Having had the good fortune to have such weather as we could coal ship in, and also employed carpenters to build frames for the protection of our fire-room hatches, against the water which might extinguish our fires, should we have the misfortune to undergo one of the severe gales that are so frequently met with in the ocean which we had to traverse before reaching our next port, we sent our letter-bag to a merchant-ship bound to Boston, raised anchor on the 3d of February, and steamed away out, passing the Lion’s Rump, False Bay, and Cape Hanglip, bound to the Isle of France, or as now called, the Mauritius. On getting a short distance from the place we encountered a mountainous, foamless swell, which did not break, but rolled up to a very great height with regularity. Our ship was sluggish in the extreme, and when we slid slowly down into the trough of the sea, the wave before and behind us was apparently as high as our mizzen top. The colors of a ship hoisted at her mizzen peak, but only a short way off, at times, were entirely shut in from our view by the swell. If this sea had only broken it would have proved the propriety of the old Dutch name for the cape—“the Stormy cape.” In rounding the cape the fate of the unfortunate “Birkenhead,” an English transport steamer, lost off it some years ago by running on a sunken rock, came to mind; and we also thought of the collected bravery of the large number of troops on board of her. It is one thing to face death from the belching mouth of cannon or the deadly rifle, for then a man is hurried on by the clangor and excitement of the strife, and moves under the illusory belief that makes more than half the soldiers of the world, that somebody else may be killed, but that he will not. But what is to be said in praise of the placid courage of the poor soldiers on the Birkenhead, who, with death inevitable, not amid “the sulphurous canopy,” but death from the yawning wave facing them, yet fell into rank at the roll of drum, as if on a dress-parade, and sank into the yesty deep with the engulfed vessel, patterns of discipline and martyrs to duty.
We ran to the eastward for some days for the purpose of getting a favorable wind and then headed northward for our port. The weather continued rough and disagreeable. The anti-scorbutic notions of the commander-in-chief—although we were not a sailing vessel liable to be out of port for any considerable length of time, but a steamer whose necessity for coal would require short runs, caused to be put on board of us before leaving Cape Town, twelve of the large, wide horned cape-bullocks, and a number of the cape-sheep with tails as wide as a dinner plate. The stalls of the larger cattle were on the forecastle and on the quarter-deck, tied up to the halyard racks. When the ship rolled heavily, the noise of these poor animals endeavoring to conform to her movement, or disturbed by the men in getting at the ropes which their large horns covered, and their continued tramping over the heads of those below deck, was of course increasing the comfort of shipboard hugely. Then during a rough night although cleats had been nailed on the deck to steady them, some steer would tumble down and dislocate his thigh, requiring the butcher’s axe to despatch him next morning. On the port side of the “quarter-deck,” y’clepted, I believe, in the time of Drake, the “king’s walk,” the impromptu bleating of the sheep from a fold made by lashing oars from the breach of one gun to another, was quite mellifluous.
If the necessity had arisen of fighting the ship, overboard would have to go the beef-cattle: if the ship had been required to salute a superior command met on the sea, the orders would have been given, perhaps, as follows: “Starboard (look out for the bull) fire!” “Port (you’ll get kicked) fire!” “Starboard (don’t hurt those sheep) fire!” &c. The efficiency of the ship for war purposes was seriously impaired, if not destroyed, during their presence.
Two days from port, the anti-scurvy idea still predominant, punch made with ship’s whiskey and lime juice, was served out to the crew, but many an old shell-back as he took his tot, looked as if he would have preferred the ardent minus the other ingredients.
On the 14th of February we discovered a tant vessel to the windward of us. It proved to be a steamer under sail alone, her engines out of gear and dragging her wheels. She stood down in our direction as if desirous of speaking us, and many expressed much surprise at our not stopping, but all at once we had stopped, and the stranger shot across our stern. In answer to the hail, “What ship is that?” the reply was: “Her majesty’s steamer Styx, bound to the Mauritius; please report us under sail.” Our stopping was involuntary, a screw of one of the “cut-offs” to our engines having come out, which was promptly fixed with a block of wood by one of the admirable engineers which it was the good fortune of the Mississippi to have; so that we were ready to go ahead again in a very few minutes. The Englishman, no doubt, was none the wiser for the belief that we stopped in courtesy to him.
The weather just before reaching Mauritius was much smoother than it had been; the sun now came up upon the right, and his going down in the Indian ocean at night, was a sight most beautiful to look upon, its whole bosom bathed in fiery floods, and way above, tower above tower, rose in radiance and glory illuminated clouds. When our band’s best strains were filling the ship at evening and these sights preceded night, we could hardly realize that we were in the Indian ocean—the ocean of squalls, calms, heavy rains, gale, storm, and hurricane.
CHAPTER IV.
About 11 o’clock on our fifteenth morning out from the Cape of Good Hope, the southwestern end of the island of Mauritius was visible from the masthead, and we put on all our furnaces so as to reach Port Louis before night. On approaching the land we ran for two hours, past highly-tilled fields encompassing the cosy houses of the planters, sloping to the water’s edge in living green. As we neared the small crescent on which is built the little town of Port Louis, we were boarded by two English harbor-masters, who conducted us to our anchorage, and assisted in mooring the ship head and stern, as the place is too contracted for a vessel of any size to swing in. Their costume showed the philosophy which John Bull always carries into torrid temperatures. They were dressed in white linen roundabouts, pants and shoes, and on their heads were wide-brimmed hats, made of the pith of a tree and covered with white. We had gotten the ship secured just about the time a gun from one of the forts nigh us, announced the hour to be 8 o’clock. I sat upon the wheel-house looking at the necklace of lights that marked the town; the moon as if moved by the notes of our band which was playing delightfully “Katy Darling,” and the “Old Folks at Home,” seemed to rise more rapidly, and as it came it displayed the lofty outline of Peter Botte mountain, of Penny Magazine memory; the tall palms that fringed the beach on the right looked more stately and graceful in the silver light, and the scene altogether was so enchanting, that no one who looked upon it, could keep from feeling Bernardin-St.-Pierreish.
At daylight next morning we got a look at Port Louis. The town is not extensive, though nestling prettily under tall volcanic hills. Its suburbs are composed of the red-roofed huts of liberated Africans, making long streets. In its bazar, like nearly all places in that portion of the globe, your attention is first arrested by the grotesque—the kaleidoscope of costume. Of course your ubiquitous pig-tail friend “John Chinaman” is present. Here he attires himself in dark nankeen clothes, wears his clumsy shoe without sock, twists his plaited queue under a Manilla hat, and with his Paul Pry umbrella which he seldom hoists, looks as much like another “John Chinaman” who passes him, as two bricks in a house. You see the Arab with his head entirely shorn, or the dark-haired Lascar most diminutive in loin wardrobe, but gaudy in the vest that covers his fine-formed chest; the Parsee clothed in his gown of white muslin, his turban and pointed shoes; the Malayan women in very brief attire, their children strapped on their backs, sitting on the wayside, chewing the areca-nut or the betel-leaf that they may spit blood-red saliva, and none the better looking for having a large ring fastened through the skin of their foreheads, or hanging from one nostril. These people are all very graceful in their movements. Their religions are comprised in Mohammedanism, Buddhism, Hindoo, &c. They number some six thousand of the population of the place.