I’m afraid that neither Charlie nor Walter cared a very great deal for science for science’s own sake, but they would certainly relish the adventures connected therewith, and all the strange scenes and creatures they were bound to see.
As for young Armstrong, or Ingomar as he still preferred to be called, he chose to consider himself of very little account indeed.
“I am neither a sailor nor a naturalist, nor anything else,” he said one day rather mournfully down in the saloon. “I love Nature, I appreciate beauty, but I’d rather be able to reef topsails or take my trick at the wheel.”
“But, my dear young sir,” said the captain, smiling, “you have found the sinews of war.”
“Found the cash? I have,” he laughed somewhat sarcastically. “Yes, and you may well say I found it. Paddy O’Flynn found a pair of tongs—at the fireside—and got into trouble about it. And I—well, I hadn’t even the honour and glory of making the money we’re spending. I can sing a song, spin a yarn, or recite a piece, and there my utility ends. Why, Humpty Dumpty is a deuced sight more of a real man than I am.”
Charlie and Walt laughed aloud. The idea of comparing himself with Humpty Dumpty seemed very ridiculous!
Long, long ago, crossing the line in a sailing ship used to be a very dreary affair indeed. The doldrums were always a drawback. Is there any real British boy, I wonder, who does not know what is meant by the “doldrums”? If so I trust he will get into them some of these days, in a brig or schooner. It will be an experience he is not likely to forget. His barque may be any time, from two or three weeks to a month, in crossing the line, for the wind may be nil. It may come in puffs or cat’s-paws from any direction of the compass, or, if you ask a sailor how it is, he may tell you discontentedly, that it is straight up and down like a cow’s tail.
Meanwhile the sea is as calm as Farmer Hodge’s mill-dam, a sea of oil, or glycerine, or mercury, but it is a sea of great, round, rolling waves all the same. The ship’s motion, therefore, is just about as disagreeable as could well be imagined; there is no “forwardness” about it. Now you go up, up, up, now you go down, down, down. Sea-legs are little good, and in your progress along the deck, if you do not succeed in getting hold of something, then just as often as not you shall find yourself on your back in the scuppers. You could not say “lee-scuppers,” you know, because there is no lee about it, and no windward either. You laugh when the other fellow falls, and perhaps the smile has hardly vanished when down you go yourself. Discomfort is no name for the doldrums. Fiddles are on the table at every meal, of course, but these do not prevent minor accidents, such as finding the fowl you were about to carve squatting on your lap, the potatoes chasing each other all over the floor, your plate of delicious pea-soup upside down on your knees, or your best white breeches soaked with black coffee.
Of course there are strange birds to be seen, and flying fish, and porpoises, and sharks, and, on rare occasions, the sea-serpent himself, but this doesn’t comfort you, with the thermometer over 95° and the pitch boiling in the seams.
On this voyage there was a pretty commotion, when, one evening, Neptune himself, King of the Ocean, with his bodyguard, his lady wife, and his barber, came on board. It was a pretty bit of acting altogether. Ingomar had consented to play Neptune in order to be let off, for he had never crossed the line before, and a splendid Neptune he made, while squat, droll little Humpty Dumpty was the wife. Ten in all had to submit to the terrible ordeal of shaving—an iron hoop was the razor, a tar-brush spread the horrid lather—and the grizzly embrace of Neptune’s bearded wife, to say nothing of the bath to close up with. Neither Charlie nor Walter, who were the first victims, seemed to like it; but when all was over, and they hurried into their dry pyjama suits, they enjoyed the fun as much as anybody else. The whole wild scene was lit up with electric gleams, blue and red and green, with music galore.