The very best and most daring poacher I know lives within five-and-twenty minutes' journey from Waterloo. You may keep on framing stringent game laws as long as you choose, but you cannot kill an overmastering instinct.
I am not prepared to say, "Abolish the Game Laws;" but I do say that those laws cause wild, worthless fellows to be regarded as heroes. No stigma whatever attaches to a man who has been imprisoned for poaching; he has won his Victoria Cross, and he is admired henceforth. You inflict a punishment which confers honour on the culprit in the eyes of the only persons for whose opinion he cares. Even the better sort of men who haunt our public-houses are glad to meet and talk with the poachers. The punishment gives a man a few weeks of privation and months of adulation. He bears no malice; he simply goes and poaches again. No burglar ever brags of his exploits; the poacher always boasts, and always receives applause.
JIM BILLINGS.
Few people know that large numbers of the splendid seamen who man our North Sea fishing fleets are arrant Cockneys. In the North-country and in Scotland the proud natives are accustomed to regard the Cockney as a being who can only be reckoned as human by very charitable persons. To hear a Scotch fisherman mention a "Kokenee" is an experience which lets you know how far scorn may really be cherished by an earnest man. The Northerners believe that all the manliness and hardiness in the country reside in their persons; but I take leave to dispute that pleasing article of faith, for I have seen hundreds of Londoners who were quite as brave and skilful sailors as any born north of the Tees. The Cockney is a little given to talking, but he is a good man all the same.
In the smacks many lads from the workhouse schools are apprenticed, and some of the smartest skippers in England come originally from Mitcham or Sutton. Jim Billings was a workhouse boy when he first went to sea, and he sometimes ran up to London after his eight weeks' trips were over. When I first cast eyes on Jim I said quite involuntarily, "Bob Travers, by the living man!" The famous coloured boxer is still alive and hearty, and it would be hard to tell the difference between him and Jim Billings were it not that the prize-fighter dresses smartly. Jim doesn't; his huge chest is set off by a coarse white jumper; his corded arms are usually bared nearly to the elbow, and his vast shock of twining curls relieves him generally from the trouble of wearing headgear. On Sundays he sometimes puts on a most comfortless felt hat, but that is merely a chance tribute to social usage, and the ugly excrescence does not disfigure Jim's shaggy head for very long. Billings's father was a mulatto prize-fighter, who perished early from the effects of those raging excesses in which all men of his class indulged when they came out of training. The mulatto was as powerful and game a man as ever stripped in a twenty-four-foot ring; but he ruined his constitution with alcohol, and he left his children penniless. The little bullet-headed Jim was drafted off to the workhouse school, and from thence to a small fishing-smack.
Does anyone ever think nowadays of the horrors that were to be seen among the fleets not so very long ago? It is not a wonder that any of the fishers had a glimmer of human feeling in them when they reached manhood, for no brute beast—not even a cabhorse in an Italian town—was ever treated as an apprentice on a smack was treated. Some of the sea-ruffians carried their cruelty to insane extremes, for the lust of blood seemed to grow upon them. It is a naked truth that there was no law for boys who lived on the high seas until very recent years. One fine, hardy seadog (that is the correct and robust way of talking) used to strip his apprentice, and make him go out to the bowsprit end when the vessel was dipping her stem in winter time. He was such a merry fellow, was this bold seadog, and I could make breezy, "robust" Britons laugh for hours by my narratives of his drolleries. He would not let this poor boy eat a morsel of anything until he had mixed the dish with excrements, and when the lad puked at the food the hardy mariner cut his head open with a belaying-pin or flung him down the hatchway. Sometimes the hardy one and the mate lashed the apprentice up in the fore-rigging, and they had rare sport while he squealed under the sting of the knotted rope's end. On one night the watch on deck saw a figure dart forward and spring on the rail; the contumacious boy had stripped himself, and he was barely saved from throwing his skinny, lacerated carcass into the sea. Shortly after this the youngest apprentice went below, and found the ill-used lad standing on a locker, and gibbering fearfully. The tiny boy said:
"Oh! Jim, Jim, what's come to you?" but James never uttered a rational word more. He was sent to his mother's house at Deptford, and he went to bed with four other children. In the early morning the youngsters noticed that Jim seemed rather stiff, and he had exceedingly good reasons, for he was stone-dead, and doubled up. The coroner's jury thought that death resulted from a stoppage of the intestines. That was very funny indeed, for Jim's shipmates observed that as he was bruised and rope's-ended more and more he lost all power of retaining his food, and everything he swallowed passed from him undigested. Jim succumbed to the wholesome, manly, hardening, maritime discipline of the good old times, and no one was hanged for murdering him.
The mind of the kindly, shoregoing man cannot rightly conceive the monstrosities of cruelty which were perpetrated. Fancy a boy bending over a line and baiting hooks for dear life while the blood from a fearful scalp wound drained his veins till he fainted. The lad came to in four hours; had he died he would have been quietly reported as washed overboard. If you can stand a few hours of talk from an old smacksman you may hear a sombre litany of horror. Those fishers are, physically, the flower of our race, and many of them have the noblest moral qualities. Knowing what I do of the old days, I wonder that the men are any better than desperate savages.