We are picking out our course to-night (Monday) on the chart rather comfortably in the cabin. It is smooth and we are in mid-Channel, in the north-west we have Holyhead Light. We forecast a run of luck for ourselves. We’ve had our share of head-winds and little difficulties since we left the south of Norway, so with the compasses we mark out six days’ run as long as to-day’s run, which will bring us to Azores in six days, or seven days sure, if we have a little strong fair wind—we won’t think of nasty rough weather.
But “Just about here,” the compasses pause, “I was three weeks,” said Henriksen. “That Christmas was the roughest time of my life,” he continued, puffing at his new calabash.
“We was on the Kron Prince three weeks out from Cardiff, seven feet water in the hold and the pumps won’t work.” They had reached the Azores and drifted back to the Bay, then to the Irish Channel, and got shelter, I think, in Bridgewater.
“Captain and mate they’s on deck, with revolvers, but we get ashore and run away. We was not going in that for-dumna sink ship, I’se sure. No! tree hours at wheel was my last watch, one hour pumping, cold, wet, then I finds in corner of fo’c’sle three biscuits, one half-cup tea cold, dat decides me!” “How did you get off?” I said.
“With a runner—runner come alongside: we cuts square hole under fo’c’sle head, captain and mate, they looks all round deck, but not below bows, and we slips out, eight of us and our bags.”
Perhaps these eight were justified for the Crown Prince got a new crew and sailed, and was never heard of again.
Henriksen had three guineas sewn in the waistband of his trousers, and a lot of sense besides for eighteen, also his mate’s certificate, although he was only a sailor on board, and he reflected, as he went ashore, on what he knew of runners and their ways: how the sailor is kept by the same on the credit of his next two or three months’ advance wage, and then goes to sea with precious few clothes and say five shillings to land with at the next port, and has therefore to go to another runner until he gets another ship, and so may be at sea two or three years with hardly the sight of pay. So on getting ashore Henriksen made a clean bolt to the nearest railway station, jumped into first train, taking ticket to first station, leaving his bag with the runner, of course, but keeping his mate’s ticket. Where did he say he got to? I forget, somewhere near Liverpool, but five or ten miles he did free of charge as the guard was interested in his recital.
From Liverpool he booked third class to Belfast. It was a wild crossing and he met, strangely enough, another runaway, an Englishman, and isn’t this the making of a story? They befriended a would-be second-class passenger and his wife, who were obliged, by overcrowding, to go steerage, and both these people were helplessly sea-sick, and their poor children just rolled about the floor till the two young seamen took care of them, and held them in their arms all night. The father pressed a whole £1 note on Henriksen, which he refused, as he had plenty of his £3 remaining, but the Englishman was stony, and he was persuaded to take ten shillings, and the parents gave each of them their address.
Afterwards Henriksen called on them—and such a fine house it was! Henriksen reflects now he might have called on these old friends in Belfast this journey. “They must be old people now. Next time I come to Belfast,” he says, “I calls—maybe they’s in life.”
At Belfast he went on a local tramp, then got berth as second mate, and had twelve months at sea without a day ashore. For it was to Bahia that he went, where you anchor almost out of sight of land. For I forget how many weeks he lay at anchor, then sailed to another port, twelve men in the fo’c’sle, seven with monkeys, the rest with parrots, fancy the racket! then to Mobile Bay and then back to Troon, “two houses and a wall,” as he describes our charming little Scottish seaport, then home to Norway. That is all you sometimes see of foreign parts if you go down to the sea in ships. Nine months at sea with one night ashore is the writer’s longest spell of salt water, but Henriksen tells me he knows of a man being twenty-seven months at sea without getting on shore. I think I must make a special book of Henriksen’s adventures. As told to me they are interesting, but our surroundings count for a good deal: over a chart in the little lamplit cabin or on our quarter-deck (three steps and overboard), the moon overhead, and our sails looking dark and large, and our Æolian engine singing its steadfast song.