"Why it's the baker! How piteously he pleads to be rescued, but we can do nothing for him."
The day, hour and minute of the appearance were entered in the log-book, and when the vessel arrived home, the tale was told and paraphrased in a way that attracted national attention. The comparing of notes disclosed that the entry in the log-book corresponded chronologically with the date and time of the baker's death.
Contemporary with this traditional gentleman was a well known shipowner, who was notoriously mean and wicked towards the sailors who manned his ships. Prayers of a highly peculiar character were continuously made that he should be transported to the same region of warmth as the Baker. Of course all shipowners are relegated to these parts when they do anything to excite the anger of Jack. But the owner of whom I am writing had put himself beyond all forgiveness; he was an unspeakable wretch who would stoop to the most revolting methods of sensuality. The sanctity of homes was invaded by the fiend who carried on a double game of starving his men and destroying all that was dear to them. The curses that were continuously poured forth upon him from all parts of the world cannot be spoken; they may only be imagined. Ultimately he died amid a storm of rejoicing, and when the hearse came to take him to the graveyard the horses are said to have refused to carry the body. It was no sooner placed in the hearse than they went wild and smashed the conveyance; other horses were brought up, but they were equally obdurate and violent, and it became necessary to employ men to carry the coffin, but only the lowest roughs could be found for the service. The community, especially the seafaring part of it, were convinced that his wickedness had been so great that even the devil refused to have anything to do with him in a respectable country. He was forthwith passed on to Stromboli to assist the Baker in his arduous task of keeping the fires going, and for the purpose of confirming the sailors' belief in the law of retribution. This traditional person was a butcher—if it be safe or lawful to use such a phrase as "tradition" in connection with one of the mariner's solemn planks of faith. He left a large fortune behind, which has been a curse to his descendants, and it would have been a great disappointment to the contemporary seamen if it hadn't, as much of their time was used in the imprecation of ghastly forms of punishment and in imagining modes of disposing of what they vehemently avowed was ill-gotten wealth.
In my youthful days I listened to these tales and drank them in with juvenile credulity. How often have boys remained on deck during their watch below to get a glimpse of these personalities, and sometimes I imagined I could see all that others had told me they had seen. Incidents of this kind varied the monotony of a long passage, as the talk about it went on until some other thing equally sensational developed. To make any attempt at ridiculing the reality of such things was to offer a gross insult to the seamen's susceptibilities.
To say that shipowning, even in the early part or middle of the last century, was synonymous with a system of heartless starvation would be too sweeping an assertion to make. There always have been men who strove to act generously towards the people serving in their vessels, though these, I am persuaded, were in the minority, and it is to the credit of that minority that they had to struggle against precedent, example, and it may be the habitual conviction that it was part of the sailor's business to take whatever food was put aboard for him. Running short of provisions was to them only an incident natural to the sailor's calling. This view had been handed down by successive generations of avaricious stoats, not the least prominent and contemptible of whom was Elizabeth, with her chilly heart, at one time receiving from Drake the spoils of his voyage in the Pelican; at another walking through the parks publicly with him, and listening with eager fascination to his stories of "amazing adventure," adventures that some of her Catholic subjects maintained to be "shocking piracy." We all remember the story of his sailing off with bullion from Tarapaca worth half a million ducats; also of the chase and capture of the Cacafuego, which had aboard the whole of the produce of the Lima mines for the season, consisting of silver, gold, emeralds and rubies. The hanging of Mr Doughty Philips, the spy, was talked of; the cutting off from the Church of God for cowardice of the chaplain, Mr Fletcher, and the chaining of his leg to a ringbolt in the deck until he repented of his sin. And she is so much interested in all these things that a royal banquet is held aboard the Pelican. Her Majesty attends and knights Drake. Mendoza demands for his master the stolen treasure. Leicester wants to share it with his friends; but Elizabeth puts her foot down and maintains it to be a legal capture which must be held. She conceives this to be a part of the game. Subsequent events cause Drake to plead with her to grant supplies, and she rebukes him for his extravagance. The Armada is close at our shores. Lord Howard reminds her that food is exhausted and that her sailors are having to catch fish to make up their mess, and yet they are praying for the quick arrival of the enemy. Their commander says English sailors will do what they can to vanquish the invaders, but they cannot fight with famine. "Awake, Madam," writes the poor distracted Lord admiral; "awake, for the love of Christ, and realize the danger that confronts the nation." He managed this time to squeeze one month's rations out of her, but when asked if any more should be provided, this lovely virgin monarch replied peremptorily, "No!" And when the great Armada came in sight there was but two days' food remaining. "Let tyrants fear," she says; "I have always so behaved myself that under God I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and good will of my subjects"!! She knows that she has the body of a weak and feeble woman, but she is assured she has the heart of a king, and rather than any dishonour should grow by her, "I myself will take up arms and be your general, judge and rewarder of all your virtues." That is all very pretty, and sounds pre-Napoleonic, but we cannot all swallow sweet, cantish little nothings in place of food and wages. Better would it have been had Elizabeth shown some practical evidence of "devotion" to her "people" by granting supplies and food to her starving sailors who fought and won in the most deadly naval encounter that the world has ever known. Their stomachs were empty but their hearts were big, though many of them went under with sickness brought on by famine, while she held tight that seven hundred and fifty thousand pounds which Drake brought home for her. It is amazing that a historian should be found to regard that speech of hers as being "free from affectation." But one historian not only says this, he adds: "She was the protector of her country, and the prudent executor of its will." She was nothing of the sort; on the contrary, she was a cold, greedy, heartless termagant, who risked the loss of her country by her parsimony, and it was only saved by the dauntless courage of the famishing seamen. I think that is one of the most gruesome and humiliating pieces of British history: for the monarch of a great empire to exhibit herself in the light of a sailor's boarding-housekeeper; squeezing his life's blood out, and herself handing down to posterity a character for meanness that would put to the blush the owner of a collier brig whose main idea of economy may be starving his crew. When I hear her spoken of as the Good Queen Bess, I think of how she ordered the Puritan lawyer, John Stubbs, and the printer of his pamphlet to be led to the scaffold and have their right hands driven off by the wrist with a butcher's knife and mallet, and how in God's name she commits many other unspeakable acts of devilishness, the most dastardly of which was her refusal to provide food for the thousands of brave men who saved her and her kingdom. What a contrast between this woman and the great Queen Victoria, whose long career is free from a single act of cruelty, and whose whole life teems with good deeds, while Elizabeth's reeks with an odour so bad that no student of history can peruse the account without wondering why she was allowed to live; for truly she was as bad a shrew as ever wore a skirt!
IX
MISCELLANEOUS
Fifty or sixty years ago the N.E. coast ports were all tidal; no harbours of refuge; no twenty-four feet on any of the bars at low water as there is now; no piers or breakwaters projecting as they do to-day far into the German Ocean. It therefore frequently happened that during neap tides there was not sufficient water over the bars for even the shallowest drafted vessels. In that case, if the weather was fine, i.e., wind off the land, and smooth water, the vessels were taken outside, and the balance of their cargoes sent to them by a peculiar type of lighter known in that part of England by the name of keels. These craft were skilfully managed by two men called keelmen, who worked them up and down the stream with the tide and manipulated them with long oars. One of these lighters was being rushed out of the river by a heavy westerly wind and a current of abnormal velocity. The two men were doing their best to control their little vessel towards its destination, when the skipper spontaneously observed that they were going to drift out to sea unless aid came to them, or some means of stopping her progress were not adopted. He naturally bethought himself of the anchor, and shouted out to his mate:
"By gox, Jimmy, w'or gan to drift into the German Ocean! Let go the b—y anchor!"