Neptune was full of anecdotes of his life and adventures, and his wife also had a good deal to say about hers, which caused many a peal of laughter to rattle round the table.
Some of the men recited pieces of their own composition. Here is one by the crew’s pet, Ted Wilson to wit:
The Ghost of the Cochin-Shanghai.
’Tis a tale of the Greenland ocean,
A tale of the Northern seas,
Of a ship that sailed from her native land
On the wings of a favouring breeze;
Her skipper as brave a seaman
As ever set sail before,
Her crew all told as true and bold
As ever yet left the shore.
And never a ship was better “found,”
She couldn’t be better, I know,
With beef in the rigging and porkers to kill,
And tanks filled with water below;
And turkeys to fatten, and ducklings and geese,
And the best Spanish pullets to lay;
But the pride of the ship, and the pet of the mess,
Was a Brahma cock, Cochin-Shanghai.
And every day when the watches were called,
This cock crew so cheery O!
With a shrill cock-a-lee, and a hoarse cock-a-lo,
And a long cock-a-leerie O!
But still as the grave was the brave bird at night,
For well did he know what was best;
Yes, well the cock knew that most of the crew
Were weary and wanted their rest
But one awful night he awoke in a fright,
Then wasn’t it dreary O!
To hear him crow, with a hoarse cock-a-lo,
And a shrill cock-a-leerie O!
Oh!
Then out of bed scrambled the men in a mass,
“We cannot get sleep,” they all cried;
“May we never reach dock till we silence that cock,
We’ll never have peace till the villain is fried.”
All dressed as they were in the garments of night,
Though the decks were deep covered with snow,
They chased the cock round, with wild yell and bound,
But they never got near him—no. And wherever he flew, still the bold
Cochin crew, With a shrill cock-a-lee, and a hoarse cock-a-lo,
And a long cock-a-leerie O!
Now far up aloft defiant he stands,
Like an eagle in eerie O!
Till a sea-boot at last, knocked him down from the mast,
And he sunk in the ocean below.
But the saddest part of the story is this:
He hadn’t quite finished his crow,
He’d got just as far as the hoarse cock-a-lo
But failed at the leerie O!
Oh-h!
And that ship is still sailing, they say, on the sea,
Though ’tis hundreds of years ago;
Till they silence that cock they’ll ne’er reach a dock,
Nor lay down their burden of woe;
For out on the boom, till the crack of doom,
The ghost of the Cochin will crow,
With his shrill cock-a-lee, and his hoarse cock-a-lo,
But never the leerie O!
No!
They tell me at times that the ship may be seen
Straggling on o’er the billows o’ blue,
That the hardest of hearts would melt like the snow,
To witness the grief of that crew,
As they eye the cold waves, and long for their graves,
Looking so weary O!
Will he never have done with that weird cock-a-lo,
As get to the leerie O!
Oh-h!
Dinner discussed, the fun commenced. In the first place, there were sailors’ dances, and the floor was kept pretty well filled one way or another. But certainly the dances of the evening were the barber’s “break-down,” Rory’s “Irish jig,” and the doctor’s “Hielan fling.” They were solos, of course, and the barber was the first to take the floor; and oh! the shuffling and the double-shuffling, and the tripleing and double-tripleing of that wonderful hornpipe! No wonder he was cheered, and encored, and cheered again. Then came Rory, dressed in natty knickerbockers and carrying a shillelah! nobody could say at times which end of him was uppermost, or whether he did not just as often strike his seemingly adamantine head with his heels as with his shillelah. Lastly came Sandy McFlail in Highland costume, and being a countryman of my own, I must be modestly mum on the performance, only, towards the end of the “fling,” you saw before you such a mist of waving arms and legs and plaid-ends, that you could not have been sure it was Sandy at all, and not an octopus.
But hark! there comes a shriek from the pack, so loud that it drowns the sounds of music and merriment. Men grow suddenly serious. Again they hear it, and there is a perceptible movement—a kind of thrill under their feet. It is the wail that never fails to give the first announcement of the breaking up of the sea of ice.
Chapter Twenty Five.
Breaking Up of the Great Ice Pack—In the Nips—The “Canny Scotia” on her Beam-Ends—Staving of the “Arrandoon.”
In the very midst of joy and pleasure in this so-called weary world, we are oftentimes very nigh to grief and pain.