Chapter Ten.
Crossing the Line.
“Humph!” grunted Captain Gillespie, astounded by this information. “That’s the joker, is it?”
“Aye, aye, sorr,” said Tim Rooney, thinking he was asked the question again as to the other’s identity; “it’s him, sure enough.”
“Then I should like to know what the dickens he means by such conduct as this? The beggar first comes aboard my ship without my leave or license, and then tries to break his neck by going aloft when nobody sent him there!”
“Arrah sure, sorr, the poor chap ownly did it to show his willin’ness to worruk his passige, sayin’ as how Mr Mackay tould him ye’d blow him up for comin’ aboard whin he came-to this arternoon, sorr,” pleaded Tim, not perceiving, as I did, that all the captain’s anger against the unfortunate stowaway had melted away by this time on learning that he had shown such courage. “Begorra, he would cloimb up the shrouds, sorr, whin ye tould the hands to lay aloft; an’ the divil himsilf, sorr, wouldn’t ’a stopped him.”
“He’s a plucky fellow,” cried the captain in a much more amiable tone of voice, to Tim’s great surprise.
“Send him aft, bosun, and I’ll talk to him now instead of to-morrow, as I said.”
“Aye, aye, sorr,” replied Tim; and, presently, the stowaway, who looked none the worse for his fall, came shambling sheepishly up the poop ladder, Tim following in his wake, and saying as he ushered him into the captain’s presence, “Here he is, sorr.”
“Well, you rascal,” exclaimed Captain Gillespie, looking at him up and down with his squinting eyes and sniffing, taking as good stock of him as the faint light would permit, “what have you got to say for yourself—eh?”
“Oi dunno,” answered the ragged lad, touching his forelock and making a scrape back with his foot, in deferential salute. “Of’s got nowt ter say, only as Oi’ll wark me pessage if you’ll let me be, and dunno put me in that theer dark pit agin.”
“Do you know you’re liable to three months imprisonment with hard labour for stowing yourself aboard my ship?” replied Captain Gillespie, paying no attention to his words apparently, and going on as if he had not spoken. “What will you do if I let you off?”
“Oi’ll wark, measter,” cried the other eagerly. “Oi’ll wark loike a good un, Oi will, sure, if you lets Oi be.”
“Ha, humph! I’ll give you a try, then,” jerked out Old Jock with a snort, after another nautical inspection of the new hand; “only, mind you don’t go tumbling off the yard again. I don’t want any accidents on board my ship, although I expect every man to do his duty; and when I say a thing I mean a thing. What’s your name—eh?”
“Oi be called Joe Fergusson, measter,” replied the shock-headed fellow, moving rather uneasily about and shuffling his feet on the deck, the captain’s keen quizzical glance making him feel a bit nervous. “My mates at whoam, though, names me, and the folk in Lancacheer tew, ‘Joey the moucher.’”
“Oh, then, Master Joey, you’ll find you can’t mooch here, my lad,” retorted Old Jock, glad of the opportunity of having one of his personal jokes, and sniggering and snorting over it in fine glee. “However, I’ll forgive you coming aboard on the promise of your working your passage to China; but, you won’t find that child’s play, my joker! Fergusson, I’ll enter you on the ship’s books and you’ll be rated as an able seaman, for you look as if you had the makings of one in you from the way you’ve tried already to earn your keep.”
“Thank ye koindly, measter,” stammered out the redoubtable Joe, seeing from the captain’s manner that his peace was made, and that nothing dreadful was going to be done to him, as he had feared from all that Tim Rooney and the hands forward had told him of Old Jock’s temper—although he did not understand half what the captain said—“Oi’ll wark, measter.”
“There, that will do,” said Captain Gillespie interrupting him ere he could proceed any further with his protestations of gratitude; “the proof of the pudding lies in the eating, and I’ll soon see what you’re made of. Bosun, take him forrud and rig him out as well as you can. I’ll send you an old shirt and trousers by the steward.”
“Aye, aye, sorr,” answered Tim obediently, pleased at “the ould skipper behavin’ so handsomely,” as he afterwards said; “an’ I’ll give him an ould pair av brogues av me own.”
“You can do as you like about that,” said Captain Gillespie, turning on his heel and calling the watch to tauten the lee-braces a bit, telling the men at the wheel at the same time to “luff” more; “but, you’d better let the chap have a good lie-in to-night and put him in the port watch to-morrow so that Mr Mackay can look after him.”
“Aye, aye, sorr,” replied Tim, leading his charge down the poop ladder again. “I’ll say to that same, sorr.”
“And, bosun—”
“Aye, aye, sorr.”
“Just see if those pigs in the long-boat got damaged by that fellow tumbling on top of them. His weight ought to have been enough to have made pork of some, I should think!”
“Aye, aye, sorr,” said Tim as he went off laughing; and I could hear his whispered aside to Adams, who was standing by the deck-house. “Begorra, I’d have betted the ould skipper wouldn’t forgit thim blissid pigs av his. He wor thinkin’ av thim all the toime that poor beggar wor fallin’ from aloft, I belave!”
Much to the captain’s satisfaction, though, the grunting inhabitants of the long-boat were found to be all right, escaping as harmlessly as Joe Fergusson; and so, with his mind relieved Old Jock went below soon after “six bells,” or two o’clock, leaving the charge of the deck to Mr Saunders—who, grumbling at the captain’s rather insidious usurpation of his authority, had betaken himself to the lee-side of the taffrail, whence he watched the ship’s wake and the foaming rollers that came tumbling after her, as she drove on before the stiff nor’-wester under reefed topsails and courses, the waves trying to poop her every instant, though foiled by her speed.
So things went on till midnight, when the men at the wheel were relieved, as well as the look-out forward, and the port watch came on deck; while, the starbowlines going below, Mr Mackay took the place of the second mate as the officer on duty. Tom Jerrold, too, lugged out Sam Weeks and made him put in an appearance, much against his will; but nothing subsequently occurred to vary the monotony of the life on board or interfere with the vessel’s progress, for, although it was blowing pretty nearly “half a gale,” as sailors say, we “made a fair wind of it”—keeping steadily on our course, south-west by west, and getting more and more out into the Atlantic with each mile of the seething water the Silver Queen spurned with her forefoot and left eddying behind her.
The wind, somehow or other, seemed to get into my head, like a glass of champagne I had on Christmas-day when father and all of us went to Westham Hall and dined with the squire. I can’t express how jolly it made me feel—the wind I mean, not the champagne; for it was as much as I could do to refrain from shouting out aloud in my exultation, as it blew in my face and tossed my hair about, pressing against my body with such force that I had to hold on by both hands to the weather bulwarks to keep my feet, as I gazed out over the side at the magnificent scene around me—the storm-tossed sea, one mass of foam; the grand blue vault of heaven above, now partially lit by the late rising moon and twinkling stars, that were occasionally obscured by scraps of drifting clouds and flying scud; and, all the while, the noble ship tearing along, a thing of beauty and of life, mastering the elements and glorying in the fight, with the hum of the gale in the sails and its shrieking whistle through the rigging, and the ever-murmuring voices of the waters, all filling the air around as they sang the dirge of the deep!
“You seem to like it, youngster,” observed Mr Mackay, stopping his quarter-deck walk as he caught sight of my face in the moonlight and noticed it’s joyous glow, reflecting the emotions of my mind. “You look a regular stormy petrel, and seem as if you wanted to spread your wings and fly.”
“I only wish I could, sir,” I cried, laughing at his likening me to a “Mother Carey’s chicken,” as the petrel is familiarly termed, a number of them then hovering about the ship astern. “I feel half a bird already, the wind makes me so jolly.”
Mr Mackay quietly smiled and put his hand on my shoulder.
“Take care, my boy,” said he good-humouredly, “you’ll be jumping overboard in your enthusiasm. You seem to be a born sailor. Are you really so fond of the sea?”
“I love it! I love it!” I exclaimed enthusiastically. “Now, I can imagine, sir, the meaning of what I read in Xenophon with father, about the soldiers of Cyrus crying with joy when they once more beheld the sea after their toilsome march for months and months, wandering inland over a strange and unknown country without a sight of its familiar face to tell them of their home by the wave-girt shores of Greece!”
“You’re quite a poet, Graham,” observed Mr Mackay, laughing now, though not unkindly. There was, indeed, a tone of regret and of sadness, it seemed to me, in his voice. “Ah, well, you’ll soon have all such romantic notions taken out of you, my boy, when you’ve seen some of the hardships of a sailor’s life, like others who at one time were, perhaps, as full of ardour for their profession at the start as yourself.”
“I hope not, sir,” I replied seriously. “I should never like to believe differently of it to what I do now. I think it is really something to be proud of, being a sailor. It is glorious, it—it—it’s—jolly, that’s what it is, sir!”
“A jolly sight jollier being in bed on a cold night like this,” muttered Weeks, who was shivering by the skylight, the tarpaulin cover of which he had dragged round his legs for warmth. “Don’t you think so, sir?”
“That depends,” replied Mr Mackay on Sammy putting this question to him rather impudently, as was his wont in speaking to his elders, his bump of veneration being of the most infinitesimal proportions. “I think, though, that a fellow who likes being on deck in a gale of wind will turn out a better sailor than a skulker who only cares about caulking in his bunk below; and you can put that in your pipe, Master Sam Weeks, and smoke it!”
This had the effect of stopping any further conversation on the part of my fellow apprentice, who retired to the lee-side of the deck in high dudgeon with this “flea in his ear;” and, it being just four o’clock in the morning now and the end of the middle watch, eight bells were struck and the starbowlines summoned on deck again to duty, we of the port watch getting some hot coffee all round at the galley and then turning in. For this I was not sorry, as I began now to feel sleepy.
“I’d rather be a dog with the mange than a sailor,” yawned Tom Jerrold when Sam Weeks roused him out of his nice warm bunk to go on duty in the cold grey morning. “Heigh-ho, it’s an awful life!”
So, it can be seen that all of us were not of one opinion in the matter.
But, in spite of sundry drawbacks and disagreeables which I subsequently encountered, and which perhaps took off a little of the halo of romance which at first encircled everything connected with the sea in my mind, I have never lost the love and admiration for it which I experienced that night in mid Atlantic when I kept the middle watch with Mr Mackay, nor regretted my choice; neither have I ever felt inclined, I may candidly state, to give an affirmative answer to Tim Rooney’s stereotyped inquiry every morning— “An’ ain’t ye sorry now, Misther Gray-ham, as how ye iver came to say?”
The next day, our third out from the Lizard, we spoke the barque Mary Webster from Valparaiso for London, sixty days at sea.
She signalled that she had broken her chronometer and had to trust only to her dead reckoning, so Captain Gillespie hove-to and gave them our latitude and longitude, 45 degrees 15 minutes North and 10 degrees 20 minutes West, displaying the figures chalked on a black-board over our quarter, in order that those on board the other vessel might read the inscription easily with a glass, as we bowed and dipped towards each other across the rolling waves, both with our main-topsails backed.
Before the following morning we had weathered Cape Finisterre, Mr Mackay told me, having got finally beyond the limits of the dread Bay of Biscay, with all its opposing tides and contrary influences of winds and currents which make it such a terror to navigators passing both to and from the Equator; and, in another two days, we had reached as far south as the fortieth parallel of latitude, our longitude being now 13 degrees 10 minutes west, or about some five hundred miles to the eastward of the Azores, or Western Islands.
As we worked our way further westwards I noticed a curious thing which I could not make out until Mr Mackay enlightened me on the subject.
On my last birthday father had given me a very nice little gold watch, similar to one which he had presented to my brother Tom, much to my envy at the time, on his likewise obtaining his fifteenth year.
This watch was a very good timekeeper, being by one of the best London makers; and, hitherto, had maintained an irreproachable character in this respect, the cook at home, whenever the kitchen clock went wrong, always appealing to me to know what was the correct time, with the flattering compliment that “Master Allan’s watch, at all events,” was “sure to be right!”
But now, strange to say, although my watch kept exactly to railway time up to the day of my arrival in London and while we were on our way down the river, I found that, as we proceeded into the Channel and out to sea it began to gain, the difference being more and more marked as we got further to the westward; until, when the captain, after taking the sun on our fifth day out, told Tom Jerrold who was on the deck beside him to “make it eight bells,” or strike the ship’s bell to declare it was noon, I was very nearly an hour ahead of that time—my watch, which I was always careful about winding up every evening as father enjoined me when giving it to me, pointing actually to one o’clock!
I could not understand it all.
Mr Mackay, however, made it clear to me after a little explanation, showing me, too, how simple a matter it was with a good chronometer to find a ship’s position at sea.
“For every degree of longitude we go westwards from the meridian of Greenwich, which is marked with a great round 0 here, you see, my boy, we gain four minutes,” said he, pointing out the lines of longitude ruled straight up and down the chart as he spoke, for my information; “and thus, the fact of the hands of your watch telling, truly enough, that it is now about eight minutes to one o’clock in London, shows that we are thirteen degrees further to the west than at the place where your time is set—for we are going with the sun, do you see?”
“Yes, I see, sir,” said I; “but suppose we were going to the east instead of the west?”
“Why then, my boy,” he replied, “your watch, in lieu of gaining, would appear to lose the same number of minutes each day, according to our rate of sailing. A ship, consequently, which goes round the world from the east to the west will seem to have gained a clear day on circumnavigating the globe; while one that completes the same voyage sailing from the west continually towards the east, loses one.”
“How funny!” cried I. “Is it really so?”
“Yes, really,” said he; “and I’ve seen, on board a ship I was once in, the captain skip a day in the log, to make up for the one we lost on the voyage, passing over Saturday and writing down the day which followed Friday as ‘Sunday’—otherwise we would have been all out of our reckoning with the almanac.”
“How funny!” I repeated. “I never heard that before.”
“Probably not, nor many other things you’ll learn at sea, my boy, before you’re much older,” answered Mr Mackay, as he turned to the log slate on which Captain Gillespie had been putting down his calculation about the ship’s position after taking the sun and working out his reckoning. “Let us see, now, if your watch is a good chronometer for telling our longitude. Ha, by Jove, 13 degrees 10 minutes west, or, nearly what we made out just now. Not so bad, Graham, for a turnip!”
“Turnip, sir!” cried I indignantly. “Father told me it was one of Dent’s best make, and to be careful of it.”
“I’m sure I beg both your father’s and Dent’s pardon,” said Mr Mackay, laughing at my firing up so quickly. “I was only joking; for your watch is a very good one, and nicely finished too. But I must not stop any more now. I hope you won’t forget your first lesson in navigation and the knowledge you’ve gained of the difference between ‘mean time’ and what is called ‘apparent time’ on board a ship, and how this will tell her correct longitude—eh?”
“Oh, no, sir,” I answered as he went off down the companion way below, to wind up the chronometers in the captain’s cabin, a task which he always performed every day at the same hour, having these valuable instruments under his especial charge; “I won’t forget what you’ve told me, sir.”
Nor did I.
Shortly afterwards Mr Mackay showed me how to use the sextant and take the sun’s altitude, on his learning that I was acquainted with trigonometry and rather a dab at mathematics, the only portion indeed of my studies, I’m sorry to confess, in which I ever took any interest at school. I was thus soon able under his instruction to work out the ship’s reckoning and calculate her position, just like the captain, who sniffed and snorted a bit and crinkled his nose a good deal on seeing me engaged on the task; although he gave me some friendly commendation all the same, when he found that I had succeeded in actually arriving at a similar result to himself!
Wasn’t I proud, that’s all.
But, before advancing so far in my knowledge of navigation, I had to be initiated into my regular duties on board, and learn the more practical parts of seamanship; however, having willing tutors in Mr Mackay and the boatswain, and being only too anxious myself to know all they could teach me, it was not long before I was able to put it out of the power of either Tom Jerrold or Weeks to call me “Master Jimmy Green,” as they at first christened me—just because they had the advantage of going to sea a voyage or two before me! I may add, too, that my progress towards proficiency in picking up the endless details of nautical lore was all the more accelerated by the desire of excelling my shipmates, so as to have the chance of turning their chaff back upon themselves.
Spurred on by this motive, I quickly learnt all the names of the ropes and their various uses from Mr Mackay; while Tim Rooney showed me how to make a “reef knot,” a “clove hitch,” a “running bowline,” and a “sheep-shank,” explaining the difference between these and their respective advantages over the common “granny’s knot” of landsmen—my friend the boatswain judiciously discriminating between the typical peculiarities of the “cat’s-paw” and the “sheet bend,” albeit the one has nothing in connection with the feline tribe and the other no reference to one’s bed-covering!
The wind moderated when we got below the Azores, while the sea also ceased its tumultuous whirl, so that we were able to make all plain sail and carry-on without rolling as before; so, now, at last, I was allowed to go aloft, my first essay being to assist Tom Jerrold in setting the mizzen-royal. Really, I quite astonished Tom by climbing up the futtock shrouds outside the top, instead of going through “the lubber’s hole,” showing myself, thanks to Tim Rooney’s private instructions previously, much more nimble in casting off the gaskets and loosening the bunt of the sail than my brother mid expected; indeed, I got off the yard, after the job was done, and down to the deck a good half minute in advance of him.
On our sixth day out, we reached latitude 35 degrees north and 17 degrees west, drifting past Madeira a couple of days later, the temperature of the air gradually rising and the western winds growing correspondingly slack as we made more southing; until, although it was barely a week since we had been experiencing the bitter weather of our English February, we now seemed to be suddenly transported into the balminess of June. The change, however, took place so imperceptibly during our gradual progress onward to warmer latitudes, that, in looking back all at once, it seemed almost incredible.
I found the work which we apprentices had to do was really very similar to that of the hands forward, Tom Jerrold and I in the port watch, and Weeks and Matthews—who, although styled “third mate,” had still to go aloft and do the same sort of duties as all the rest of us—in the starboard watch under the second mate, having to attend to everything connected with the setting and taking in of sail on the mizzen-mast, as well as having to keep the ship’s time, one of us striking the bell every half-hour throughout our spell on deck.
After the first few days at sea, too, I came to the conclusion that if our work was like that of the sailors our food was not one whit the better; albeit, one of the stipulations in the contract when my father paid the premium demanded by the owners of the ship for me as a “first-class apprentice,” was that I should mess aft in the cabin.
I certainly did so, like Tom Jerrold and the two others; but all that either they or I had of cabin fare throughout the entire voyage was an occasional piece of “plum duff” and jam on Sundays—on which day, by the way, we had no work to do save attending to the sails and washing decks in the morning; while, in the afternoon, Captain Gillespie read prayers on the poop, his congregation being mainly limited to ourselves and the watch on deck, the crew spending their holiday, on this holy day, in mending their clothes in the forecastle.
Yes, our rations were the same as those of the ordinary hands; namely, salt junk and “hard tack,” varied by pea-soup and sea-pie occasionally for dinner, with rice and molasses as a treat on Saturdays. Our breakfast and tea consisted of a straw-coloured decoction known on board-ship as “water bewitched,” accompanied by such modicums of our dinner allowance as we were able to save conscientiously with our appetites. This amounted to very little as a rule, for, being at sea makes one fearfully hungry at all hours, and, fortunately, seems to endow one, also, with the capacity for eating anything!
Really, if it had not been by currying favour with Ching Wang and bribing the steward, Pedro Carvalho, between whom there were continual rows occurring about the provisions, which it was the duty of the Portuguese to serve out, we must have starved ere reaching the Equator; for Captain Gillespie, in order to “turn an honest penny” and make his Dundee venture prove a success, persuaded the men forward and ourselves to give up a pound and a quarter of our meat ration for a pound tin of his marmalade, which he assured us would not only be more palatable with our biscuit, being such “a splendid substitute for butter,” as the advertisements on the labels say, but would also act as an antiscorbutic to prevent the spread of scurvy amongst us—it being, as he declared, better than lime-juice for this purpose!
The hands consented to this arrangement at first as a welcome change; but, when they presently found themselves mulcted of their salt junk, they grumbled much at Old Jock for holding us all to the bargain, and he and his marmalade became a by-word in the ship. I did not wonder at all, after a bit, that Pedro the steward got into the habit of venting his wrath when vexed by kicking the empty tins about!
I cannot say, however, that I disliked my new life, in spite of these drawbacks in the way of insufficiency of food and constancy of appetite, throughout which Ching Wang remained my staunch friend, bringing me many a savoury little delicacy for supper when it was my night watch on deck. These tit-bits in the “grub” line I conscientiously shared with Tom Jerrold, who received similar favours from the steward, with whom he was a firm favourite, the only one, indeed, to whom the Portuguese appeared to take kindly on board.
No, on the contrary, the charm of being a sailor grew more and more upon me each day as the marvels of the deep became unfolded to me, and the better I became acquainted with the ship and my companions.
All was endless variety—the sky, the sea, and our surroundings changing apparently every moment and ever revealing something fresh and novel.
It did not seem real but a dream.
Could that be the Madeira I had read about in the distance, and that the Bay of Funchal of which I had seen pictures in books; and that the little nautilus or “Portuguese man-of-war” floating by the side of the vessel, now almost becalmed, with its cigar-shaped shell boat and pink membraneous sail all glowing with prismatic colouring? Was it an actuality that I saw all these things with my own eyes; or, was I dreaming? Was it really I, Allan Graham, standing there on the deck of the good ship Silver Queen, or somebody else?
An order from the captain, who came up from his cabin just then and caught me mooning, to go forward and “make it eight bells,” stopped my reflections at this interesting point; and the next moment I was more interested in a most appetising odour of lobscouse emanating from Ching Wang’s galley than in poetical dreams of Atlantic isles and ocean wonders!
On passing Madeira, we soon got out of the Horse Latitudes, a soft breeze springing up from the west again towards evening, which wafted us down to the Canaries within the next two days. Here we picked up the north-east trades south of Palma, just when we could barely discern the Peak of Teneriffe far-away off high up in the clouds, and then we went on grandly on our voyage once more with every sail set, logging over two hundred miles a day and going by the Cape de Verde Islands in fine style. We did not bring up again until we reached “the Doldrums,” in about latitude 5 degrees north and 22 degrees west, where the fickle wind deserted us again and left us rolling and sweltering in the great region of equatorial calm. The north-east and south-east trades here fight each other for the possession of their eventful battle-ground, the Line, and old Neptune finds the contest so wearisome that he goes to sleep while it lasts, the tumid swelling of his mighty bosom only showing to all whom it may concern that he merely dozes and is not dead!
The temperature of the sea seemed to increase each day after we lost sight of the Peak of Teneriffe until it was now lukewarm, if one drew a bucket from over the side; although Captain Gillespie said it was “quite cold” for that time of year!
Talking about this, Mr Mackay told me that sea-water is composed of an awful lot of things such as I would not have supposed—oxygen and hydrogen, with muriate of soda, magnesia, iron, lime, copper, silica, potash, chlorine, iodine, bromide, ammonia and silver being amongst its ingredients, and the muriate of soda forming the largest of the solid substances detected in it. With such a mixture of things as this, it is not surprising that it should taste so nasty when swallowed—is it?
With the enforced leisure produced by the calm, I had plenty of opportunity for observing the various strange varieties of animal life which came about the ship—the flying-fish with beautiful silvery wings that sparkled in the sunlight coming inboard in shoals, pursued by their enemies the albacores, who drove them out of the sea to take refuge in the air; besides numbers of grampusses and sharks swimming round us. Adams, the sailmaker, killed one of these latter gentry with a harpoon, spearing him from the bowsprit as he came past the ship. He looked up with his evil eye, fancying perhaps that he would “catch one of us napping,” but no one was unwary enough to get within reach of his voracious maw; and Mr Shark “caught a tartar” instead and got a taste of cold steel for his pains, much to our delight, though the captain was chagrined at the loss of the harpoon, the shark parting the line attached to it in his death struggles, and carrying it below with him when he sank. The brute, to end the story, was eaten up at once by his affectionate comrades, the sea being dyed red with his blood.
We had not all leisure, though, thus hanging about the Equator under the scorching sun, now at noon precisely perpendicular over our heads, the heat at night too being almost as stifling and the stars as bright as moons; for Captain Gillespie took advantage of our inaction to “set up” the rigging, which had slackened considerably since we entered the tropics, the heat making the ropes stretch so that our masts got loose and the upper spars canted.
While doing this, of course, I had another practical lesson in seamanship, learning all about “double luffs” and “toggles,” “salvagee strops” and “Burton tackles,” and all the rest of such gear, whose name is legion.
But I must go on now to a more important incident.
One morning, about a week after the wind left us, with the exception of an occasional cat’s-paw of air which came from every point of the compass in turn, we ultimately drifted to the Line; accomplishing this by the aid of the swell ever rolling southward and the eddy of the great south equatorial current, setting between the African continent and the Caribbean Sea. This meets the Guinea current running in the opposite direction in the middle of the Doldrums, and helps to promote the pleasant stagnation, of wind and water and of air alike, of this delightful region so dear to mariners!
I recollect the morning well; for the night was unusually oppressive, the heat between the middle watch and eight bells having been more intense than at any period, I thought, during the week.
So, after tossing about my bunk, unable to get to sleep I was only too glad when the time came to turn out for duty, the task of washing decks and paddling about in the cool water—for it was cool at the earlier hours of the morning if tepid at noon—being something to look forward to.
I forgot, however, all about the terrible rites of Neptune for those crossing the Line for the first time, and neither Tom Jerrold nor Weeks, naturally, enlightened me on the subject; so that I was completely taken by surprise when a loud voice hailed us from somewhere forward, just about “four bells,” as if coming from out of the sea.
“What ship is that?”
“The Silver Queen,” answered Mr Saunders, who was on the poop and of course in the joke, answering the voice, which although portentously loud, had a familiar ring about it suspiciously like Tim Rooney’s Irish brogue. “Bound from London to Shanghai.”
“Have ye minny of me unshaved sons aboard?”
“Aye, two,” shouted back Mr Saunders, “a stowaway and an apprentice.”
“Ye spake true,” returned the voice. “I knows ’em both, Misther Allan Gray-ham an’ Joe Fergusson. I will come aboard an’ shave ’em.”
Then it all flashed upon me, and I tried to run below and hide; but two of Neptune’s tritons seized me and pushed me forward to where the boatswain, capitally got up in an oakum wig with an enormous tow beard, was seated on the windlass, trident in hand. Joe Fergusson, who had been made prisoner before me, lay bound at his feet, close to an improvised swimming bath made out of a spare fore-topsail, rigged up across the deck on the lee-side and filled with water to the depth of four feet or more.
The ceremonies were just about to begin; and, I could readily imagine what was in store for both me and my companion in distress, the ex-bricklayer, who, like myself, having never been to sea before would have to go through the painful ordeal as well as being made fools of and laughed at by all our grinning shipmates around; so, seeing Tom Jerrold and Sam Weeks conspicuous right in front of me, and Mr Saunders looking on too with much gusto, I made another desperate attempt to free myself from those holding me, urging on Joe Fergusson to try and save himself and me too.
Our struggles were in vain; but, strange to say, help came for us from a most unexpected quarter.
As I have said before, the night had been extremely hot and the morning lowering; and now, all at once, a violent squall caught the ship in the midst of Neptune’s carnival.
“Stand by your royal halliards!” roared out Captain Gillespie, who coming up quickly behind Mr Saunders on the poop made him jump round in consternation at his neglect in not keeping a look-out overhead while watching the game going on in the bows amongst the crew.
Neptune darted down from his perch instanter in the most ungodlike fashion; and, the rest of the men rushing to their stations, left Joe Fergusson and I rolling on the deck.
“Let go!” next cried the captain; adding a moment later, “Bosun, go forward and slack off the head sheets!”
And then the rain came down in a perfect deluge, as if it were being emptied out of a tub, and as it only can pour down in the tropics; and that is how we “crossed the Line!”