Young Tom Bowling / The Boys of the British Navy

by John C. Hutcheson

While ‘old crusty’ was laying down the law in this fashion, though continuing to mind his steering as smartly as he had done all along, the cutter was nearing the cruiser every instant, the wind taking her along in a series of mad leaps and bounds through the water and over the water, jumping from the top of one wave to that of another, and sometimes almost in mid-air, until we seemed about to hop on board the Mermaid, all standing like some of those flying-fish I have seen in the tropics, or else smash ourselves all to pieces against her iron hull.

But, in the nick of time, when only some twenty or thirty yards off her sharp ram bow, which would have cut into the cutter as easily as a knife goes into butter in summer-time, Draper gave a tug to his steering oar; and, Captain Hankey ‘making a lee’ for us by porting his helm, we glided into comparatively calm water under the cruiser’s starboard counter.

A dozen ropes were thrown to us from men already stationed in the rigging for the purpose, a dozen hands and more held out to help us up the side; and almost before any of us well knew where we were, there we stood, safe and sound on the deck of our old ship again, the cutter being then hoisted up to the davits.

Draper, who had saved her and us, was the last man to leave her, when the falls were secured and the gripes put round the boat again.

After this exciting episode, nothing very notable occurred during our stay on this part of the coast for the next twelve months, beyond my being made ‘able seaman.’

I passed for this grade very satisfactorily, I am glad to say; but, it would not be fair for me to omit mentioning that it was mainly through my old friend Larrikins that I was able to get off with flying colours. My old chum coached me up in the knotting and splicing of wire rope, of which art he was a proficient, his father being a working smith, and Larrikins himself having been intended originally for that trade, before the superior attractions of the sea weaned him from the paternal handicraft.

In the following year, however, matters became a trifle livelier on the East coast.

The Somali, from the constant blockade we kept up along their territory with our boats and cruisers, from Cape Guardafui down to the Equator, thus putting a stop to their slave-dealings, capturing as we did all their dhows and blocking all outlets from the coast, determined on retaliatory measures; so, mustering all their forces and calling up the assistance of the slave-dealers of the interior, they began to attack various points of the British protectorate.

Possibly, had the Arabs only us to deal with, things might not have got to this pass; but, very unluckily for this country, the Germans, who have long been jealous of our colonial enterprise and commercial success in Africa as elsewhere, took it into their heads, not long since, to extend their trade on the eastern seaboard.

The ideas of Meinherr Von Sourkrout and his warlike Kaiser in respect of the colonisation of this part of the Dark Continent, like those of our French cousins on the West Coast, differ much from the more peaceful plan pursued by England for several generations past—a plan that has worked wonderfully well in the building up of our Empire, and the spread of our manufactures over every land and sea!