The Story Teller of the Desert—"Backsheesh!" / or, Life and Adventures in the Orient

by Thomas Wallace Knox

But there was reason in the request of the boatmen on this occasion, and we might have relaxed enough to pay him before getting on board the steamer. Had we paid in the boat he could have received the money directly from our hands without any nonsense. When we were all on board, one of our party went to the foot of the gangway and held out the stipulated napoleon. We and all our napoleons were infected the instant we came on board, and the boatman was obliged to receive his in a tin cup of salt water. And if the party who paid him had dropped overboard while leaning down, and the boatman had rescued him, the boat and all it contained would have gone into quarantine the prescribed number of days. Such an event has occurred several times in Syra and other ports. In time of quarantine a man must be very careful about his movements.

The Wien got away from Syra about four in the afternoon, and put out into a very rough sea. The lady of our party went to bed immediately, her husband didn’t feel very well, and two others of the party were as cheerful as a pair of chickens that have been caught in a thunder shower. The fifth member of the crowd knew he wouldn’t be seasick, but had no appetite worth mentioning, and I was left alone in my glory, to pace the deck or go below, as I pleased.

I haven’t been seasick for a reasonable number of years, and didn’t want to begin again at that time and place. I have a suspicion that I take a malicious delight in showing how well I can be when others around me are covering the sea with maledictions, and furnishing pleasure and undigested food to the fishes that follow in the wake of the ship.

To give an illustration of the way I can stand the rolling of the “deep and dark blue ocean,” let me relate one incident.

Several years ago I went on board a steamer at Civita Vecchia, for Genoa. When we left Leghorn there were about sixty passengers, as happy as though they had just returned from a wedding or a circus. When we got out to sea we struck into a Mediterranean squall, such as sometimes blows the strings out of a pair of laced gaiters, or shaves the hair from the back of a bull dog. Those passengers went below to study the interior construction of the ship. Among them was an Englishman, who told me he had made four voyages to China, and hadn’t been seasick since he was a boy. I was the only passenger that didn’t go below, and I eat my dinner alone and with an appetite that would terrify the keeper of a boarding house. My English friend was much disordered about the stomach, and when we got to Genoa it was all he could do to get himself on shore. I took care of his wife and carried her down the gangway and up again on shore, and was as polite as I knew how, and it was entire disinterestedness on my part, as I had never met her before, and her husband was a big fellow who could fight if he wanted to, and, moreover, seasickness had given her a bedraggled appearance that was not calculated to incite love making to any alarming extent.

She looked as though somebody had run her through a patent clothes wringer and forgotten to shake her out afterwards.

As soon as the Wien had left the harbor of Syra and got out to sea, she tossed about in a very lively way, and it was no joke to walk along her deck without falling. One needed to have as many legs as a spider or a caterpillar to keep himself straight, and when you were below deck, the creaking of the timbers was something surprising.

“As long as she creaks she holds,” is an old maxim of the mariners, and if it be true, there was never a holdinger ship than the Wien.

We passed Samos and Naxos and other islands of the Ægean Sea, and when the moon came out I propped and chocked myself into a corner on deck, and devoted the time to thinking about the siege of Troy and a dozen other things connected with the history of Greece.

Particularly did I think of the gold and silver things I had seen in Dr. Schliemann’s collection at Athens, things that were said to have come from the treasury chest of old King Priam, the same venerable oyster that fought Agamemnon and the other Kings of Greece.