"'The flag that braved a thousand years
The battle and the breeze',
must not expect their lives to be all sunshine, any more than they need expect the sea around to be always blue, rippled by balmy winds, and domed over with an azure sky, flecked with fleecy cloudlets, and at night studded with silver-shining stars.
In some ships they will find that fighting the waves is not fun by any means, because many of the best of our navy ships are sent to sea defective. Machinery—and it is marvellously intricate nowadays—may break down at an untimely moment, even in the midst of a terrible storm, and having no serviceable sail, even the largest iron-clad will then be at the mercy of the waves. Oh, how she rolls and yaws and plunges and careens at such a time!
The best sailors on board cannot keep their feet, their heads swim with the awful motion. Things break loose and play pitch-and-toss about the deck, the ward-room furniture may be all one chaotic heap, and all the while the seas are making a plaything of her, dashing over her, high as the conning tower, and rushing in cataracts fore to aft, or even vice versa. At such a time it seems as if the ocean wished to show those poor wave-beleaguered sailors how small the strongest works of man are, compared to those of God.
But independently of storms without or the breaking down of machinery, the ship may not be a happy one as far as officers and men are concerned. The crew, all told, may be a badly assorted one, and I have been in ships, only for a short spell, thank goodness, that were known on the station as "floating hells".
Much depends upon one's captain. If he is a kind-hearted, genuine fellow he can do everything to keep things smooth fore and aft. The ward-room officers take their cue from him, the gun-room follows the example which the ward-room sets them on deck or below, the midshipmen influence the warrant officers, and these in their turn the able and ordinary seamen and the first and second class boys themselves.
But I must heave ahead with my story, instead of hauling my fore-yard aback or lying-to, in order to ruminate and preach. Oh, I know my own faults, my lads; I have so much to say about sea and a life on the ocean wave, that, with a pen in my hand, I want to say it or write it all at once.
Well, Creggan hadn't been a day at sea before he found out that the Osprey was going to be a real happy ship.
They soon lost sight of land in the haze of the storm, though all day long the beautiful gulls kept sailing around the ship, tack and half-tack in the air. For these sea-gulls look upon ships as their own, because from them they receive their main supply of food; so they always follow them afar, trying, as it were, by their plaintive calls, to get them to return.
It was dark enough at eight o'clock to-night, and the gulls had all returned shorewards. The gale still raged, but the Osprey was under easy sail, and the motion was by no means disagreeable to a sailor.