A BUNDLE OF IRISH PENNANTS.
"Did you ever see the 'Three Chimneys,' Captain Cope?" I asked.
"I can show you where they are on the chart, if that'll do. I've been right over where they're laid down, but I never saw the Chimneys myself, and I never knew anybody that had seen them."
"But they are down on the chart," broke in a pertinacious matter-of-fact body beside us.
"What of that?" replied the captain; "there's many a shoal and lone rock down on the charts that nobody ever could find again. I've had my ship right over the Chimneys, near enough to see the smoke, if they had been there."
So opened the series of desultory conversations here set down. It is talk on board ship, or specimen "yarns," such as really are to be picked up from nautical men. The article usually served up for magazine-consumption is, of course, utterly unlike anything here given, and is as entirely undiscoverable anywhere on salt water as the three legendary rocks above alluded to. The place was the deck of the "Elijah Pogram," one of Carr & Co.'s celebrated Liverpool liners, and the time, the dog-watches of a gusty April night; the latitude and longitude, anywhere west of Greenwich and north of the line that is not inconsistent with blue water.
The name "Irish Pennant" is given, on the lucus-a-non principle, (just as a dead calm is "an Irish hurricane, straight up and down,") to any dangling end of rope or stray bit of "shakings," and its appropriateness to the following sketches will doubtless be perceived by the reader, on reaching the end.
The question was asked, not so much from a laudable desire of obtaining information as to set the captain talking. It was a mistake on my part. Sailors do not like point-blank questions. They remind them unpleasantly, I suppose, of the Courts of Admiralty, or they betray greenness or curiosity on the asker's part, and thus effectually bar all improving conversation.
There is one exception. If the inquirer be a lady, young and fair, the chivalry of the sea is bound to tell the truth, the whole truth, and often a good deal more than the truth.