Chapter Fourteen.
Friday Night at Sea.
“Now round the galley fire the merry crew,
With song and yarn and best of cheer,
Have gathered. And storms may rage, and seas may rise,
And thunders roll; they know not fear.”
Anon.
Scene: A ship at sea, south of the Cape of Good Hope. A steamer evidently from her build, though the funnel has been lowered, and a gale of wind is roaring through her rigging, bellying out the few sails she is able to carry till it looks as though the cloth would bust. She is making heavy weather, dipping the ends of her long yards right into the water, and plunging so much, that at times neither her jib-boom nor bows are visible in the foam and spray. She must be shipping tons of water. Looking at her as we are now doing with the eye of imagination, it would seem there could be little else save discomfort on board of her. And the night, too, is closing around her dark and thick. The sea is very troubled, the waves are racing, brawling, foam-crested billows, lightning plays around the ship every now and then, and thunders hurtle in the air, the awful noise appearing to run along over the sea. But let us go on board of her.
Here are Kenneth and Archie. Neither is on duty. Kenneth’s watch will come on deck at midnight. Archie, who is engineer of this craft, may be called upon at any moment to stir up the banked fires and get up steam.
This is the ship in which Kenneth has been second mate for eighteen months, including the time he lay sick or roamed convalescent on the South American shore, where Archie found him. They have bidden farewell to that beautiful coast, which in some parts is so enchanting, with its wealth of vegetation, its grand old woods, its fruit trees, its flower-trees, its flowers themselves, the life and loveliness that teems everywhere on the earth, in the air, in the sea, on the little islands, green and feathery, that peep up here and there out of the blue, on mountain top, and even in its caves, that I feel sad as well as sorrowful. I cannot pause to describe it all.
But why should I? My descriptions, after all, would fall flat on the senses of the reader, even with the aid of the best of illustrations, for no artist can give colour and movement combined. Go, reader, and see the world for yourself if you feel so inclined, and if ever you have the chance, I can tell you from long experience it is a very beautiful one.
“Well,” said Kenneth, “we came up here, Archie, lad, to have a walk, but I don’t see much chance. What a night it is going to be! How black the sky! How vivid the lightning! How close the horizon is—”
The last part of Kenneth’s sentence was lost in a peal of thunder.
“Stand by! Jump, Archie. There is a comber.”
They both leapt on the top of the capstan as an immense green sea swept over the bows and came tearing aft, carrying everything movable before it.
When it passed away, and the water found partial exit by the scuppers,—
“I don’t think there will be much pleasure in a walk to-night, Kennie,” said Archie. “Wouldn’t I like to be back again on that flower mountain of yours!”
“Poor dear old Gasco!” said Kennie with a sigh. “You find good among people of all nations.”
“He was very sad when you bade him good-bye.”
“Yes, and I won’t forget his last words. They are so true ‘Farewell,’ he sighed rather than said, ‘farewell, if farewell it must be. This meeting to part, and meeting but to part with those one gets to love, is one of the most soul-sobering feelings attached to our lot here below. Ah!’ he continued, lifting up a finger—you know his style, Archie—‘Ah! my young friend, what a joyful place heaven must be, if only for this one reason, we shall meet all our dear, dear friends again, and parting will be unknown! Farewell; we’ll meet Yonder, if not on earth again.’”
There was a pause in the conversation, filled in by the whistling wind and the ceaseless rush of the dashing waves.
“Well,” said Archie at last, “I cannot say that a night like this, Kennie, makes one feel enamoured of a sailor’s life.”
“You must take the shadow as well as the sunshine, though,” returned Kenneth. “You would rather be back at my boathouse cave, I daresay, at Cotago, launching the tub for a pleasant day among the islands, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes, indeed. Stand by; there is another wave.”
“Hark?” said Kennie during a lull. “They are singing forward, round the galley fire. I’ve a good mind to go and join them; will you come? a second officer can do what a first can’t.”
“Yes, take your flute; that will be an excuse.”
Given a trim ship and plenty of sea room, and it isn’t all the wind that can blow that will succeed in lowering the spirits of the British sailor.
The jolliest of the crew of the Brilliant were seated to-night near the galley fire, or they clung to lockers or lay on the deck; it is all the same. It was cold enough to make a fire pleasant and agreeable, and they were all within speaking distance; they had pipes and tobacco and plates of sea-pie, for it was Friday night, the old custom of making Friday a kind of Banian day being still kept up in some vessels of the merchant service.
“Hullo! Mr McAlpine,” cried the carpenter. “Right welcome, sir. And you too, Mr McCrane. Glad to see the smiling faces of the pair of you. Ain’t we, mates?”
“That we are,” and “that we be,” came the ready chorus.
“Some sea-pie, gentlemen,” said the cook, handing each a steaming basin of that most savoury dish.
“I made it,” cried the bo’sun.
“Not all,” cried another. “I rolled the paste.”
“And I cut the beef.”
“And I sliced the bacon.”
“And I chopped the onions.”
“And I pared the ’taters.” This last from the cabin-boy.
“Ha! ha! ha!” roared the jolly carpenter. “I say, maties, blowed if we haven’t all had a hand in the pie.”
“Well, it is jolly eating anyhow,” said Kenneth.
“The smell of it’s enough to raise a dying man,” quoth Archie.
“Bravo, sir,” cried the bo’sun, “and I hopes it makes ye both ’appy.”
“Happy, yes,” said Kenneth. “I’m so happy now, I can sing and play.”
“Oh I give us a toot on the old flute first.”
Kenneth gave them “a toot.”
“Now give us a song.”
“Let the gentleman take his breath,” the carpenter remonstrated.
“Never a breath,” persisted the bo’sun. “He must pay his footin’, I says. And I warrant you, too, he has as much pleasure in singing as we has in listenin’ to ’im.”
“Oh! shut up, old Barkshire,” said somebody.
“Barkshire be bothered,” cried the bo’sun. “I’m not ashamed to own my shire. You comes from the land o’ Tres and Pens; you’re west-country, you be. Have to fish for your breakfast every mornin’, else ye doesn’t get none: He! he!”
“Well, never mind,” said the good-natured carpenter, smiling. “We’re all nationalities here. Bill here is York; Tim is Irish; I’m just what Pipes calls me, Barkshire.”
“And I and my friend are Scotch,” said Kenneth.
“Hurrah! for a Scotch song, then.”
It wasn’t one, but several songs Kennie and Archie had to sing, but all Scotch, and what can beat them, reader mine?
“Sing ony o’ the auld Scotch sangs,
The blithesome or the sad;
They mak’ me laugh when I am wae,
And weep when I am glad.
Though eyes grow dim and hair grow grey,
Until the day I dee,
I’ll bless the Scottish tongue that sings
The auld Scotch sangs to me.”
There was no satisfying his audience, so once more Kennie had to fall back upon the flute. While playing, a heavy sea struck the vessel on the weather bow, and the water came tumbling down the hatchway; although it rushed forward among the men and hissed against the hot iron fending of the copper, they hardly shifted their positions.
But Kenneth played a selection of the best English, Irish, Scotch, and Welsh airs now, now merry, now plaintive and sad, now almost wailing, and anon merry again, once more.
There was a perfect chorus of applause when he had finished. The old bo’sun must crawl over to the corner where the musician was—although, owing to the motion of the ship, it was no easy task—and shake Kenneth by the hand.
“God bless you, young sir,” he said, and the tears were in his eyes. “I was back in bonnie Berkshire all the time you was a-playin’, sir. I saw my children, sir, runnin’ among the daisies, the crimson poppies growin’ among the corn’s green, the waving lime trees all in flower and covered with bees—ah! sir, you took the old man home, you took him home.”
“Don’t talk twaddle,” cried his tormentor; “he took us all home, for the matter o’ that.”
“Sit down, ye ould fool!” cried Tim O’Flaherty.
Kenneth put up his flute, and the bo’sun sat down beside him.
“Hark to the thunder!” he said; “listen to the thud o’ the seas. My eye! it is a night and a half. Just like the night we went over in the old Salanella.”
“Went over!” cried the carpenter. “What d’ye mean?”
“Why, I means what I says, to be sure. We turned turtle. Every soul below was called to his account, and only myself and five more managed to cling to the keel.”
“She must have been a barnacley old tub,” said the cook, “else you wouldn’t ha’ got over the copper.”
“You just mind your ladle, old man,” said the carpenter. “You’re only a cook, arter all, and Pipes knows what he’s a-talking about.”
“O’ course I does,” said Pipes. “Thank ye, Chips; it ain’t very often you takes my part. O’ course I knows what I’se a-talkin’ about. The keel rolled over to us, and we easily got on top.”
“Suffer much?”
Pipes did not look at the speaker, but away into vacancy as if he were recalling the past.
“Suffer!” he said. “I hope it may never be the lot o’ anybody in this galley to know what we suffered. For three days and nights o’ storm I and one other clung to that ship’s bottom; the rest dropped off one by one or slipped willingly into the sea, glad to end their terrible misery.
“I never did think the ocean was so vast and empty-like till then, mates. All the weary days we did nothing but gaze and gaze around us, and hope and hope, and pray and pray. Well, blessed be His name, mates, God heard our prayers at last. A ship—’twas the second we’d seen, for the first took no notice of us—bore down and took us off, and that was no easy task in the condition our misery had reduced us to.”
“Listen,” cried one of the men.
There were three distinct knocks on the deck with a heavy boot; (A plan adopted in some merchant ships for calling the attention of those below to an order about to be given) then a stentorian voice sang down the hatchway,—
“All hands, shorten sail! Look alive there, lads. Tumble up. Tumble up.”
A fiercer squall than any the vessel had yet encountered struck her before the men had time to reach the yards, and the sails they would have furled were rent into ribbons, and the noise they made as they fluttered out in the breeze was like the volley-firing of a company of soldiers. It was two hours before those whose watch was not on deck got back to the galley fire. It had just gone eight bells in the last dog watch, so the evening was still young.