Chapter Eighteen.
A Steam Trial, and a Gun-burst.
On their way up the harbour, the Captain pointed out the long line of old hulks moored on either side of the stream that had once, when in their prime, been esteemed the pride of the Navy.
With towering masts and gallant rig they had flown the flag that has borne the battle and the breeze for many a long year.
But, within the last decade, their glory has departed, alas, like the glories of “Rotten Row,” as this anchorage of broken-down ships is called; many of the old historic vessels having been sold out of the service and their places know them no more!
“Ah, these are something like ‘Roman remains’!” exclaimed Captain Dresser, when their wherry ultimately glided up to the ruins of Porchester Castle, the base of whose swelling walls was laved by the rippling tide. “That ‘villa’ at Brading was a regular take-in, and I shall always regret that half-crown in hard cash, out of which I was swindled!”
“Sure, I don’t think you’ll ever forget that day,” cried Mrs Gilmour, laughing as she explained the matter more lucidly to her brother and sister-in-law. “Just as Queen Mary said that Calais would be found engraved on her heart after she was dead, the Roman villa at Brading will be found graven on yours, Captain, sure!”
“I don’t mind,” said he resignedly, “I like something for my money; and, here, there is something to see and nothing to pay for it either!”
The boatmen rowed the boat close inshore in order to allow them to inspect the place nearer, as they did not have sufficient time to land and examine it properly. Mrs Gilmour, while they laid off making thus a cursory inspection of the ruins, became the castle’s historian—telling how the Romans originally built the fortress on their invasion of England over eighteen hundred years ago, styling it “Portus Magnus,” or “the great port,” it being situated on a tongue of land commanding the approaches to their encampments in the interior of the country—the harbour being then more open to the sea than it now is.
“Aye,” corroborated the Captain. “It has silted up considerably, even in my time, in spite of continual dredging.”
“The Saxons afterwards called the place Portceaster, whence its present name ‘Porchester,’” continued the narrator; “and, subsequently, the stronghold has played an important part in history, from the days of Canute up to the reign of Queen Elizabeth.”
“That’s something at any rate!” interposed the Captain. “More than you can say for the Brading villa!”
“You mustn’t interrupt, sure,” said Mrs Gilmour, tapping him with her parasol as her brother laughed, exchanging winks with the old sailor. “After the time of good Queen Bess, however, the castle is not memorable for much in its history till we come to the early part of the present century; when it was used as a depot for the prisoners taken in the French war, some eight or ten thousand being incarcerated within its walls at one time!”
“What a lot!” cried Bob. “It must have cost a heap of money to keep them in food, auntie?”
“It did, ‘a lot,’ my dear,” replied his aunt, adopting his favourite word. “Several men with names distinguished in the Revolution were confined here, among them being the Irish general Tate, who led that ridiculous invasion of this country planned by Buonaparte, which was routed by a body of Welsh women at Fishguard.”
“Hurrah for the sex!” interrupted the Captain again, Mr Strong joining in his cheer, while the boatmen grinned. “More power to their petticoats!”
Mrs Gilmour only smiled at this, not venturing to explain that the invaders mistook the red-cloaked, tall-hatted women of the Principality, who were ranged along the crests of their native mountains, for British regiments on the march to annihilate them; and so, capitulated to avoid capture!
“One of the most comical characters imprisoned in the castle,” she went on, “was a seaman named François Dufrèsne, who was a regular Jack Sheppard in the way of breaking out of confinement.”
“Oh!” exclaimed Bob, pricking up his ears at the mention of the noted celebrity of the Newgate Calendar. “That’s jolly! What did he do, auntie?”
“Why, he would, for a mere frolic or for a trifling wager, seals the walls of the castle under the very eye; of the sentries, making his way into the woodlands on the north of Portsdown Hill, where he would ramble at large, stealing all the eggs and fowls he could lay his hands on. He had, as he explained, a great weakness for poultry.”
“By Jove, I can quite excuse him,” said the Captain in his funny way. “I’m partial to a chicken, myself!”
“So am I, too,” remarked Mrs Strong. “It was only what might be called ‘an amiable weakness’ on his part, considering that probably the poor prisoners were not too well fed.”
“They were not, my dear Edith,” replied her sister-in-law, “if all accounts be true; for the French Government complained of their being half-starved! However, be that as it may, Dufrèsne used to plunder away amongst the cottagers, until their anger at losing their stock led to his recapture and remission to durance vile. Once he actually made his way to London; when, calling at the house of the ‘French Commissioner’ there, who was the agent for all the prisoners of the war, he procured a decent dress and a passport, with which he presented himself again at Porchester and made a triumphant return to his prison!”
“The governor must have been surprised,” said Bob. “Wasn’t he, auntie?”
“He was,” assented his aunt. “Very much surprised, my dear.”
“Did they punish him for escaping?” asked Nell. “I don’t think they ought to have, as he came back.”
“No, I don’t think they did,” replied Mrs Gilmour. “But, my dear, I think I’ve told you enough now of the castle and all belonging to it, and must really stop, for it’s time for us to be going back.”
“Indeed we must, ma’am,” said the Captain, “that is, if we’re going over the Victualling Yard.”
“What, more sight-seeing!” exclaimed Mrs Strong in a voice of despair. “Can’t you let us off doing any more to-day?”
“Well, ma’am,” pleaded the Captain apologetically, “only just one place more and you will then have ‘killed all the lions’; that is, all save the Dockyard, which Master Bob will have to tell you about.”
“Do let us go, mamma! I do so want to see them making the biscuits. They do it all by machinery, just fancy!” said Nellie coaxingly. “Do, let us go, please, won’t you?”
“Do, please,” also pleaded Bob, “it will be so very jolly!”
“I suppose I must give in,” sighed his mother. “Oh, Captain Dresser, Captain Dresser, you have a good deal to answer for!”
The old sailor only chuckled in response; and, giving the necessary orders to the boatmen, the wherry, which had come down rapidly from Porchester, the tide having turned and being now on the ebb, was pulled in to the Gosport shore, its passengers landing at Clarence Yard, the great food depot of the Navy.
Here they saw all that was to be seen, gazing with wonder at the vast stores of things eatable accumulated for the service of the fleet—Bob and Miss Nell being particularly interested in the bread-factory and bakery, where the attendant who showed them over the place completed their satisfaction by filling their respective pockets with the curious hexagonal-shaped biscuits there made, “thus provisioning them,” as the Captain said, “for the remainder of their stay.”
They crossed back from Gosport to Portsmouth by the floating bridge, which, of course, Bob wanted to know all about, the Captain explaining to him how it was fixed on two chains passing through the vessel and moored on either shore, so as to prevent the “bridge” from being swayed by the action of the tide, which runs very strongly in and out of the harbour at the point of its passage.
“But how does the bridge move?” asked the inquiring Bob, full of questions as usual. “I can’t see how it can, if it be chained up like Rover!”
“There is a steam-engine in the centre of the vessel, as you can see for yourself, there,” replied the Captain, pointing to the funnels that bore out his statement. “This engine works a pair of vertical wheels inside that casing between the two divisions of the boat; and these wheels, which are each some eight feet in diameter and cogged, wind in the chains at one end, paying them out at the other.”
“I see,” said Bob; and the floating bridge having by this time reached its terminus at the Portsmouth side of the water, they all stepped ashore and made their way home, Mrs Strong declaring that she had had “enough of going about, for one day at least!”
In spite of her exertions, however, she was none the worse for them after dinner; being able, indeed, to accompany the others down to the beach, Rover now forming one of the party, and magnanimously forgiving his young master for leaving him behind all day in the house while he went gallivanting about sight-seeing, albeit Dick’s company and Sarah’s kindness in the way of tit-bits somewhat made amends to the poor dog for the neglect of the truant Bob.
“By the way,” said the Captain to the latter, on taking his leave in the evening after escorting them back to “the Moorings,” “you mustn’t forget the trial of the Archimedes to-morrow, my boy. Captain Sponson told me the other day at the Club that she’d go out of harbour at nine o’clock sharp in the morning!”
“Oh, I’ll remember,” replied Bob. “Where will she start from, Captain?”
“Why, from Coaling Point, at the further end of the Dockyard; so we’ll have to be under weigh half-an-hour earlier,” cried the old sailor from the doorstep. “You had better call at my place, as it is on the way. Mind you’re not later than 8:30 sharp, or she’ll be off without you!”
“I’ll be there in time, never fear,” was Bob’s response as the Captain bade him “Good-night!” and stumped off homeward. “I’ll be in time!”
Poor Rover!
He was doomed to another day of desertion; for, much to his surprise, his young master, instead of taking him down to the sea as usual in the morning, started off alone, and without his towels, too, which puzzled Rover more than anything else.
Dogs have their feelings, similarly to other people; and so, his brown eyes filled with tears as he watched Bob rushing out of the house, in a terrible hurry lest he might keep the Captain waiting, or even, indeed, be too late altogether—with never a word for him save a peremptory, “Lie down, Rover; I can’t take you with me; lie down, sir!”
It was really too bad of Bob!
In consequence of this unhandsome treatment, it may be likewise added, Rover’s tail, which he generally carried in a jaunty fashion, with the trifle of a twist to one side, as became a dog of his degree and one moving in the best canine society, now drooped down between his legs—of a verity it almost touched the ground!
This made the deserted animal look such a picture of misery that, on Nell’s drawing her aunt’s attention to him, the good lady of the house not only spoke sympathising words unto him, to which the sad dog replied by ever so feeble a wag of his drooping tail; but Mrs Gilmour also, sanctioned, nay, even directed, his being entertained with a basin of hot bread-and-milk served up on the best dining-room carpet, an event unparalleled in the annals of “the Moorings!”
Bob meanwhile, with never a thought of Rover, was proceeding across the Dockyard with the Captain, who hobbled painfully over the knobbly paving-stones with which that national institution is ornamented, anathematising at every step he took the rulers of the “Queen’s Navee,” who put him thus to unnecessary pain.
“I can’t think how, in a Christian land, people’s poor feet should be so mercilessly disregarded!” he exclaimed, on giving his favourite corn an extra pinch between two projecting boulders—“I’d like to make ‘my Lords’ of the Admiralty do the goose-step regularly here for four hours a day; and then, perhaps, there’d be a chance of a poor creature being enabled to walk about the place in comfort!”
Notwithstanding the instruments of torture in the shape of paving-stones of which the Captain complained, and justly, he and Bob just managed to reach the Archimedes before she cast-off from the jetty alongside of which she had been coaling, the two only having time to jump on board as the gangway connecting her with the shore was withdrawn. Another moment and they would have been too late; for “time and tide,” and ships going out on trial, wait for no man, or boy either.
However, there they were, “better late than never,” Bob thought, and he thought further, too, as he gazed round the deck of the ironclad, which was somewhat begrimed with coal-dust, and about the ugliest and most mis-shapen monster imaginable, “Can I really be on board a ship?”
He was, though; and, presently, the sound of the escape steam, that had previously been roaring up through the rattling funnels, ceased; while the fan-blades of the screw-propeller began to revolve, surging up the water of the open dock in which the vessel lay into a mass of foam, and creating, so to speak, a sort of “tempest in a teapot.”
Then, a couple of attendant tugs sent their tow-ropes aboard, so as to check and guide the unwieldy leviathan in her progress through the deeper channels of the harbour which ships of heavy draught have to take to get out to sea; and “going easy,” little by little, with an occasional stop, as some impertinent craft or other got into the fairway, they finally reached Spithead.
“What is that funny red vessel coming down to us for?” inquired Bob, pointing out a dandy-rigged yawl that just then rounded-up under the stern of the Archimedes, laying-to a little way off. “She’s coming alongside, I think.”
“That’s the powder-hoy,” replied the Captain. “She’s brought the ammunition for our big guns here.”
“And why is she painted red?” asked Bob again—“eh?”
“Just for the same reason that danger-signals on railways and warning flags are always red,” said the other. “I suppose because the colour is more glaring and likely to be taken notice of; and no doubt, too, that’s why our soldiers are clothed in scarlet so that they can be all the more readily potted by the enemy?”
“You are pretty right there, Captain Dresser!” said, laughingly, a young naval officer standing near, who kindly took all further trouble off the Captain’s hands in the way of answering Bob’s questions and showing him round the ship, the machinery of which especially charmed him, being so much more imposing and complicated than that of the poor Bembridge Belle, which had interested him only yesterday, so to speak, though now washed to pieces by the relentless sea!
The movements of the eccentric aroused Bob’s chief wonder, the two piston-rods connected with it and guiding the motion appearing in their working like the crooked limbs of a bandy-legged giant “jumping up and down,” as he expressed it, “in a hoppety-kickety dance.”
Bob was called up from the engine-room by an extraordinary sound that proceeded apparently from the deck above.
This, as he ascended, grew louder and louder; until it became to him really awesome.
“What is that?” he asked the young lieutenant, who had accompanied him below and now followed him up, keeping close to his side. “Has anything happened, sir?”
“No, nothing’s happened,” replied the young officer, who was a bit of a wag. “That is our steam siren.”
“What is that, sir?” said Bob again—“I don’t understand you.”
“It’s the siren,” explained the other, “a thing like the steam-whistle, for signalling to passing ships.”
“It makes an awful row,” cried Bob. “Don’t you think so, sir?”
“It does,” said the lieutenant laughing. “A great row!”
“Why do they call it a siren, though?” inquired the insatiable Bob. “The ‘sirens’ I’ve read of in my lessons at school used to be mermaids that sang so sweetly and made such beautiful music, as they played on their harps or lyres, that they lured poor mariners to destruction!”
“But doesn’t our siren make beautiful music?” asked the lieutenant in a joking way. “It is loud, it is true; but don’t you think it sweet?”
“No,” answered Bob, most emphatically. “It isn’t! It is more like a thousand wild bulls all with the toothache and roaring with pain!”
“That’s not a bad description,” said the other, laughing heartily again. “Hullo, though, they are going to fire now! Don’t you see they’ve just run up a red flag on that spar we have forward as an apology for a mast?”
“I see,” replied Bob, concentrating his attention on the preparations being made around for testing the machine-guns and larger weapons with which the vessel was armed, long cylindrical shot, ribbed with brass bands, being piled by the side of the various batteries, and nicely-made cases of cartridges placed ready for the hoppers of the Nordenfeldts and Gatlings. “How awfully jolly!”
The Archimedes, after taking her ammunition on board, had steamed out seaward so as to get a good offing where she might fire her guns without the risk of hitting any passing craft; and, by the time Bob had come on deck again from inspecting the machinery, she was well beyond the Nab light and far out into the waters of the Channel.
On the order being presently given to fire, the machine-guns went popping away, to test how many shots they can fire off in a minute—the report of some of them sounding like an asthmatic old gentleman with a very bad cough.
“What a funny noise!” cried Bob—“Rover barks just the same when he’s asleep and dreaming!”
“Indeed!” said the young lieutenant, more intent, however, on watching a party of blue-jackets getting ready a big gun for firing in the bows than paying much attention to Bob. “Look out there, youngster!”
“What are they going to do, eh?” asked Bob—“all those sailors there!”
“Why, fire one of our forty-three ton guns; so you’d better look out for squalls. Have you got any cotton-wool about you?”
“No,” answered Bob. “What for?”
“To put in your ears, so as to deaden the noise of the report,” said the lieutenant. “I’ve got some, though, so it doesn’t matter. Here’s a bit to stick in your ears—you’d better take my advice, it’ll save your tympanum!”
Bob did not know what he meant; but he put the cotton-wool in his ears, as desired, on seeing Captain Dresser and some other officers standing near doing the same, and that the lieutenant was not “taking a rise out of him,” as at first he was inclined to think.
The enormous gun, carrying a charge of two hundred and eighty pounds of powder, with a shot weighing nearly a quarter of a ton, was now loaded; when the officer directing the operation ordered all persons to move away from the vicinity of the weapon, which was about to be fired for the first time—at least on board the Archimedes.
Everybody retreated behind the armoured screen bulkhead that formed a sort of “shelter trench” across the deck; for, if an accident should happen in the way of an unexpected explosion, refuge might be had there from any flying fragments.
Everybody, as has been said, at once, on the order being given, sought this retreat—everybody, that is, but Bob, who, instead of stepping back like the others, stepped forwards.
At the same moment the signal was given, “Fire!”
A terrific report followed, as if the ship and all its contents were blown up, there being none of the reverberating sound, like that usually heard when heavy guns are fired, as of an express train rushing at speed through the air; but a dull, hollow, sullen, sharp roar, succeeded by the heavy swish of some body, or something, falling into the water alongside, while a thick smoke hung over the deck like a pall.
“By Jingo!” exclaimed the Captain, “the gun has burst!”