The presiding genius of this most primitive of arrangements was a hunchback, a shrewd little Yankee with a French face, who received £11 per month and earned £50. He had one assistant, a nondescript man of indefinite age, who never wore an apron, and whose duties were confined to peeling potatoes, stoking the fire, plucking fowls, and washing up pots. But these things he would do as long as there were any of them to do, mechanically, even though, as was frequently the case, the conditions all about us looked as if another ten minutes would see us all at the bottom of the sea. He earned £5 a month. But what he lacked in ability or initiative was more than made up by his chief. That man was a miracle. On that two-feet slab he would make pastry of all kinds, prepare most elaborate dishes, yes, although the salt spray whistled around him, and on occasion an eddy of the gale would flip a dish with its contents off his board far away to leeward. He would shout an order to his acolyte for half a dozen fowls and a bucket of boiling water. A few rapid motions of the hands, and they were all gyrating in the scuppers, while one after another he plunged them into the steaming bucket and slithered the feathers off, flinging each as he did so to his waiting henchman for the minor picking. Thus I have seen him serve six fowls at noon—at 12.35 they were being eaten. Ask me not how, for the details are unpalatable.
But his great achievement was butchering in bad weather—butchering sheep. Stolid Joe would bring the sacrifice along, mercurial Bill would seize it, stab it, and unaided commence to rip off its hide immediately. There, on the deck, outside his galley door, the struggle would go on as if it were a fight to the death, so great was the fury that little man displayed. And it was one of the commonest sights to see, in the midst of the operation, a green comber of a wave come hissing along, embracing carcase and cook, and sweeping them clean off in a dishevelled heap bang aft up against the second-class berths. Knife in one hand, half-skinned sheep gripped by the other, he had no buffers wherewith to ward off bruises; but he had a voice. And he used it, not in canticles of praise. Yet punctually the meal for which that sheep was being prepared would appear on the table. And it would not be an unsavoury dinner, either. The one thing that always seemed to dishearten him was the lifting clean out of its fiery bed of a copper or kettle, that fitted into a hole on the stove-top, by a vicious plunge of the vessel. And as such an event was usually followed by a green sea thundering over all, and flooding him and his lieutenant clean out of the galley amid a smother of steam, coal grit, and spoilt food, his temporary subdual could not be wondered at.
But I must forbear. Mental pictures of that super-excellent cook's doings arise before me in almost interminable succession, tempting me to forget the fact that there were many others doing almost precisely the same things unsung, and unrewarded save by the meagre pay they drew. Who, for instance, could envy the cook of a "weekly" tramp?—a steamer, that is, which, making quite long voyages, has engaged her crew at so much a week and find themselves. Perhaps there are no cooks at sea who are more worried than these. For Jack, left to his own devices for supplying himself with food, does some of the queerest things that ever were or could be recorded. And each individual expects his own mess to be as carefully looked after as a whole saloon dinner. Natural, perhaps, on his part, but for the hapless cook purgatorially inconvenient. I was once a passenger from an Irish port to Liverpool in a weekly boat, and in the grey of the dawn was waiting at the galley door to buy a cup of coffee. Men came and went incessantly, banging oven doors and flinging utensils from side to side of the red-hot stove-top. The cook was absent, engaged aft in some business or other. Presently he appeared with a teapot, and immediately snatched at a huge copper kettle which stood on the stove in the middle, where the top plate was almost transparent with heat. The kettle flew up in his grasp, being empty. "Why, there's nothin' in it!" he screamed. "No," replied a fireman who was groping in the starboard oven; "I tried it ten minutes ago, and it was empty then." "An' you putt it back on that stove!" said the cook tragically. "Course I did," was the calm reply; "think I was goin' ter fill it?" I really thought the cook would have died of suppressed emotion before he found words wherein to express himself. But his tongue was loosened presently, and then his remarks, if sulphurous, were fairly comprehensive. The fireman only laughed.
What shall I say of the cook of the tramp pure and simple? Only this, I am afraid that, while he has a bitter, hard berth of it, he gets little better pay than his brother of the sailing ship. One consolation he has, and that not a little one—he has more to cook, and consequently he is, taken generally, a better workman. For there is nothing tends to disgust a man more, no matter of what trade he be, than the being compelled to make bricks without straw. And there can be no doubt that, hard as are the tramps in many respects for their crews, the food is much better than that provided in sailing ships, taking the average. Having such a rough crowd to cater for, however, does not tend to improve the quality of the cooks carried in tramp steamers. A decent man hardly cares to face the possibility of being violently assaulted, for no fault of his own, by members of a gang of ruffians of every nation under heaven save his own countrymen. And this is the state of affairs that any man in such a position as a cook holds must be prepared to face in most tramps. If he be fortunate enough to get into one of the north-east coast tramps, owned by canny firms, who like to have their ships manned by their own people, and whose highest ambition is to see efficiency combined with comfort on board of them, he will be as well off as any sea-cook, not an artist, can reasonably ask to be.
THE COOK (SAILING SHIPS).
It may, perhaps, have appeared strange to many that, in dealing with the cook in the preceding chapter, I hardly mentioned anything about the materials with which he is called upon to deal. Most people have heard something about the badness of food in the Merchant Service, and therefore it might seem at first sight a great mistake to write a chapter on the sea-cook, and say nothing about the kind of food. My excuse must be, that in the kind of ships with which I have been dealing the food question rarely causes any trouble. In the finest steamships I doubt very much whether the workers are not fed quite as well as are any corresponding class of toilers ashore; and even in the lowest tramps there is not that general lack of decent food which does press so hardly upon the seamen in sailing ships.
For one reason, the steamship is never so long away from port, except she breaks down, as to give the same excuse for carrying the kind of food considered necessary in sailing ships. And in many, as I have said, there is a system in vogue of paying the men so much per week, and permitting them to "find" themselves—a hateful system, and one that can only be indulged in by the authorities at the cost of much suffering and loss of efficiency by the improvident men who are under it. How can a man do his work who, without more forethought than a babe, comes to sea for a fortnight's passage with a few ship-biscuits and a dozen salt herrings? Without any of the minor comforts, such as tea, coffee, cocoa, or sugar, he is in misery all the time, besides being an unmitigated nuisance to those of his shipmates who have come provided with what they need. Then when the vessel arrives in port, and such a man gets his pay, it is but rarely that his bitter experience results in his being more careful. He will have an extensive drunk, and again face the passage in a condition of starvation. But, in any case, his behaviour does not affect the cook.