Jack never complained, it wasn’t his habit, but, unknown to me, he was having a pretty bad time of it in the starboard watch. Of course, the vessel was short-handed—four hands in a watch to handle an over-sparred brute of nearly a thousand tons—and as a consequence Jack’s ungainly want of smartness was trying to his over-worked watchmates, who were, besides, unable to understand his inability or unwillingness to growl at the hardness of the common lot. The chief man in that watch was a huge Shetlandman, Sandy Rorison, who, broadly speaking, was everything that Jack was not. Six feet two in his stocking vamps, upright as a lower mast, and agile as a leading seaman on board a man-o’-war, there was small wonder that Sandy was sorely irritated by the wooden movements of my deliberate chum. But one day, when, relieved from the wheel, I came into the forecastle for a “verse o’ the pipe,” I found Sandy bullying him in a piratical manner. All prudential considerations were forgotten, and I interfered, although it was like coming between a lion and his kill. Black with fury, Sandy turned upon me, tearing off his jumper the while, and in choking monosyllables invited me to come outside and die. I refused, giving as my reason that I did not feel tired of life, and admitting that I was fully aware of his ability to make cracker-hash of me. But while he stood gasping, I put it to him whether, if he had a chum, any consideration for his own safety would stop him from risking it in the endeavour to save that chum from such a dog’s life as he was now leading Jack Stadey. Well, the struggle between rage and righteousness in that big rough man was painful to see. It lasted for nearly five minutes, while I stood calmly puffing at my pipe with a numb sense of “what must be will be” about me. Then suddenly the big fellow went and sat down, buried his face in his hands, and was silent. I went about my work unmolested, but for nearly a week there was an air of expectation about the whole of us—a sense that an explosion might occur at any moment. Then the tension relaxed, and I saw with quiet delight that Rorison had entirely abandoned his hazing of Jack.
After a most miserable passage of a hundred and ten days we arrived at our port, and almost immediately after came an opening for me to join a fine ship as second mate. It could not be disregarded, although I had to forfeit to the knavish skipper the whole of my outward passage earnings for the privilege of being discharged. So Jack and I parted, making no sign, as is the custom of men, of the rending pain of our separation. When next I saw Jack, several years after, I had left the sea, but on a periodical visit to the docks—a habit I was long curing myself of—I met him, looking for a ship. How triumphantly I bore him westward to my little home I need not say, but when in the course of conversation I found that he and Rorison had been chums ever since I left the Magellan, I was dumbfounded. The more because, in spite of the change in Rorison after my risky interference on that memorable afternoon, I had passed many unhappy hours, thinking, in my conceit and ignorance of the nobleness of which the majority of human kind are capable, given the proper opportunity for showing it, that Jack would have but a sorry time of it after I had left him. Malvolio thought nobly of the soul, and I have had reason, God knows, to think nobly of my fellow-men, even of those who upon a casual acquaintance seemed only capable of exciting disgust. I believe that few indeed are the men and women who have not within them the germ of as heroic deeds as ever thrilled the hearts and moistened the eyes of mankind, although, alas! myriads live and die wanting the occasion that could fructify the germ. Made in His own image, although sorely battered out of the Divine likeness, the Father does delight in showing how, in spite of the distance men generally have placed between themselves and Him, the type still persists, and self-sacrifice, soaring above the devilish cynicism that affects to know no God but self-interest, blazes forth to show to all who will but open their eyes that “God’s in His Heaven, all’s right with the world.”
Two more strangely assorted chums surely seldom foregathered than Sandy and Jack. I remember none in real life, though the big trooper George Rouncewell and Phil have been immortalized by Dickens in “Bleak House,” and the probability is that such a friendship had been known to that marvellous man. How the bond between the Shetlandman and the Finn gradually grew and toughened I had no means of knowing, for Jack was a man of so few words, that even my eager questioning never succeeded in drawing from him the information that I thirsted for. However, to resume my story, the pair succeeded in obtaining berths in the same ship again, a big iron clipper, the Theodosia, bound to Melbourne. I did not succeed in meeting Sandy before they sailed, though I tried hard in my scanty leisure to do so. But I determined that when they returned I would have them both home to my little place, and devote some of my holidays to entertaining them. I watched carefully the columns of the Shipping Gazette for news of the ship, and succeeded in tracing her home to Falmouth for orders from Port Pirie. Thence in due time she departed, to my great disappointment, for Sunderland. And the rest of the story must be told as I learned it long afterwards.
It was in the late autumn that they sailed from Falmouth, leaving port on a glorious afternoon with that peerless weather known to west-country fishermen as a “fine southerly.” Up the sparkling Channel they sped with every stitch of canvas set, and a great contentment reigning on board at the prospect of the approaching completion of the voyage under such favourable conditions. Being foul, the Theodosia made slow progress, but so steady was the favouring wind that in two days she picked up her Channel pilot off Dungeness. He was hardly on board before a change came. One of those sudden gales came howling down the stern North Sea, and gradually the labouring ship was stripped of her wings, until in a perfect whirl of freezing spindrift she was groping through the gloom across the Thames estuary. But no uneasiness was felt, because the pilot was on board, and the confidence felt in the well-known skill and seamanship of those splendid mariners makes even the most timid of deep-water sailors feel secure under their charge. No man is infallible, however, and just before midnight a shock, which threw all hands, then standing by to wear ship, off their feet, brought the huge vessel up all standing. Not many minutes were needed to show every man on board that she was doomed. Lying as she was on the weather edge of the Galloper Sand (though her position was unknown even to the pilot), she was exposed to the full fury of the gale, and the blue lights and rockets made but the faintest impression upon the appalling blackness. All hands worked with feverish energy to free the long-disused boats from their gripes, although they were often hurled headlong from this task by the crushing impact of those inky masses of water that rose in terrible might all around. And as the boats were cleared, so they were destroyed until but one remained seaworthy and afloat upon the lee-side, fast by the end of the forebrace. One by one the beaten, bruised, and almost despairing men succeeded in boarding that tiny ark of refuge as it strained and plunged like a terrified creature striving to escape from the proximity of the perishing leviathan. When it appeared that all hands were crowded into the overburdened boat, the watchful skipper mounted the lee rail, and, waiting his opportunity, leapt for his life.
“Cast off, cast off,” shouted a dozen voices as the captain struggled aft to the place of command, but one cry overtopped them all, the frenzied question of Rorison, “Where’s Jack Stadey?” A babel of replies arose, but out of that tumult one fact emerged, he was not among them. The next moment, as a mountainous swell lifted the boat high above the ship’s rail, Rorison had leapt to his feet, and, catching hold of the drooping mainbrace above his head, was hauling himself back on board again. And the boat had gone. Doubtless in the confusion, some man had succeeded in casting the end of the rope adrift that held her, not knowing what had happened, so that the next vast roller swept her away on its crest a hundred fathoms in an instant. The wide mouth of the dark engulfed her. All unheeding the disappearance of the boat, Rorison fought his way about the submerged and roaring decks, peering with a seaman’s bat-like power of vision through the dark for any sign of his chum. Buffeted by the scourging seas, conscious that he was fast losing what little strength remained to him, he yet persisted in his search until, with a cry of joy, he found poor Stadey jammed between the fife-rail and the pumps, just alive, but with a broken leg and arm. Not a word passed between them, but with a sudden accession of vigour, Sandy managed to drag his chum aft and lash his limp body to one of the poop hen-coops. He then cast another coop adrift, and secured it to the side of the first. Having done this, he lashed himself by Stadey’s side, and with one hand feeling the languid pulsation of his chum’s heart, awaited the next comber that should sweep their frail raft away into the hissing sea.
Next morning, under a sky of heavenly glory, two Harwich fishermen found the tiny raft, still supporting the empty husks of those two faithful souls, undivided even unto the end of their hard life, and together entered into rest.
With these two exceptions all hands were saved.
ALPHONSO M’GINTY
Who is there among British seafarers that does not know the “chain-locker”—that den just opposite the Mint like an exaggerated bear-pit? The homeward-bounder, his heart light as thistle-down with the first taste of liberty after his voyage’s long imprisonment, takes no heed of its squalor; no, not even in the drear December slushiness, following upon a Shadwell snowstorm. If he does glance around shudderingly at the haggard faces of the unshipped for a moment, the feel of the beloved half-sheet of blue foolscap ostentatiously displayed in his club-fingered right hand brings the departing look of satisfaction back swiftly enough. It is his “account of wages,” his passport within the swing doors of the office, which he will presently exchange for the few pieces of gold for which he has given such a precious slice of his life.