Frank Brown, Sea Apprentice

by Frank Thomas Bullen

“Oh ho, ha ha, he he!” gasped the nigger, “geess you’re a new chum, berry green ain’t it. Neb’ mine, hold out yer pots,” and Frank, doing so, saw to his amazement a modicum of tea ladled out into them like soup, from a big saucepan.

“Now take dat away,” said the cook, “an’ come back ’gen, I’ve got some scouse for ye; feed yer well fus start off; letcher down easy like, he he!”

Frank’s disgust and chagrin were too great for words, but he had already learned one lesson, not to talk back, even to a loathsome negro cook who looked as if made of dirt, so he hurried off to his new home, and putting the pots on the deck, in the absence of a table, came back and fetched a tin pan of what looked like very badly made Irish stew. This he carried into the house, and then sat down on his sea-chest and looked blankly at his shipmates.

The two seniors said not a word, but producing tin plates and spoons, helped themselves to a goodly portion of “scouse” and a biscuit out of a grimy box (the biscuit looked, Frank thought, like those he used to give the dog at home), and began to eat at a great rate and in hoggish fashion. The other new-comer looked on helplessly as if unable to grasp the meaning of things, and Frank wondered if it was not some horrid dream from which he would presently awake. He was suddenly and rudely roused by the elder of the two seniors rapping him over the knuckles with his spoon and saying, “Now then, mummy’s darlin’, wade in and get some supper; you’ll get no more till seven bells to-morrow, and besides, it’s bad cattin’ on an empty stumjack.”

For a moment Frank found his tongue and replied, “I don’t know what you mean. Is this our tea?”

What a superb joke. How the two did laugh and choke, and then when they found their breath again, the senior said scornfully, “Looky here, my soft kiddy, the sooner you wake up the better for you. This is your tea, as you call it, and as Bill and me are pretty sharp set, you and the other young nobleman had better produce your dinner service and fall to, or I’m hanged if you’ll get any at all.”

At this point there was a diversion caused by the other new-comer, Harry, bursting into hysterical tears. For a moment the two hardened ones suspended their eating and gazed open-mouthed at him, remembering perhaps their own experiences only a year ago, then with rude chaff and empty threats they resumed their interrupted supper. But it did Frank good. He couldn’t comfort the weaker boy, but he set his teeth and determined that he wouldn’t be laughed at anyhow.

So he began to hunt up his mess traps, plate, pot, pannikin, knife, fork, and spoon, and at last he found them, but with all his will power aroused he couldn’t use them. He had no desire for food. So he just put them in his bunk and sat down again, wondering.

He had not sat thus for more than a minute when his comrade in misfortune became violently sick, for the ship was just beginning to curtsy to the incoming sea over the bar as she was tossed seaward head to the wind, and even had the weather been as fine as could be wished, the many strange smells and the beastly appearance of the food were enough to turn any delicate boy’s stomach. It did for Frank at any rate, and almost immediately he too was vomiting in sympathy, utterly oblivious to the blows and abuse the two seniors showered upon them both with the utmost liberality.

With a last flicker of sense, but almost as much dead as alive, the two new-comers crawled into their bunks among their unpacked belongings there, and lay wallowing in unconscious misery, intensified, if possible, by the fumes of strong tobacco from the pipes of their hardened shipmates, who sententiously observed that there was nothing like bacca to kill stink.