Next day the yards were squared to a stiff, fair breeze, and to the strain of some old Spanish chanty I found myself bound for Tahiti! My description of this voyage and the crew may appear like some gross exaggeration; but I can assure the reader that I could not possibly describe that crew and their ancient craft without appearing to exaggerate. I even remember the thrill that went through me when I saw the ancient-looking yellowish sails belly to the Pacific wind as we passed beyond the barrier reefs and caught the outer foam. But alas! the thrill passed away when I sat down in the forecastle with those marvellous old shellbacks and had my first meal.
I might say that the salt-horse and biscuits of the “Zangwahee” were as ancient as the crew appeared to be. Perhaps it was natural enough that there should be an affinity between the ancient members of that crew (a few members belonged to my own century) and the horses that had apparently roamed the primeval Arabian plains! Only a great poet could describe the antique “Menu” of that forecastle. I have a brilliant imagination, and so it was easy enough for me to imagine that the corn that those biscuits were made of had ripened in Assyrian cornfields! I only had to eat a foc’sle biscuit to enter at once the realms of enchantment. Just as good wine intoxicates the brain, the fumes of those cast-iron mouldy biscuits created a gassy atmosphere in my stomach and inspired my brain with weird poetic fancies. I imagined I saw Ruth standing amid the “alien corn”; and, taking another nibble, I had visions of old rivers flowing by ancient walls, and of the desert towers of the Pharaohs! I saw tired harvest girls, sickle in hand, sleeping by their garnered heaps under Assyrian suns. Yes, reader, such dreams were mine when I had poetic nightmares after partaking of the “Zangwahee’s” forecastle menu of salt-horse and hard-tack.
Though I could fill reams with the wonders of the “Zangwahee’s” menu and all that my brain fancied, I have only space to set down the stern facts that apply to the “Zangwahee’s” crew. As I’ve said, they were hairy-chested men, real seadogs of another age. To see their thick-bearded lips and their crooked noses, as they sang and climbed aloft, made me half fancy that I had been blown across a century into the Nelson period. Notwithstanding the old skipper’s rough exterior, I found him quite human. Surely few young men who have gone to sea have had the experiences I have had, for that old skipper would get blind drunk, and, lying in his bunk, roar mighty encores as I played selections on my violin to him! He loved sea hymns, and, when I played “For those in peril on the sea,” he would mumble deep in his beard, his eyes becoming wet with tears! Though I liked that strange old captain (and I believed he liked me), my chief delight was to come off watch and sit in the forecastle with the crew as they tugged their beards, shook their fists, cursed the mate, the skipper, and the Universe! As they sat on their sea-chests in the dim-lit forecastle, they looked exactly what they were—genuine high priests who worshipped at the altar of monstrous yarns and the best rum!
Some of them had fine, fierce, kind eyes, and bearded lips that never tired of yelling forth the wild mystery of the sea and oaths of inexhaustible beauty! They were able to express, in one neat phrase, the pictorial ruggedness of their adventurous, unholy careers. They were true sea-poets—possessing forcible descriptive genius that enabled one to conjure up weird visions of the wondrous countries they had seen and the “charming” women they had known. And I vow that they made their verse scan, subtle verse devoid of any direct influence from the idyllic school of romanticism. Some hailed from ’Frisco, Japan, Callao, New York, London Town, Norway, etc., so there was a splendid mixture of the world’s maritime literature. Consequently that forecastle’s audience made a terrific school of the “Sturm und Drang” persuasion, a school that fairly hummed with the unrestraint of Rousseau’s Confessions, at the same time favouring Mallarmé and Browning for concentrated expression. A forcible accent came on their rhymes too! One epic punch-rhyme would make one’s eyes see stars! What hairy fists they had! But those older hands seldom quarrelled. O Le Tao’s frame was as bare as an egg when compared to the hieroglyphics and tattooed sea-heraldry inscribed on their carcases. I had never seen such living art before, such brazen display as they revealed when they sat by their bunks and undressed in that forecastle. Watching by the mingy oil-lamp that hung from the fo’c’sle roof-beam, I seemed to be witnessing some life-like, wondrous Madame Tussaud’s waxwork of the sea, as one by one they pulled their coats and vests off, revealing their herculean, muscular frames in the nude! What a sight I beheld!—the tattooed storied history of their adventurous careers! On one old sea-weary sailor’s chest was engraved, in curves of red and blue, a goddess-like girl, the one great romantic love of his youth. She was exquisitely designed, and one unloosed tress fell down to her bare shoulders. I was fascinated as, leaning forward, I made out the faint words inscribed beneath the feet—“My Lucille,” then again, over the crown of hair, “Mizpah.” Others were veritable living volumes, depicting all those things that influence sailormen in the seaports of the world: shapely-limbed maids of Shanghai, Tokio, Callao, ’Frisco, New York, and London Town adorned their figures. “My True love Harriet,” Lucille, Unita, Mary Ann, Bill’s Alice, Ducky-Sarah, Angelina, Una, Fan-Tan, all were there, pug-nosed, and some, alas, indelicately underclad. I do not exaggerate when I say that I was initiated into the storied, tragical history of the oceans, of wrecks, the morals and poetic characteristics of strange womenkind in distant lands, and the shattered hopes of faithful sailormen, as I studied those weather-beaten manuscripts of the seas. For many of those tattooesque designs were sentimental symbols telling of fidelity in love, some deep faith in “Alice, dated 1879,” and lo, the recorded disillusionment with the later date—1880—the design of a heart with a dagger through it, revealing something of the bitterness brought to those old sailors’ hearts through the faithlessness of those old loves whose names were tattooed on their massive, hairy chests and muscular arms! It would indeed be a weird chapter of memoirs that told of my brazen explorations, of my astonished exclamations, as I curiously scanned and studied the tattooesque history of those violent old manuscripts. Many of the inscriptions had faded with age. Old Hans, who had sailed the seas fifty years, before I was born, would yarn for hours as I frequently interrupted to stare at his chest, his arms, wrists, and fingers.
“Who was she?” I’d ask.
He would shake his head sadly and tell me how Unita jilted him; how Kum-Kum slept in Tokio, and Leila in Kensal Green, and Singa-Samber in some old cemetery in the South Seas. Once he put forth his tarry thumbnail, and by the mingy gleams of the fo’c’sle’s hanging oil-lamp helped me to trace out a faint figure on his big wrinkled chest, and, lo! I plainly discerned the face, legs, and shoulders of some old pal hanging on a foreign gibbet! I often thought that I must be dreaming it all, as they sat there in the shadows, yarning away, as the Pacific combers banged against the vessel’s side, and we rolled along on our lonely course bound for old Papeete. It took some time before that crew acknowledged me as one of their legitimate members, for they were often cantankerous devils.
Ah, memory of it all—and my first oath! For, though I had been many voyages and roughed it “on the wallaby” with old sundowners in Australia and New Zealand, I had not blossomed into a true sea-poet of the great unromantic school of the oceans. No unfledged prima donna, no débutante, ever rehearsed her first part as I did, I know. I’d show them how to swear! After deep meditation, I gathered together the finest swear words extant. Over and over again I repeated those vile phrases until they fell glibly, naturally, from my tongue—full-blooded adjectives that resolved into monstrous illegitimate pronouns that I may not print here! I longed to publish those words, so to speak, to inflict them, sear them on the soul of one of those cantankerous old seadogs, for they played many scurvy tricks upon me, such tricks as must remain unrecorded. Though many opportunities presented themselves before I got the swear-phrases off by heart, I had to wait quite four days before I could get my own back in a legitimate way. At last the desired moment came. It was just at sunset. I was standing on deck gazing on the horizon, admiring the expanse of peace, the ineffable beauty of awakening stars and approaching night. Suddenly the modern sailor, who hailed from a local pub, Houndsditch, London, walked out of the forecastle, looked at me as I stared over the bulwark, then yawned, and dabbed me negligently—smash! in the mouth with a coal-tar brush, and calmly asked me if “Me mother knew I was out?”
I clapped my hand to my tar-smeared face; then I let forth my pent-up volley of oaths, which I well punctuated with a splendid driving blow on that son of Houndsditch’s nasal organ. The applause and calls of encore from the whole crew, who had rushed up to see the fight, were terrific. They cheered and cheered. Then I gave them something more to cheer about—I picked up the nearest tar-pot—there was a row of them by the galley door—and crash! it fitted like a cap over my opponent’s cranium, hiding his brow, eyes, nose, and mouth too! It was splendid. The cheer that followed that unrehearsed act of mine soothed my ruffled nerves considerably. I was declared the winner, and, metaphorically speaking, was awarded on the spot the Nobel prize for swearing! I gained and maintained the highest respect from those seasoned sailormen. They nudged me in the ribs when “Houndsditch” passed me on deck, and reviewed my contributions to ocean-poetry in the most friendly spirit as I swore and swore. So have I slowly and painfully educated myself that I may compete with my fellow-man and fight the world with my sleeves up. I recall that I was quite comfortable on board after that fight. Ah! I often think to myself, that if I were a king or a millionaire, how I should purchase thousands of tar-pots, and fix them—crash!—over the heads of some people I know. But why digress to record one’s personal viciousness? Except for the incidents recorded it was a monotonous voyage; and I was delighted when we caught a good trade wind and, with all sails set, the “Zangwahee” fairly danced and bowed as she did her ten knots toward old Papeete.
I had been to Papeete before, so knew what I was up against. I wasn’t touring the world with a camera and a thousand a year; and, though “South Sea palm-clad isles and wine-dark seas” sounds poetic and comfortable like, you have to rough it a bit if you’ve only got fourpence halfpenny in the exchequer. But these facts didn’t trouble me overmuch, since I could play the fiddle and swear.
The cook of the “Zangwahee” was a most grotesque character. He swore like the much-maligned trooper, banged his pots and pans about, and behaved like a lunatic when we stood by the galley door and held our noses, as we cynically praised the terrible effluvia of the cooking salt-horse. He, too, belonged to another age. He was sun-tanned to a yellowish hue, and had a large, drooping nose with bristly hair on the end. He would purse his lips up and, giving me a contemptuous glance as I smelt the galley odours, would say: “You call yerself a saylorman! yer God-damned galoot, clear art of it!” But in the end he and I became quite chummy. He would sit by his galley doorway and tell about the good old days, curse the modern sailormen and seafaring ways, as I agreed with all he had to say. “You orter been a-living in our time, when men was sailors,” he’d say, as I softly pressed him to take another sip of rum from the flask which I always carried, so that I might with ease bribe those dogmatic seafarers. After that he would cook a small bit of salted horse in fresh water instead of sea-water for my especial benefit. He even gave me fresh-made biscuits at times. So did I manage to exist on the “Zangwahee”; otherwise I should have been buried over the side and gone out of this story years ago. When rum was plentiful, the cook would stop on deck dancing half the night. Through being bow-legged, he looked like some mammoth frog clad in an apron, as he shuffled in a jig in the moonlight, close by his galley door. The songs he sang were quite tuneless, consequently he sang and sang. He would fold his arms on his breast and open his mouth like a puppet, as I played the violin and he danced. I’ve never played an obligato to a frog’s solo; but for tune and tempo give me the frog! (I don’t think it’s usually known, but the Polynesian swamp frog was the original inventor of the syncopated accent of the modern cake-walk.) Its chant goes: