The “junk store” some wag once called the Featherstone fleet: and the gibe was not far wide of the mark. Anyone who has the patience and the curiosity to search the pages of a fifty-or sixty-year-old “Lloyd’s Register” will find in that melancholy record of human achievement and human effort blown like dead leaves on the winds of time and change sufficient reason for the nickname. Everywhere it is the same tale—“Mazeppa” ex “Electric Telegraph,” “Bride of Abydos” ex “Navarino,” “Zuleika” ex “Roderick Random,” “Thyrza” ex “Rebel Maid.” Old Featherstone had at one time more than fifty ships under his house-flag, not one of which had been built to his order. “The man who succeeds,” was one of his sayings, “is the man who knows best how to profit by other men’s mistakes.”
The doctrine was one which he put very effectively into practice. He had an almost uncanny nose for bargains; but, what was more than that, he was gifted in a most amazing degree with that peculiar and indefinable quality best described as “ship sense”—an ability amounting well-nigh to a genius for knowing a good ship from a bad one which is seldom found but in seamen, and is rare even among them.
Someone once asked him the secret of his gift, but I doubt if he got much satisfaction out of the answer.
“Ask me another,” snapped out the old man in his dry, staccato fashion. “I’ve got a brother can waggle his ears like a jackass. How does he do that? I don’t know. He don’t know. Same thing in my case, exactly.”
And certainly where he got it is something of a mystery. But since there had been Featherstones buried for generations where time and grime combine to make a hallowed shade in the old parish church of Stepney, there may well have been seafaring blood in the family, and likely enough the founder of the little bow-windowed shop in Wapping Wall was himself a retired ship’s carpenter.
Whatever the explanation, there was undeniably the fact. He bought steamers that didn’t pay and had never paid and that experts said never would pay: ripped the guts out of them, and in a couple of years they had paid for themselves. He bought unlucky ships, difficult ships, ships with a bad name of every sort and kind. Ships that broke their captains’ hearts and their owners’ fortunes, ships that wouldn’t steer, that wouldn’t wear, that wouldn’t stay. And never once did his bargain turn out a bad one.
III
From Old Featherstone’s portrait, and that painted ironical smile which still had the power to call up in him a feeling of vague discomfort, Broughton’s eyes travelled on to the portraits of ships which—Old Featherstone excepted—were the room’s sole artistic adornment.
Over there in the corners—one each side of the portrait—were the old “Childe Harold” and “Don Juan.” They were the first ships Old Featherstone bought, in the distant days when he was still young Featherstone, a smart young clerk in Daly’s office, whose astonishing rise to fortune was yet on the knees of the gods.
They were old frigate-built East Indiamen, both of them, the “General Bunbury” and “Earl Clapham,” from some Bombay or Moulmein dockyard: teak through and through, but as leaky as sieves with sheer age and years of labouring in seaways. Young Featherstone bought them for a song: gutted them, packed their roomy ’tween-decks with emigrants like herrings in a barrel, and hurried them backwards and forwards as fast as he dared between London and Australia while the gold rush of the ’sixties was at its hottest. He was in too big a hurry even to give them new figureheads to match their new names, with the result that a portly British general and a highly respectable peer of Evangelistic tendencies had to endure the indignity of an enforced masquerade, the one as the wandering “Childe,” the other as the disreputable “Don” of many amours.