Alwyn stood at the other ready to receive his guests.
He looked very handsome did our Claude, in his peaked cap, reefing-jacket of simple blue, and gilt buttons.
He doffed his cap as he handed the ladies on board, and was rewarded by a smile from Mrs Hodson, and a blushet—let me coin a word—from Clara, her daughter.
Now, it was evident that Professor Hodson was the head of the party; for no sooner had every one of them taken a good look round the gallant ship than he remarked, “Now, gentlemen, what do you say—shall we have an early dinner and then sail, or sail first and have a more comfortable one out at sea! I propose the latter plan.”
“Professor,” said his wife, sternly, “I propose the former; and ladies, I think, should carry the sway.”
“They generally do,” sighed the professor, who looked subdued and henpecked, as distinguished savants are apt to be.
“Your proposal is best, madam,” put in Claude, smiling. “It is best to have it over. You can sup afterwards; that is,” he added mysteriously, “if any of you will care to.”
“Oh, we shall all sup,” said the professor. “The ocean always gives me an appetite.” (N.B.—He had been three times from London to Ramsgate by steamer.)
“Most sartainlee, capitaine,” said the French savant.
To have seen the way the gentlemen, and—pardon me, my lady readers—the ladies also, enjoyed that excellent dinner, one would have said there would be little need for supper.
The saloon was long and comfortable, though there was nothing of the boudoir about it. Claude himself had seen to everything personally. It was a very brilliant and select little party that assembled on deck about an hour afterwards. The élite, or rather the literary élite, of the city had come to wish the Icebear “God-speed?”
“What am I to do with all these flowers, sir?” the steward asked that same afternoon, when he got a word with the captain.
“Keep the choicest for the saloon,” was the reply, “and distribute the rest impartially for’ard.”
The Icebear was a lovely vessel, both fore and aft. She had been originally intended for a man-of-war to add to the navy of a far-off foreign potentate; but as the potentate in question did not, or could not, pay at the right moment, after waiting a goodly time the builder very properly put her in the market, and she was knocked down at a reasonable figure to our savant friends. About 1500 tons burden she was, low in bulwarks, flush in deck, with no great breadth of beam, though with more than the coffin-ships they often send poor Jack to sea in—things with no breadth at all to speak of, and that go over and down in a breeze, and in sea-way that a Peterhead herring-boat would laugh at. The Icebear was sturdy and strong all over, had good engines, good shaft and screw—she carried a spare one. Forward, the bows were of triple strength, moderately sharp, and shod with iron, to aid in boring through the ice.
She had three respectable masts, not heavy enough to weigh her over on her beam-ends if a squall struck her broadside, nor light enough to snap like pea-sticks if a puff came. When under sail the screw could be hoisted up into a kind of covered well, and the advantage of this will be found when the ship gets farther north.
Not a yard of canvas, not a fathom of cordage, that had not been examined and tested by Claude himself.
So much for the exterior. “Downstairs,” as landsmen would say, she was fitted up with a view to the utmost comfort. The men’s sleeping-berths forward and amidships were bunks and hammocks. The crew all told was ninety men, or would be when the vessel lay in at Kirkwall to ship additional hands.
Remember, there was no lumber of any kind on the upper deck. No unsightly cabins or rooms, only forward was the winch and then the steerage cabin, the capstan, the midship companion; and aft the saloon and cabin skylights and companions, the wheel-house and binnacle. I hope I am not talking Greek to my readers, who are probably not all nautical; but I wish it to be understood that the Icebear’s decks were most roomy, nothing at all unnecessary being built or even lying thereon—a deck on which you could waltz with delight, or fight without discomfort. The captain’s quarters, or rather his private room, occupied the after-part of the ship under the wheel-house, and was charmingly furnished, with a splendid stove, warm, soft carpets, a lounge, easy-chairs, a swing-cot, a library of choice books, and two ports that looked out over the sea. There, then I what more would you have in a private room afloat? and, mind you, it was the whole width of the ship. It had a private staircase. But the wardroom, or principal saloon, which lay under the quarter-deck, had cabins off it for the officers of the expedition, whose acquaintance we will make in good time.
It may be asked what were two ladies and four learned landsmen doing on board a ship bound for the icy North? It was a proposal of Mrs Hodson, to which her husband knew he dared not say nay, that the party we now see on board should accompany the vessel as far as Kirkwall, for what she called “the pleasure of a sail.”
Well, the pleasure of the sail really commenced before they were beyond the pier-head of Aberdeen. The long granite breakwater, which they were steaming past, was crowded with people, and, greatly to Mrs Hodson’s delight, a lusty shore-porter sprang up to the top of a parapet and, commanding silence by a wave of his arm, proposed “Three cheers for the two gallant ladies, who were sailing away to the North Pole never to return.”
And the cheers were given too—not three, but three times three; and when Mrs Hodson smilingly bowed her acknowledgments, and pretty Clara waved a handkerchief, which the crowd firmly believed to be wet with tears, then the cheering was redoubled, and kept up till the ship was over the bar. Next, guns were fired from the fort; and when this salute was returned from the Icebear, and the flag dipped and hoisted again, the voyage had commenced in earnest.
All the way to Peterhead it was most enjoyable, but as night stole over the ocean, and the sun dipped towards the sea, and just as Professor Hodson was proposing to go down to supper, the wind sprang up; then—let me say it in my own queer way—all on board that were sailors, were sailors, and those on board who were not, were very much the reverse. Surely this is better than saying that certain folks were sea-sick.
But it was a pity that the cruel wind should blow so high, and that the waves should not have respected the savants a single bit, nor Mrs Hodson either, nor even the pretty Clara.
It was not only a pity, but it was excessively annoying; for Professor Hodson, who had once written a treatise on the physical geography of the sea, had meant to give a scientific lecture in the forenoon; while Sir Thomas, the bold Saxon, was to have lectured on astronomy under the stars, the dredging machine was to have been set to work, and the mysteries of the ocean depths revealed to the wondering gaze of poor Jack; while Mrs Hodson had pictured to herself the pleasure she would have in presiding at the head of the table, and lecturing, not only her husband, but everybody else; and Clara—she, too, had had her dreams. There could be no harm, Clara had thought, in looking her best, and dressing her best, and even engaging in the delicatest of flirtations with the handsome Lord Claude. She had had a lovely sailor costume made, but, oh dear!—my heart bleeds to mention it—it was never worn, and the only miserable consolation left to her was to remember, that this nautical rig would do for Henley Regatta. Ugh!
But oh! the cruel, cruel ocean, and oh! the merciless waves, not one of all those dreamers left his or her cabin till the Icebear lay safe and sound in Kirkwall.
Thus ended the pleasure sail from which so much joy had been expected.