Chapter Twenty Five.
The Arab Stronghold.
At that moment the wind lulled for an instant, and I was just able to make a slash with the sharp edge of my knife across the rope, severing it instanter, and thus saving poor bungling Bouncer all further trouble; when, a terrific gust came, this time right astern, carrying sail and mast and all, the latter snapping off like a carrot close to the thwart where it was stepped, over the heads of all in the boat forwards, high in air—just as if the lot were the remnants of a big kite that had parted its supporting string, the sail ultimately disappearing in the distance, swallowed up by the angry waves.
These latter were now boiling up round the cutter on every side, our little pigmy of a craft seeming lost in the seething caldron of broken water; but, she was buoyant as a cork, and, although half rilled, breasted the billows in fine style and running before wind and sea at a tearing rate with not a rag of sail on her now, nor an oar, save one Mr Chisholm and I rigged out over the stern by Draper’s direction, this being better to steer her by than the rudder, which we then unshipped.
It was a good job for us that our old coxswain had got wounded, and that Draper had taken his place just then temporarily while Hoskins was on the sick-list; for, though Draper was the oldest petty officer on board the ship—his promotion to a higher grade having been delayed, I believe, through his natural crustiness of temper, which he really could not help—there was no doubt that he knew the East Coast of Africa well, and the management of a boat the better of the two, especially in a stormy sea.
Ay, and it was stormy now!
Far as the eye could reach, the mad waves dashed and clashed against each other as they raced along, borne onward before the blast; throwing up their white crests, all lashed into foam, in showers of spray and spindrift that fell back over us in the boat, wetting us to the skin and blinding those that had to face it.
The horizon, too—what we could see of it, that is, through the spray—was covered with a mass of inky clouds, almost blue-black in hue, that covered by degrees the whole of the heavens, with the exception of a round spot right overhead that looked like a gigantic eye.
Mr Chisholm, who, young though he was, had the sight of a hawk, spotted this at once.
“Hullo, Draper!” he cried, pointing aloft. “What’s that up there—anything more brewing up for us, d’ye think?”
The coxswain, who had all his work cut out to keep the boat from being swamped by the heavy following seas that came rolling up astern of us, threatening every minute to engulf the cutter and carry her down bodily below, gave an uneasy squint in the direction whither the young officer pointed his finger.
“Lord-sakes, sir,” he exclaimed, shaking his head in a very grave way, “that be a h’ox-eye!”
“Ox-eye!” Mr Chisholm repeated after him in a quizzing tone, with a grin on his face. “I’ve heard of ox-tongues before—those tinned ones ain’t bad eating sometimes for lunch on a pinch; but an ox-eye—what is that, Draper?”
“Nothin’ to larf about,” grunted out our crusty coxswain, bracing his body against the loom of the oar with which he was steering and slewing the boat’s head aside to avoid a cross sea that nearly broke at that very moment over our bows. “If ye’d be’n as long on this coast as me, sir, ye’d know when ye seed one o’ them things up there—it means, ‘Look out!’ Ay, by the Lord too, we must look out now! Stand by there—all hands lie down in the bottom of the boat; it’s yer only chance, if ye values yer lives!”
“Down, men!” Mr Chisholm cried, endorsing Draper’s words of warning with his command. “Do as the coxswain tells you—down for your lives!”
Our chaps who were seated on the thwarts forwards and amidships at once scrambled down on the bottom boards, while we in the sternsheets, including Mr Chisholm himself, squatted on the grating, only old Draper sitting up still at his post aft with both hands holding the loom of the steering oar in a firm grip.
“Bend yer heads,” muttered this worthy the next moment; “it’s a-comin’ now!”
As the words passed his lips and we all bowed down below the level of the gunwale, the roar of the sea seemed hushed in the dead stillness that ensued; and then, with a wild shriek that sounded like the moaning of some lost soul from the bottomless pit, the wind, which had been gathering up all its strength in the interim, burst upon us, burying the cutter’s bows as it struck her right under water.
Bouncer, frightened out of his life, made a movement to rise as he lay alongside me on the stern grating; but old Draper gave him a kick in the ribs with the toe of his heavy boot.
“Lie still, you beggar!” he cried, bringing, with a tremendous pull of his arms, the oar-rudder hard over. “The boat’s rightin’ all right. We’ve seed the wust on it if yer’ll only bide still!”
Fortunately, we had a weather cloth over the bow, which prevented the sea from pouring in and swamping us when the cutter dipped under; while, as all of us remained quiet and our dead weight was more towards the stern than forwards, the boat’s natural buoyancy prevailed and she rose up like a cork.
The worst might have been over, as Draper had said; still, we were not ‘out of the wood’ yet, gust after gust assailing us, and the waves racing up madly astern, when, dividing, they would tower up on either side of our frail craft, threatening destruction for the moment ere they rolled onward again—we, all the while, fleeing before the fury of the storm we knew not whither, powerless alike to shape a course or guide our boat.
All that our skilful coxswain could do was to prevent the cutter from shipping a sea, no matter how the wind took us, or whether we ran with the billows or athwart them, as sometimes happened from the sudden shift of the gale, at whose beck and call we were; for, one moment going north or west into the open sea, the next recklessly careering eastwards, right in upon the rocks of the mainland, or dashing south amongst the mazy little islands and islets round and about Zanzibar, where our plight would be as perilous.
We had been boxing the compass like this for some four or five hours, without the weather showing any signs of a mend, it being now late in the afternoon; and our head turned towards Bagamoyo again for about the fifth time that day since we began our circling experiences, when, just as it was beginning to grow darker, though there had not been much light about since noon, a ship hove in sight.
She was dead ahead of us, riding out the gale under steam.
The smoke of her funnels was trailing away to leeward and so mixing up with the clouds that were banked on the horizon that old Draper, who was looking out as well as steering, for he would not allow any of us to sit on the thwarts, said he could not tell ‘t’other from which.’
Presently, however, as we surged onwards, carried down upon her at the rate of twelve knots or more, Draper could distinguish the smoke from the clouds; ay, and the ship herself.
“By the Lord!” he cried, looking at Mr Chisholm, his face all aglow and his voice heartier than I ever heard him speak before, “it’s the Mermaid, sir.”
“The Mermaid, coxswain!” ejaculated Mr Chisholm, at once jumping to his feet and taking a sight himself, shading his eyes with his hand. “Yes, it is the Mermaid, hurrah!”
“Steady there, sir,” said Draper, warningly putting his hand on the young officer’s arm; “we ain’t aboard her yet, sir; and if yer don’t keep cool, sir, beggin’ yer pardon, sir, it’s precious little we’ll see of her this night, or ever ag’en, fur that matter!”
“But, how shall we get alongside?”
“Keep cool, sir. I’ll tell ’ee when the time comes,” rejoined the coxswain, in a soothing tone that took off the impertinence of his thus speaking to his officer. “You leave it to me, sir, and I’ll find a way, if man can do it, to get alongside our old hooker; ’sides them aboard ’ll be on the lookout, too, and between the pair on us we ought fur to manage it comf’ably!”
While ‘old crusty’ was laying down the law in this fashion, though continuing to mind his steering as smartly as he had done all along, the cutter was nearing the cruiser every instant, the wind taking her along in a series of mad leaps and bounds through the water and over the water, jumping from the top of one wave to that of another, and sometimes almost in mid-air, until we seemed about to hop on board the Mermaid, all standing like some of those flying-fish I have seen in the tropics, or else smash ourselves all to pieces against her iron hull.
But, in the nick of time, when only some twenty or thirty yards off her sharp ram bow, which would have cut into the cutter as easily as a knife goes into butter in summer-time, Draper gave a tug to his steering oar; and, Captain Hankey ‘making a lee’ for us by porting his helm, we glided into comparatively calm water under the cruiser’s starboard counter.
A dozen ropes were thrown to us from men already stationed in the rigging for the purpose, a dozen hands and more held out to help us up the side; and almost before any of us well knew where we were, there we stood, safe and sound on the deck of our old ship again, the cutter being then hoisted up to the davits.
Draper, who had saved her and us, was the last man to leave her, when the falls were secured and the gripes put round the boat again.
After this exciting episode, nothing very notable occurred during our stay on this part of the coast for the next twelve months, beyond my being made ‘able seaman.’
I passed for this grade very satisfactorily, I am glad to say; but, it would not be fair for me to omit mentioning that it was mainly through my old friend Larrikins that I was able to get off with flying colours. My old chum coached me up in the knotting and splicing of wire rope, of which art he was a proficient, his father being a working smith, and Larrikins himself having been intended originally for that trade, before the superior attractions of the sea weaned him from the paternal handicraft.
In the following year, however, matters became a trifle livelier on the East coast.
The Somali, from the constant blockade we kept up along their territory with our boats and cruisers, from Cape Guardafui down to the Equator, thus putting a stop to their slave-dealings, capturing as we did all their dhows and blocking all outlets from the coast, determined on retaliatory measures; so, mustering all their forces and calling up the assistance of the slave-dealers of the interior, they began to attack various points of the British protectorate.
Possibly, had the Arabs only us to deal with, things might not have got to this pass; but, very unluckily for this country, the Germans, who have long been jealous of our colonial enterprise and commercial success in Africa as elsewhere, took it into their heads, not long since, to extend their trade on the eastern seaboard.
The ideas of Meinherr Von Sourkrout and his warlike Kaiser in respect of the colonisation of this part of the Dark Continent, like those of our French cousins on the West Coast, differ much from the more peaceful plan pursued by England for several generations past—a plan that has worked wonderfully well in the building up of our Empire, and the spread of our manufactures over every land and sea!
Meinherr Sourkrout’s method for extending trade, that is, according to the experience of us bluejackets of the British Navy who have served on the East African station, has been to shoot down the natives wherever the flag of his Fatherland has ever been stuck up; and, when the men of the negro tribes, objecting to such friendly advances, have bolted into the bush, Meinherr, imitating the example of his great countryman Marshal Haynau, took to flogging their wives and womenfolk in order to coax the black gentlemen back.
The darkeys, somehow or other, didn’t tackle to this treatment; and, the Germans having thus roused them up to the south of our protectorate, where, unfortunately for us, Meinherr Von Sourkrout and his domineering compatriots have a territory far too close to our own, the natives, being of the opinion that we were in sympathy with their oppressors, joined hands with the Somalis in their advance on our trading posts along the coast—they did not touch those belonging to the Germans, for the very good reason that these have none!
I heard Mr Gresham explaining all this one day to Dabby when they were both sitting in the captain’s gig, to which I had been shifted since my promotion to able seaman; for I was pulling stroke at the time, the boat taking them ashore to a grand dinner-party given by the British Consul to the Sultan or some other ‘big pot’ at Zanzibar, off which port the Mermaid was then lying.
I wondered what led to this queer talk, as none of us on board had heard anything on the lower deck about any row being imminent; for, of course, sick of our stagnant life for the last few months, as all of us were, the inkling of any fight being in the air would have been as welcome to us as the ‘flowers of May.’
Still I kept my ears open all the same; and when, the next morning, I met the captain’s steward returning from the galley with a cup of early cocoa for ‘old Hankey Pankey,’ and he told me that he thought we were going to be busy soon, the ‘old man’ having directed him to take out his sword and pistols, and give them to his marine servant to be cleaned up, I began, as ‘Gyp’ did that time on board the Saint Vincent, ‘to smell a rat.’
A little later on, my impressions became confirmed; for, just as we were piped down to breakfast after ‘wash and scrub decks,’ and I was telling Larrikins, who sat alongside me at the mess-table, what I had heard, the engine-room gong sounded, and the word was passed to get up steam as quickly as possible.
‘Old Hankey Pankey’ did not waste time when he had once got his orders; and some couple of hours after we had weighed anchor and were rapidly leaving Zanzibar, with its rows of square stone houses, built with flat roofs in the eastern style, that front the beautiful curving bay, whose white sandy beach is washed by water so clear that you can see the bottom at six fathoms, and which is backed, beyond the warehouses and mansions of the merchants, by the bright greenery of palm trees and dates and other rich tropical growths, the beautiful foliage of which contrasts vividly with the intense whiteness of the buildings and adjacent shore, offering quite a relief to the eye from the glaring sun and coppery sky overhead.
“Say, Tom,” said Larrikins to me presently, as the two of us, with a lot of the other hands, were polishing up the brasswork of the machine-guns on the upper deck, “d’yer know where we’re bound in such a hurry?”
“No, Larry,” I replied. “Somewhere up the coast, though, I ’spect from what I told you down below.”
Larrikins chuckled to himself.
“Ye’r a fine chap, Tom, to give a fellow h’infumation,” he said with a snigger. “I could ’a told you as much meself. Why, carn’t I see with ’arf a h’eye we’re steerin’ to the north’ard up the coast, with the munsoon a-blowin’ right in our teeth and the sun on our starb’rd ’and!”
I laughed, too, at the sharp wag’s rejoinder.
“Well, Larry,” I said at last, after polishing up the ratchet of the Nordenfeldt I was working at to my personal satisfaction, hoping to have the aiming of it bye-and-bye, “I can’t tell you any more than that we are bound up the coast, and are likely to have a brush with the Arabs along there somewhere; but where that somewhere is, my joker, I’m hanged if I know!”
“I can tell you, mate,” put in a man who was rubbing up the gun at the end of the bridge hard by where we were standing. “We’re off for Mombassa again. I heard ‘old Square toes,’ the navigator, tell Mr Chisholm just now. He said we were agoin’ to meet the Merlin there, and purseed further up the coast together.”
“Oh!” said Larry, “that means business, Tom.”
“Ay,” said I, “it does, my hearty, and to tell the truth, Larry, I’m jolly glad of it.”
So were all hands on board, when the news spread through the ship; and, on our reaching Mombassa late in the afternoon of the same day, steaming fifteen knots all the way, pretty nearly our full speed when the stokehold was not ‘closed up,’ we found the Merlin there before us, as the man on deck had told Larry and me in the morning.
This made assurance a certainty, every man-jack of the crew being cock-a-hoop with excitement, when, after a lot of signalling between the two cruisers, and the Merlin’s gig bringing her captain alongside, he being junior to ‘old Hankey Pankey,’ the two of us sailed off in company just before sunset.
Our destination was Malindi, at the mouth of the Sabaki river, where it was reported the Somalis had made an inroad into the British protectorate, and burnt one of the out stations of the East African Company, slaughtering all the whites and natives employed by the traders.
This place was only some sixty miles to the northward of Mombassa; and all the arrangements for our landing having been completed, and ‘old Hankey Pankey’ settled his plan of operations with Captain Oliver of the Merlin, we did not hurry on the passage to Malindi, timing ourselves to arrive about daybreak, casting anchor in front of the town, as near in as we could get without shoaling our water, at Six Bells in the morning watch to the minute.
During our run up the coast from Mombassa, the first lieutenant and Mr Dabchick saw to our boats being got ready, and the bluejackets and marines, who were detailed for service with the expedition, mustered on deck in all their ‘war paint,’ and told off to the respective craft in which they were to go ashore; and by Eight Bells, after a hurried breakfast, which none of us much cared to eat, we were all so full of enthusiasm at the prospect of action, we shoved off from the Mermaid—all in dead silence, though, so that no inkling of our coming might reach the ears of the Arabs before we were upon them.
The boats of the Merlin left their ship at the same time as we did ours; the two lots making for the land in two columns abreast, ‘old Hankey Pankey’ leading our line in the launch, with the first and second cutters and the whaler trailing on behind, while Captain Oliver led those of the Merlin.
On reaching the shore, the sea being fortunately very quiet, though the north-east monsoon was now blowing, we waded up the sandy beach without any difficulty; and, leaving our flotilla under charge of the boat-keepers, a couple of hands in each craft to look after them so as to prevent their grounding in the event of the wind getting up, when the surf might be dangerous, we united our forces and marched in a body inland.
Avoiding the town of Malindi, our object being to surprise a stockade, where the Somalis were reported to have established themselves, some five miles off in the bush, in the rear of the outposts of the settlers, we shaped a course south by west under the guidance of one of the natives, who had been sent to us by one of the principal merchants of the place on hearing of our landing, so as to make our way easy for us, steering by compass in the jungle ashore being very different to what it is on the open sea.
The rascal, who was evidently a Somali spy sent by his astute comrades to watch our movements, made our way very easy indeed; for he took us directly in front of the stockade we had intended surprising, instead of showing us a by-path leading to the rear of the fortification, from which we could have outflanked the defence.
‘Old Hankey Pankey,’ who led our fighting force of bluejackets and marines, which mustered in officers and men altogether some two hundred strong, was flabbergasted as he gaily marched in front of the column on our being received by a hail of bullets and buckshot, which decimated our ranks as we suddenly debouched from a rough, tangled undergrowth of scrub and dwarf plantain trees.
Amidst these we could hardly see an inch before us; and then, we found ourselves in front of a high palisade, made of the trunks of heavy trees lashed together with lianas and rattan creepers that were as strong as wire rope. This was loopholed for musketry, and from thence a murderous fire of innumerable weapons was directed at our devoted heads.
Plucky as a lion, however, the captain rallied us; and, dividing the column into three portions, taking command of the middle division himself, while Captain Oliver of the Merlin, and Lieutenant Dabchick of our ship, headed the two others, we advanced with a cheer to storm the stockade, ‘old Hankey Pankey’ aiming for its front face, and the other sections of our force for the flanks of the fortification.
Talk of fighting, it was a case of ‘pull baker, pull devil!’ then!
We numbered two hundred, as I have said, but the Somalis must have mustered two thousand at least, if they had a man there.
Twice we advanced to the attack, twice we were forced to fall back before the withering flight of bullets that met us face to face from every hole and corner of that infernal stockade; though Captain Hankey bravely walked right up to the timber work till he almost touched it, a revolver in either hand, which he fired alternately at the beggars!
But, the captain got a big matchlock ball through both his legs, the missile having been discharged at him as he turned sideways, with a “Follow me, lads!” to cheer us on.
He was not licked yet, though; for, as Larrikins stooped over him to lift him up, ‘old Hankey Pankey’ got his arm round his neck and climbed up on to him pick-a-back, Larry highly delighted at the job, he and the captain then advancing again to the assault.
In the meantime, Mr Dabchick had brought up one of our little nine-pounder boat-guns which had stuck in the rear and blew in part of the palisading on the left of the stockade, when he and a lot of us made a desperate charge to storm the entrenchment.
Poor little Dabby, though, was shot dead while entering the breach the shell of our nine-pounder had made in the outer palisade that protected the Arab defences; and then, finding a second fence composed of similar baulks of timber in front of us, as strong as that we had surmounted, and that the fire of the Somalis increased the nearer we got to them, our chaps, staggered by the fall of poor Dabby, I must confess it, all at once began to cut and run!