On the third day there was enough blue in the sky “tae mak’ a Hielanman a pair o’ breeks” and the wind was coming away fair for a slant south. The two short-shipped men had turned up, dazed and useless in the aftermath of a carouse, and were in the fo’c’sle “sleeping it off.” At nine a tug came out, and the bos’n having got steam up in the donkey, the anchor was hove up without capstan-bar or chantey, and the Kelvinhaugh trailed at the end of a tow-line down the Firth of Clyde with a fresh northerly breeze whipping the short combers into white-capped corrugations.
By mid-afternoon the barque had pulled through the Cumbraes and the captain was up on the poop squinting around. He had discarded his shore toggery and slumped around in a cloth cap, a cardigan jacket, heavy woollen pants and carpet slippers. After a long scrutiny of sky and sea, and a tap at the mercurial barometer hanging in the chart-house, he spoke to the mate. “We’ll get the muslin on her when she comes up wi’ Arran. Wi’ this northerly we’re no needin’ a tug and A’m thinkin’ we’ll be safe in rinnin’ doon the Irish Channel.”
The mate nodded. “Aye, sir. Looks like a fair wind, sir!” And he sniffed at the breeze like a hound scenting his quarry. The Old Man grunted and resumed his pacing along the weather side of the poop.
When the high purple-heathered hills of Arran came abeam, the master ceased his pacing. “Get yer tops’ls on her, mister!” he ordered the mate, and his quiet command seemed to galvanize ship and crew to stirring action. “Loose tops’ls!” roared Mr. Nickerson, and the hands working on “stowing-away” jobs, at which they were time-spinning, seemed to be imbued with new life. “Loose tops’ls—he says!” cried the bos’n directing his squad. “Move yerselves, blast ye! Loose th’ fore, you! Main an’ mizzen you! Look spry now, my sons, or ye’ll have th’ mate down among ye wi’ some Yankee salt to put on yer tails!” The latter sotto voce.
Donald went up with Thompson to the lower mizzen topsail yard, and under the senior apprentice’s direction, cast the confining gaskets adrift. Almost simultaneously from the three masts came the shout, “All gone, sir. Sheet home!” As the canvas rustled and flapped from the yards and bellied in the restraining gear, the mate’s nasal bawlings could be heard injecting action. “Lay daown from aloft you skulkers ’n get some beef on them tops’l sheets. Look slippy naow!” The chain sheets rattled and clanked through the sheaves as the men, standing on the fife-rail and deck, hove down, “hey-ho’ing!” and barking, on the slack and brought the lower clews of the fore lower topsail nigh to the sheaves of the fore-yard-arms. A man squinted aloft after the last sweat had been given at the sheets. “What a hell ov a poor cut sail,” he remarked.
“To yer main an’ mizzen tops’ls naow!” came the mate’s roar. “Never mind gamming. Ye’re not on a spouter (whaler)!” Main and mizzen lower topsails were set to the wind, and the Kelvinhaugh started to drive ahead on her own and the tow-rope began to light up. “Up on yer foretopm’st-stays’l!” “Stand-by to get that tow-line aboard. For’ard with ye!” The tug blew a blast of her whistle and made a wide sheer from under the bows. The tow-rope was let go, and while twenty men hauled the wet, snakey manilla aboard over the foc’slehead, the tug steamed around and came up on the barque’s weather quarter to receive a material valediction—in the shape of a bottle of whisky—and the last letters. Donald saw the package being thrown down on the tug’s decks at the end of a heaving-line, and he watched with some anxiety for the safety of the hastily-written note which he had indited to his mother. It was a cheerful note—full of optimism which he did not feel when writing it, and he played up the most promising and alluring aspects of a sea-life and the men in whose company he would be for many months. Poor lad! the romantic ideal was fast fading and it was hard to write paragraphs of happy fiction with Thompson and Jenkins swapping gloomy prognostications for the future over the mess-table.
The tow-boat blew a long farewell blast from her whistle and dropped astern. Within five minutes she had swung around and was steaming up the Firth as fast as her slatting paddle-blades would take her, and with her went the Kelvinhaugh’s last link with the land for many a long day.
“Upper tops’ls naow!” came the order, and under the curseful directions of the two mates and the bos’n, able-bodied, ordinary and apprentice seamen were hustled from job to job, and in the midst of the action, Donald scarce realized that he was assisting to carry out those wonderful manœuvres over which he had gloated in printed page. Somehow the actual seemed different from the visionary. There was surly venom in the barking orders of—“Tops’l halliards naow an’ put yer bloody backs into it you lazy hounds!” and such bitter remarks as “Struth! A poor bunch of beef in this crowd. Sailormen have all died an’ nawthin’ left naow but skulking kids an’ broken-down sojers!” which came from the mate. In the novels the mate was usually a bluff, fatherly old codger who sung out “Heave away, my lads!” or “Haul away, my hearties!” in a hurricane roar, and with many good-humored asides interspersed between orders, but in cold realism on the Kelvinhaugh, Donald felt that Mr. Nickerson was only using his tongue because he was denied the use of his fist and boot, and the hulking German second mate growled and grunted and pushed in sullen self-restraint because British sea laws forbade him commencing the voyage by killing someone.
Running with square yards past the Arran hills, the deep-laden barque ploughed along with all hands sweating at the halliards and sheets and dressing the Kelvinhaugh in her “muslin.” Her tops’l yards were heavy, and it did not take the old hands in the crew long to realize that they had signed in a “work-house” in this short-handed, heavily-sparred craft. With the tops’l halliards led to a main-deck capstan, the crew stamped around straining at the bars in sullen silence. The stolid, brutal German barked guttural curses—he was too thick-headed to notice anything unusual in this silent labor, but the keen-eared mate sensed the absence of the deep-water working chorus, and he was down on the scene in a minute giving tongue.
“Come on thar’, bullies! Ain’t thar’ a chantey-man in the crowd? Strike a light someone! A chantey does the work of ten men, so walk her raound an’ sing aout!” A West Indian negro showed his white teeth in an ingratiating smile and the mate spied him. “A black-bird to sing every time!” he cried. “Come you coon—loosen up yer pipes an’ shout an’ walk them tops’l yards to the mast-head!” Thus encouraged, the negro commenced in a clear tenor,