“Have I ever been to Madagascar?” he repeated, with a look of amazement and wonder quaintly combined on his good-natured, ruddy-brown, weather-beaten face. “Is that what you wanted to know, eh?”
“Yes,” I replied, “that is, if you’ve no objection to answer my question.”
“Why, no! I’ve nothing to keep dark of my doings.”
“All right!” said I; “then you can go ahead.”
“Well, sir,” he began, drawing a deep breath as if he only just took in the import of my question and was turning over in his mind the matter in all its bearings, “I should rather just think I had been to Madagascar, and there’s precious little chance too of my forgetting it, either, in a hurry. Ah! if you’d once been wrecked on sich a queer, outlandish, wild, desolate sort o’ shore as that there, arterwards havin’ to swim miles upon miles through a heavy rolling sea to get to land, and that under a fierce burning sun the while; besides, when got ashore at last, being forced to tramp for ten long weary days and nights across slimy green marshes filled with alligators, crawling through thick jungles of thorny bushes that tore your flesh to pieces before ever you could ha’ come to a civilised place to get your wants attended—you, that is me, not having a morsel of food or a drop of pure water to drink all the way—why, sir, I fancy as how you’d remember the blessed place to your dying day; and, would recollect all about it in the flash of a moment again when any one just mentioned its name again the same as you have done just now!”
The speaker was a fine, robust-looking seaman of middle height, and probably of middle age also, for there was a slight suspicion of grey in the crisp brown beard that covered the lower part of his countenance, while several prominent wrinkles were apparent about the corners of his merry, twinkling, blue eyes.
He was dressed respectably in a sober suit of some rough material that fitted easily to his well-proportioned limbs, and, from his civilian costume and nautical look—for he had a sort of briny flavour about him, so to speak—I took him for a petty officer of the Royal Navy who had retired from the active duties of his profession on account of his length of service afloat having entitled him to the otium cum dignitate of a pension ashore for the remainder of his days. Such was my surmise at first sight—an impression subsequently in part confirmed; but be that as it may, he and I had got into conversation one bright summer day not long ago while standing on Portsmouth Hard, watching a white-hulled Indian troopship steaming out of the harbour beyond, with the marines for Egypt on board. I had mentioned Madagascar in casually commenting on the plucky behaviour displayed at Tamatave by Captain Johnstone of HMS Dryad in resisting the high-handed proceedings of the French admiral, who appeared to think that he might insult the English flag with impunity from the fact of his being in command of a squadron flying the Tricolour flag while the representative of the Union Jack had only one solitary vessel to oppose to that force.
“Aye, I know the East African station well,” continued my friend. “I was invalided home from there, and got my pension three years before my twenty years’ term of service was up in consequence.”
“Indeed!” said I, to lead him on, in expectation of the yarn I could perceive looming before me; but playing with my fish gently, as anglers know so well how to do, so that I might not frighten him into silence by any undue display of anxiety on my part.
“Yes, I served over a year in the London at Zanzibar before being drafted off to one of the cruisers on the station. Beastly unhealthy place that Zanzibar—all fevers and agues and malaria in the wet season, and as hot as a place you’ve heard of, sir, when the sou’-west monsoon blows off the African shore. I was there when Sir Bartle Frere came to interview the old sultan to try and make him sign a treaty to put down the slave-trade; but it was all no go—the old sultan was too wide-awake for that, and, indeed, treaty or no treaty, we can never quite stop the dealing in slaves between the Arabs on the one hand and the clove-growers on the other.”