Chapter Two.
The shadow of coming events.
It took me less than ten minutes to bundle my traps into the waiting boat alongside; and then, having already said goodbye to my shipmates in the apprentices’ berth, I stepped up to the skipper and chief mate to say the same, and to thank the former for giving me this splendid chance. He was very kind in bidding me farewell; told me I had given him every satisfaction while I had been with him; gave me a few words of caution and advice; and wound up by saying:
“The boatswain, here, tells me that the chronometer aboard the Mercury has unfortunately been allowed to run down; when, therefore, you get aboard, and have taken your meridian altitude, you had better wind the chronometer and then set it to Greenwich time, which I will give you; after which you should experience no difficulty in finding your way to Sydney, to which port I wish you a prosperous and pleasant voyage. Of course I quite reckon upon arriving two or three weeks ahead of you; but unless you have an exceptionally protracted passage you ought to arrive in good time to return home with us. Unless, therefore, the Mercury’s agent in Sydney wishes you to return to England in the ship, you had better make your way to Melbourne as soon as you have settled up, and go back with us.”
I thanked him for the kindly send-off that he was giving me, and then, after a final shake of the hand, followed Polson down the side, seated myself in the stern-sheets, and—the boatswain pulling stroke while the other three oarsmen shifted one thwart forward—shoved off, the crew and passengers of the Salamis giving me a little cheer to speed me on my way. The cheer was at once vociferously responded to by the people crowding the Mercury’s rail. No doubt they were greatly relieved at the thought that there was to be no more aimless drifting about the ocean for them, but that at last they were to find themselves again heading intelligently toward their port of destination.
By the time that I had arrived alongside the Mercury and mounted to her deck it was getting so close toward noon, that I had only barely time enough to get my traps out of the boat before the moment arrived when I must get to work with my sextant to secure the sun’s meridian altitude, from which to deduce the ship’s latitude. Then there was an even more important job to be done, namely, to start and set the chronometer; therefore, as soon as I had secured my meridian altitude and made it noon aboard the Mercury, we wore ship, and coming up alongside the Salamis—that lay patiently waiting for us with her main topsail aback—obtained the correct Greenwich time and set our chronometer to it. This done, Captain Martin swung his mainyard and made sail, and we followed suit as quickly as we could. Then I worked out my observations, pricked off the ship’s position on the chart, wrote up the log, and took possession of the late captain’s stateroom, by which time dinner was on the cabin table, and I sat down to my first meal on board the Mercury. The food, of course, was not quite so luxurious as that served up on the cuddy tables aboard the Salamis, but it was a long way better than what I had been accustomed to get in the apprentices’ berth, and I appreciated the change accordingly.
At the conclusion of the meal, at which Polson joined me, uninvited, while the carpenter stumped the poop as officer of the watch, I went on deck to have a good look at my first command; and, on the whole, was very pleased with her. She was a big ship for her tonnage, having evidently been constructed with an eye to ample cargo stowage rather than speed; consequently she was inclined to be bluff in the bows and full in the run; yet when I looked ahead and saw that the Salamis had only drawn ahead of us by about a mile during the half-hour or so that I had been below, I was by no means dissatisfied. She was evidently an elderly ship, for everything about her in the way of fittings and equipment was old-fashioned; but she was as strong as oak and iron could make her, her scantling being nearly twice as heavy as that of the Salamis. Her bulwarks were almost as high and solid as those of a frigate, and she was pierced to mount seven guns of a side, but no longer carried any artillery on her decks excepting two brass six-pounders for the purpose of signalling. She was very loftily and solidly rigged, and it did not take me long to ascertain that she had been most liberally maintained, much of her rigging, both standing and running, being new, while her ground tackle was ponderous enough to hold a ship of double her size. “Not much chance,” thought I, “of this old barkie dragging her anchors home and driving ashore in anything short of a hurricane!” She carried a full poop, the break of which came so far forward that there was scarcely room to pass comfortably between the foot of the poop ladders and the combing of the after hatch. The poop cabin was a very spacious affair, extending, for the greater part of its length, to the full width of the ship, and it was most comfortably fitted up, although, as might be expected, it lacked the luxurious finish of the Salamis’ cuddy. It looked as though it might at one time have been fitted with staterooms on either side for the accommodation of saloon passengers; but, if so, they had all been removed, save two at the fore and two at the after end of the cabin. And even these were now unoccupied, the boatswain and carpenter occupying the staterooms at the fore end of the structure, in which the chief and second mate had originally been berthed.
The captain’s cabin was abaft the saloon, in the extreme after end of the ship, and was an unusually commodious and airy apartment, extending the entire width of the ship, and splendidly lighted and ventilated by a whole range of large stern windows. There was a fine, roomy, standing bed-place on the starboard side, with a splendid chest of drawers under it; a washstand and dressing-table at the foot of it; a large and well-stocked bookcase on the port side; a chart rack occupied the whole of the fore bulkhead; the floor or deck of the cabin was covered with a handsome Turkey carpet; and a mahogany table, big enough to accommodate a large chart, stood in the middle of the apartment. This was where I was to sleep, and to spend in privacy as much of my waking time as I chose. “Truly,” thought I, “this is an agreeable change from my cramped quarters aboard the Salamis!”
Having completed the establishment of myself in this luxurious cabin, by turning out my chest and hanging up such of my clothes as I was likely to want immediately, and so on, I went on deck again, where the carpenter, who told me that his name was Tudsbery—“Josiah Tudsbery, your honour, sir,”—was on duty, and requested him to conduct me below to the emigrants’ quarters, which, I found, occupied the whole of the ’tween-decks. Here again the liberality of the ship’s owners became manifest, for the whole fitting up of the place was vastly superior to what was at that time considered good enough accommodation for emigrants; the married quarters consisting of a number of quite comfortable and roomy cabins; while the spaces allotted to the accommodation of the single men and women ensured to their occupants such complete privacy as was deemed quite unnecessary in those days. I found that it was the duty of the emigrants to keep their own quarters clean, and this seemed to have been somewhat neglected of late. I therefore gave orders that all hands should at once turn-to and give the ’tween-decks a thorough cleansing, in readiness for another inspection by myself at eight bells in the afternoon watch.
The emigrants aboard the Mercury numbered two hundred all told; namely thirty-three married couples, twenty-eight unmarried women, forty-two unmarried men, and sixty-four children, of whom one—a sweet, good-tempered baby girl—had been born during the voyage. They, the emigrants, seemed to be a very mixed lot, ranging from clod-hopping, agricultural labourers, whose intelligence seemed insufficient to enable them to appreciate the wonder of a flying-fish or the beauty of a golden, crimson, and purple sunset, to individuals of so refined and intellectual an appearance and so polished a behaviour, that the fact of their being ’tween-deck passengers seemed nothing short of a grotesque incongruity.
When I went below again, at eight bells, to inspect the emigrants’ quarters, I found them sweet, clean, and altogether very much more wholesome than they had been upon the occasion of my first visit, and I expressed my gratification at the change, hinting pretty strongly that I should expect the place to be maintained in that condition for the remainder of the voyage; at which remark one of the occupants—a pale, delicate-looking girl—exclaimed:
“Oh, sir, I only hope that you will insist upon that! Some of the people here—especially the men—are shockingly lazy, and would never do a hand’s turn of work if they were not made to.”
“I am much obliged to you for the hint,” said I. “I will find out the identity of those especially lazy ones, and see if I cannot imbue them with a good wholesome hatred of idleness before we arrive in the land, where those who won’t work must starve.”
By sunset that night the Salamis had slid so far ahead of us that only the heads of her courses were visible above the horizon; and with nightfall we saw the last of her that we were destined to see during that voyage.
I suppose it was only natural that I, a lad of barely seventeen years of age, should be full of business, and importance, and anxiety, for a few hours at least, upon finding myself thus unexpectedly placed in a position of such tremendous responsibility as was involved in the navigation, and therefore, to a large extent, the safety of this fine, wholesome old ship with her two hundred passengers, her crew of thirty, and her valuable cargo. At all events, that was the condition of mind in which I found myself as I paced the spacious poop, hour after hour, sometimes accompanied by Polson, sometimes conversing with Tudsbery, and occasionally alone. As I walked, my glances travelled, with the regularity of clockwork, first to windward, then ahead, then aloft, and finally—as I reached the binnacle—into the compass bowl; then away out to windward again, and so on, ad infinitum, until I was fairly bone-weary, and had completely walked off all my anxiety—to say nothing of my importance—and had convinced myself that I really might venture to leave the ship for a few hours to the care of the boatswain and the carpenter.
I have mentioned that, when bidding me farewell prior to my change over from the Salamis to the Mercury, Captain Martin was kind enough to give me a word or two of caution and advice; and one of the bits of advice which he most forcibly impressed upon me was that I should make a point of sighting either Saint Paul or Amsterdam island on my way to the eastward, and thus verify my reckoning. I recognised this as being a counsel of wisdom, and determined to shape a course that would enable me to sight both, they being only about fifty miles apart, and both standing high. I therefore very carefully laid off the compass course upon the chart, and found it to be south-east by east three-quarters east, the distance being eight hundred and forty miles; and this course I gave to the helmsman as soon as I had pricked it off and very carefully verified it, while he passed it on to his relief, and so on.
But when I turned out at six bells the next morning I found, to my disgust, that the wind had drawn round from the eastward and broken us some four points off our course; while, to add to my vexation, the boatswain and the carpenter—both of them illiterate men—had entered up the log slate in such an extraordinary manner that, so far as the dead reckoning was concerned, the information was not of the slightest use to me. Fortunately for my peace of mind the atmosphere was clear, and I was able to get sights during the forenoon which gave me the ship’s longitude; while, a little later on, a meridian altitude of the sun fixed our latitude for us. Then, for nearly thirty hours, we found ourselves enveloped in one of the densest fogs I ever experienced, with light, baffling variable winds that made of our wake a continual zigzag, winding up with three days of thoroughly foul weather—a whole gale of wind from the north-east—during the greater part of which we lay hove-to under close-reefed fore and main topsails, with our head to the south-east. Then the weather cleared and moderated; the wind gradually worked round, first to east, and then to south-east; and at length I found the ship laying up, close-hauled under all plain sail, for the spot where, according to my reckoning, Saint Paul ought to be. I was now especially anxious to make that island, for the weather of the past three or four days had been of such a character as to baffle the most experienced of navigators, and I confess that I was beginning to feel rather more than a trifle nervous. The island, however, hove into view at the precise moment and in the precise quarter that it ought to do if my reckoning happened to be correct; and this test and verification of the accuracy of my working served to completely re-establish my confidence in myself, so that, from that time onward, I never experienced the least anxiety. I felt that so long as I could get tolerably regular sights of the sun, moon, or stars I was not at all likely to go wrong.
But before the island of Saint Paul had climbed up over the horizon that stretched athwart our bows, I had become aware of a certain matter that, while it struck me as being somewhat peculiar, seemed to bear no further significance for me.
One of the first persons among the emigrant passengers aboard the Mercury to attract my attention was a tall, thin, long-haired, sickly-looking man, of about thirty years of age, clad in a suit of rusty black, whose appearance and manner generally suggested to me the idea that he must be by profession a schoolmaster. There was a certain air of exaggerated earnestness of demeanour about him, and a wildness of expression in his flashing coal-black eyes, that caused me to set him down as being somewhat crack-brained. His name, I soon ascertained, was Algernon Marcus Wilde, and he was among the first of the emigrants to speak to me. He came to me, on the morning after I joined the ship, with a complaint as to the quality and quantity of the food served out to the occupants of the ’tween-decks; and I was as much struck by the correctness of his speech, as by the excessive indignation which he infused into his manner, when stating the nature of his alleged grievance. I pointed out to him the fact that, whatever the quality of the food might be, I was certainly not responsible for it, nor, in the event of its proving to be unsuitable, could I remedy the matter away out there in mid-ocean; but I promised to investigate the affair, and to do what might be possible to remove the grievance, should I find such to exist—of which I had my doubts after my brief but highly satisfactory experience of the viands served up in the cabin.
I accordingly requested the steward to produce the dietary list which formed the basis of the agreement between the owners and the emigrants; and, upon going through it, was certainly unable to find any just cause for complaint, so far as quantity was concerned. The question of quality was of course a different matter; but here again, when, a day or two later, I unexpectedly examined the food as it was being served out at the galley, I was quite unable to discover any legitimate cause for complaint. On the contrary, the food, although plain, was as good as it was possible to obtain in those times aboard a ship that had been at sea a hundred days; and it was excellently prepared. When I sent for Wilde, and asked him to state specifically what he found wrong with the food that I had just examined, all he could say was that it was not so good or so varied in character as that which he had seen from time to time carried aft for use in the cabin; and that in his opinion no distinction whatever ought to be made in the treatment of persons occupying different parts of the ship; also that he considered I ought to give instructions for the emigrants to be fed henceforth from the stores provided for cabin use; nor would he be satisfied, although I pointed out that he was getting the food that the owners had undertaken to provide him with in exchange for his passage money. Of course to attempt to argue with so unreasonable an individual was obviously absurd, and I therefore dismissed him and thought nothing more about his complaints.
This, however, was not the matter of which I have spoken as gradually obtruding itself upon my attention, although, had I only been able to guess it, the two were not unconnected. What I noticed, almost from the first moment of boarding the Mercury, without attaching any particular importance to it, was that this man Wilde and a few of the other male emigrants were in the habit of spending practically the whole of the second dogwatch—which, in fine weather at all events, is usually a period of idleness and recreation for a ship’s crew—on the forecastle-head, smoking and chatting animatedly with the forecastle hands; while at other times the ex-schoolmaster—as Wilde actually proved to be—seemed eternally engaged in earnest discussion with his fellow emigrants. I often wondered idly what the man could possibly find to talk about so incessantly; but usually found a sufficiently satisfactory explanation in the reflection that, being a man of education, he would naturally take pleasure in extracting the ideas of others, and also probably in correcting them according to his own notions. He was evidently very fond of talking; and I frequently amused myself by watching the impassioned earnestness and the eloquent gestures with which he would hold forth upon the subject—whatever it might be—that happened to be under discussion. I soon found that Polson and Tudsbery, the boatswain and carpenter of the ship, apparently found more pleasure in spending the second dogwatch on the forecastle with their shipmates and the emigrants than they did in promenading the poop with me; but this was not surprising, for not only were they both very illiterate men, but it quickly became apparent that they and I had scarcely a single interest or idea in common, and we were consequently often hard put to it to find a topic of congenial conversation; indeed, in the course of a few days, without the slightest ill-feeling on either side, our communications became almost exclusively restricted to matters connected with the business of the ship.
Looking back, from the summit of a matured experience, as I now can, upon that first fortnight aboard the Mercury, I often feel astonished that I never, for a single instant, caught the faintest premonition of what was looming ahead; for I can recall plenty of hints and suggestions, had I only been keen-sighted enough to observe them and smart enough to read their significance; but I believe the fact to be that at that time I had no room in my mind for any other thought than that of the navigation of the ship. It is true that for more than a year it had been part of my daily duty, as a midshipman-apprentice qualifying for the position of officer, to take observations of the various heavenly bodies simultaneously with those of Captain Martin and the mates, to work them out independently, and to submit my calculations to the skipper—who examined and returned them with such written comments as he deemed called for—with the result that I had long since become proficient in the science of navigation. But this was a very different thing. If on board the Salamis I had chanced to make a mistake, the worst that could have happened would have been a sharp rebuke from the skipper for my carelessness, and an equally sharp injunction to be more careful in future; whereas now, aboard the Mercury, if I happened to make a miscalculation, there was nobody to correct it; and although subsequent observations might reveal the error, and no actual harm arise from its committal so long as the ship was in mid-ocean, a comparatively trivial mistake committed when the ship happened to be in the vicinity of rocks, or shoals, or approaching land, might easily make all the difference between perfect safety and her total loss, together with that of all hands. Hence, during those early days, when the sense of grave responsibility lay heavy upon my young shoulders, I could think of nothing but more or less abstruse astronomical problems.