CHAPTER VIII.
OFF DUTY AMUSEMENTS.
When off duty the sailors amused themselves by spinning yarns and singing songs. Sometimes they got up a sparring match, and occasionally hazing of the duller or less active of the crew was indulged in. It is related that one sailor was nicknamed “Top-robbin” because he usually began his stories with the introduction, “When I sailed in the Taprobane, East Ingyman.” Once he was induced to attempt a song, and began in a voice in which a hoarse bass struggled with a squeaky treble:
Jerry Lee was hung at sea
For stabbing of his messmate true.
And his body did swing, a horrible thing,
At the sport of the wild sea mew!
The whole watch shouted for him to stop, and he was warned:
“If you ever sing again in this ’ere watch while we’re off soundings, we’ll fire you through a lee port. Such a voice as that would raise a harrycane.”
“Top-robbin’s” yarns, however, were treated with more tolerance. He had a lively imagination and a very impressive delivery. His themes were of the ghostly sort—of phantom ships sailing against wind and tide, and women in white gliding on board in the midst of storms.
Curiously enough, Captain Semmes, who was constantly called a pirate and whose name was associated in the minds of New England people with that of Captain Kidd, had gained the reputation in the forecastle of his own ship of being a sort of preacher, the impression doubtless dating from that introductory speech of his off Terceira, in which he predicted the blessings of Providence upon the Alabama’s efforts to rid the South of the Yankees. One of the forecastle songs is said to have run thus: