So ended my volume of poetry, though I must add that the publisher turned out a good sort. I would sooner deal with publishers, some of them, than with stokehold bosses and concert managers. Music and book publishers cannot publish authors’ inspirations that do not sell and keep the author as well. I wish they could. As for the reviewers of my poetry, they made me feel the happiest of aspirants for four weeks, and I feel grateful for that four weeks of greatness.
I think it was after a voyage to the Cape that I stayed in London for a week, and then secured a berth on board the s.s. Port Adelaide, a tramp steamer. We called at Las Palmas, and then went slap, bang across the world for Sydney. It was a monotonous voyage. We had a stowaway on board; they sent him down into the stokehold. He had been a London street arab and street singer, was a jolly youth and sang The Ivy and the Myrtle were in Bloom. Then he came round with the hat and got tobacco from the amused crew. The sailors encouraged him to tell his experiences and were delighted to hear how he carried parcels for passengers at the railway stations, and often bolted with the parcel if it looked valuable! He would finish, and then take his tin whistle out and blow it, do a jig and sing some mournful street prayer.
We had very bad weather after rounding the Cape, “running the Easter down.” There were four passengers on board, and one died of consumption. He lay on the hatchway for two days and nights: the weather was so bad that we couldn’t stop the ship and decently bury “It.” He was canvassed up and weighted with lead, and seas came over the body all night long; we crept by it on deck like frightened shadows. When it was calmer the captain said the burial service, and then all the crew, standing round the tied canvas length, said “Amen.” Then gently, with the chief mate, I pushed it forward into the grave of wandering waters and heard the awful plomp as it touched the sea. At once the bell in the engine-room rang full speed ahead, the engines started banging and we were off again.
About a week after that we sighted a full-rigged sailing ship bound for New Zealand, a Shaw Saville boat painted with white squares. She was doing about twelve knots and coming right across our bows. The main-mast was snapped off by the main-yard and two of the boats were gone; she had been through some terrible weather. She came dipping and rolling by, so close that as we looked over the side we saw the apprentices wave their hands; we all waved back as she passed by, dipping her flag to us, and we saluted back with ours. I felt a choky feeling as I watched her pass, with her broken spars and torn sails, flying away towards the mist of the sunset, the figure-head with hands stretched in prayer at the bows. The white-crested, curling waves lifted their arms and plucked at her sides as she went rolling and pitching by. There was something in the sight of that beaten ship that inspired me with more tenderness than anything I have ever seen at sea.
I would often sit in the dim, oil-lit fo’c’sle as we swayed and dipped along. The tiny round port-holes lifted to the fall and rise of the bows, revealing the tossing blue moonlit seas outside. In that roaming home of merchant sailormen, at regular intervals, came the steady-drawn, thundering music of the steamer’s onward plunge as the screw urged her across the world. From the middle of the deck roof swung the oil lamp, its faint beams showing the outlines of the huddled sea-chests on the deck floor and, all around, the narrow coffin-sized bunks wherein lay the sleeping or wakeful crew. Some snored, their bearded mouths wide open; others smoked and made ribald remarks, as Jim English the boatswain, a typical sailor of the old school, yarned of long-ago voyages on windjammers. A real old shellback he was, and the only sailor whom I ever heard use the expressions “Shiver my timbers!” and “Avast there!” I had voyaged in many sailing ships and tramp steamers, and mixed with many crews in foreign seaports, but never till then had I heard a living mouth utter those ancient nautical phrases so familiar to me in my old sea novels. “Stow yer gab,” “Holy Moses,” “Who the hell?”, “Gawd lummy” and “Gorblimy” were almost the only typical remarks in which sailors of my experience expressed their various moods.
This old shellback, Jim English, was about sixty-five years of age, and had sailed the seas before most of the crew were born. Sitting on his huge brown sea-chest, he would half close his eyelids as I played.
“Give us that again, matey; my old mother sang that to me when I was a nipper,” he would say as I scraped some old melody out of the carpenter’s cheap fiddle, and his thin, wrinkled lips smiled as though he dreamed pleasantly in sleep. I never tired of listening to his yarns as he sat and took bites from his tobacco plug, his kind grey eyes moving quickly as he brought his fist down with a crash to emphasise the main facts of his wonderful tales. At night, when the wind was blowing and you could only just see the outlined forms of the watch tramping to and fro on the bridge, he would sit and tell us eerie things—how he had seen the phantom ship off the Cape on moonlight nights, dead shipmates climbing aloft among the grey sails, singing chanteys.
“Chummy,” he would say, “my wife’s been dead these ’ere twenty years, but often at night she sits on that old sack by my bunk there, looks at me in the old way and sez: ‘Jim, keep off the booze, and don’t make the round trip a dead ’orse.’ And never a drop have I touched these ten years; and the old girl comes with me and sits there and looks at me with her laughing grey eyes on every trip now.”
So earnest was he that our heads instinctively turned as we looked at the sack in the dark corner. We half expected to see his dead wife sitting there staring. He believed implicitly in dreams, for all the dire disasters of his life had been foretold in them. He was a kind of old priest of the sea; he wore an oilskin skull-cap and looked upon all of us as mere children; and we felt like children as we listened to his advice and experiences. He had cures for all our ailments, and was most superstitious. Once while he was yarning and sewing his socks he put one of them on inside out. Suddenly discovering it, he whipped it off, then turned almost purple to the centre of his bald head and said: “Now I’ve done it, mates! Some cursed thing’s sure to happen before the trip’s over. I’ve lost four shipmates overboard and all through them putting their socks on inside out!” As he said this anguish wrinkled his sea-beaten face, and I too almost cursed the unfortunate mistake. The sailors shuffling cards at the fo’c’sle table looked over their shoulders through wreaths of tobacco smoke and wondered. As for me, I believed all he said. My awestruck eyes watched him as he yarned on and fed my imagination till I was a child again. His personality filled me with admiration; I almost worshipped him. I really think if he had mutinied, and secured the old tramp steamer, I should have followed him, as a son his father, and thrown in my lot with him.
Nor do I exaggerate in saying this, for his weird personality took me out of myself and away back. He refired the magic blaze, the still smouldering embers of my boyhood’s romance, and I was romantic, almost to madness, as a boy. Old bearded heroes, with unflinching eyes, stared through my memories, and fell, striking that last brave blow for right! Beautiful women, running by the magic moonlit sea-foams of undiscovered shores, stretched their arms seaward as the wooden galleons with reefed topsails stood inland for the shore. Forlorn, lovelit eyes shone like stars through the dead sunsets on the sky-lines of vanished yesterdays, till I heard the windy poplar-trees wailing in the lanes outside my bedroom window and the robin singing on the leafless apple-tree. Once more the stolen candle shone, and the light never seen on sea or land blazed through my eyes as I travelled across magic seas and enchanted distant lands, lands peopled with warriors and the beautiful creations of the torn novel by my bedside.