Strangely enough, my chum the Irish lad proved himself, landsman though he had been before and never having even smelt the sea prior to his coming to Portsmouth, quite as expert as myself after a short stay aboard the training-ship; though I had been associated with ships and seafaring folk from the time I drew my first breath, and indeed, like all the Bowlings, as I told you at the beginning of my yarn, was born with the taste for ‘the briny,’ the feeling being inherent to my blood.
It strikes me, though, that my sister Jenny had something to do with this.
Mick heard her say the first day when I first took him home with me to visit father and mother at Bonfire Corner, that she loved sailors, and wondered how any young fellow could possibly care for anything else, when he had a chance of going afloat and serving his Queen and country, and fighting the battles of Old England.
The remark was a chance one; but, though Mick must have heard Jenny say a good many other things, for he was often at our house afterwards, being generally in the habit of accompanying me home when I had leave to go, he never forgot those words and somehow or other seemed to strive his best to reach Jenny’s ideal.
So, you see, smart seaman though I fancied myself to be even at that early age, I had to look out lest I should be supplanted by my own chum; for no sooner did I get the start of him in one thing than he would fetch alongside of me and be working ahead before I well knew where I was, the ‘owdacious young beggar,’ as father dubbed him, becoming actually a ‘royal-yard boy’ the following week to myself, while both of us, as I have said, were made first-class boys together.
Unfortunately, this was during the winter months; and, as the training-brig Martin, which is attached to the Saint Vincent as a sea-going tender in order to cruise about in the Channel to give the boys practical experience of their profession—like a frolicsome chick hanging round a broody old hen that won’t leave her nest—does not go out of harbour till the spring, Mick and I were unable for some time to take advantage of the grand privilege of our rise and really go to sea.
We thought the blissful period would never come.
But ‘it’s a long lane that knows no turning’; and, winter ebbing away into the flood of spring anon, we, with some ninety and nine other youngsters of the same standing, set sail one fine April morning from Portsmouth Harbour, the Martin slipping her buoy abreast of Blockhouse Fort, and standing out into the Solent under easy canvas, with a fair wind from the nor’-east.
A hundred boys are always taken at a time for a month’s cruise in the brig, the lot being accompanied by some of the smartest seamen belonging to the complement of the mother training-ship, so that they have every opportunity of picking up now the nautical knowledge necessary to make them worth their salt, in reference both to seamanship and gunnery.
We had a pretty fair knock-about time in the Channel, running down to Plymouth and back, having a ‘sojer’s wind,’ one that was fair both ways, out and home again; and, though, from this fact, we necessarily made an easy passage of it, some of the boys were woefully seasick, many of them never having been at sea before.