CHAPTER IV
THE VOYAGE
Our boat, the Blankshire, put out of Albany Harbour one of a fleet of transports fifty or more strong, convoyed by cruisers. We began a weary journey to an unknown destination, fair winds and fair skies companioning us. The fleet steamed in three lines, travelling at the fastest rate of the slowest vessel, and the convoy moved abeam, to starboard and to port.
The Blankshire had steamed through Port Phillip Bay a fortnight before, carrying a sober ship’s company. We had left camp at the eleventh hour, and few friends were on the wharf to call goodbye. To help us, it may be, the band played on the boat deck through early afternoon, until the trumpeter blew “Stables.”
At last land had been exchanged for sea; but it was out of the frying-pan into the fire. We moved into the swelter of the tropics, and routine gripped us. It was stables, stables, stables! It was stables before breakfast, and stables after breakfast; stables in the afternoon, and stable picket at night. Across the jumble of trampled men and nervous horses came for ever Sands’s voice.
“You fellows, keep those horses moving. What are you doing there, Oxbridge? Why aren’t you hand-rubbing, Woods?”
Round and round the steaming decks moved the procession of men and horses, a battered, unsavoury collection, long lost to hope. Through the middle of the day, when the sun was most menacing, we spelled for a couple of hours, lying about the decks to doze and read. After tea we loitered in the same way, and those who could brave the stifling lower decks went below to gamble. On pay nights you would find a gambling school at half the mess tables, with gold and notes passing forward and backward. Many a man left the table lighter in pocket, if heavier at heart. Towards ten o’clock “Lights out” was blown, the hammocks would be slung on their hooks, and we would turn in for the night, packed like sardines. You could not move an elbow. And so another day ended.
But who wants the details of that weary journey? Heat and the odour of manure are what best I remember of it. It seemed never more would we sight land.
One afternoon there came an order we must show no lights after dark, and night falling, the fleet moved forward in gloom. And one fine day the Sydney steamed into the horizon, and at morning stables arrived the news she had met and sunk the Emden. A great cheer went up, one of the few cheers passing our lips for many a day. But we saw nothing of the fight ourselves, and the weeks went by full of a long monotony. But it was ordained we should have a foretaste of the great adventure ahead of us. It happened thus.
A red-hot sun went down into the ocean, and a calm, close night had fallen. The troopdecks, with hundreds of hammocks rocking gently against one another, were stifling. The sounds of hundreds of sleepers came out of the dark, for rays of the sentry’s lantern at the companion-top crept no farther than the stairway bottom. Through the port-holes the stars moved up and down, and through the port-holes came the shifting of the seas.