A Book for the Hammock

by William Clark Russell

I managed to obtain a berth that night

To sleep in, but they woke me ere ’twas light;

A noise above, and from below a groan,

I heard a voice say, ‘Hang that holy-stone!’”

It was reserved apparently for the days of the application of steam to ships for owners of vessels to discover that passengers embarking on a short voyage stood in as much need of comfort and security as passengers embarking on a long voyage; and that more misery could be packed into the run between Dover and Calais than could be found in a journey of three years round the globe.[^[48]] How much of suffering went to such a trip as that from Rotherhithe to Lisbon may be read, very much at large, in Fielding’s wonderful narrative—the more wonderful when we reflect that the hand that penned it was a dying man’s. Nor is it hard to collect similar experiences of the old passages to Ireland, to Scotland, or to near ports, such as from London to Yarmouth or from Southampton to Plymouth. The risks, the horrors, were increased by the character of the people who had charge of the vessels. There were no Board of Trade examinations in those days; no standards of excellence; no special qualifications insisted upon. That the British mariner was always a good seaman I should be the last to deny; but he swore, he drank, he was rude, tempestuous, ruffianly, and little fitted—I am speaking of the coasting trade—to do the honours of the cabin table, or to provide by his attention and courtesy for the needs of ladies and children. Henry Taylor, writing in 1811, says, “The ship in which I engaged belonged to Hull. The captain was one who indulged himself in bed during night, in every situation; the mate—a middle-aged man—was much addicted to strong liquor. In the middle of the night, when the ship was in a perilous place, the master went to bed, and the chief mate invited the crew into the cabin to drink. In a short time he fell stupidly drunk down into the steerage. The sailors dared not arouse the master, and so took their chance of letting the ship run on until the watch was out.” On another occasion Taylor was seaman in a ship in stormy weather. The captain went below to his cabin and “turned in;” the mate, standing on the windlass end, fell asleep; a young man at the helm suddenly cried out, “We are running too far in!” Taylor seized the lead, found little more than three fathoms, and sung out to the other to put the helm hard down. “So stupidly drunk and asleep was the mate that we were hauling the head yards about before he awoke.” Such mariners must stand as representatives, and how passengers suffered when they took passage in vessels commanded by men of this pattern is only too painfully told in the relations of shipwrecks.

[48]. The duration of the Channel passage depended of course upon the wind. Prince Charles and Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, sailed at six in the morning and arrived at two in the afternoon. Sometimes the passage occupied twelve hours, sometimes twenty-four. A fresh favourable breeze made the journey a comparatively rapid one. There is a quaint entry touching this passage in Dr. Ed. Browne’s Journal (1663–4). “April 6. Betimes in the morning, wee set sayle for Calais in the packet boat; wee gave five shillings a piece for our passage and having a fair winde, wee got in four houres’ time, into Calais roade, from whence a shallop fetch’d us to shoare. At our entryng of the port wee pay’d threepence a piece for our heads; they searched my portmantle at the gate and the custom house, for which I was to pay 5 sols.”

Take a single incident of a gale a century ago. A vessel was proceeding on her voyage from Chester to Dublin. Her provisions, which at the start had been all too scanty for “the vast number of souls she took out with her”—as the record describes them—had been stowed on deck, to make room below for the passengers. In a very short while the sea washed them overboard. “What followed may be better imagined than expressed. The wretches were crammed into the hold, without light or air, and all on board the ship without bread or water, with scarce any other prospect of seeing an end to their sufferings but by the ship’s foundering.” After forty-eight hours of misery the captain made shift to enter a small Welsh port, but the distress of the passengers continued, for the village or hamlet was too small to afford them either provisions or accommodation. What became of them is not told.

Contrast such an experience with the cabins and food of a Holyhead boat—the swift journey, be the weather what it will, the brilliant, hospitable, comfortable hotels on either side the water! Or read the account of the loss of the Union, the regular packet between Dover and Calais, in 1792, side by side with the description of the last steamer built for the Chatham and Dover Railway Company: how, through unnecessary delays, she had suffered the time of high tide to slip past; how, in endeavouring to turn to windward, she had missed stays, fouled the south pier, and lay beating there; how, by a miracle, the crew and passengers were rescued, but after embarking next morning in the Pitt, Captain Sharp, were wrecked afresh, “being driven on shore at the north head, in a violent gale, but fortunately no person was lost.” One finds in such narratives as this the reason why Frenchmen for ages lived in ignorance of the true character of the English, and wrote fancifully of boule-dogs, ros-bif, Smeetfield, and Goddam. The fact is, they durst not cross.

Take another wreck of a Dublin boat—the Charlemont packet—a memorable item in the catalogue of maritime disasters. She sailed on a Wednesday, and managed to reach Dublin Bay, but was driven back by the weather. She started afresh on Friday, with the number of her passengers increased to one hundred and twenty, and was again forced to put back. The people implored the master to make for Holyhead, but he said he was ignorant of the coast. After a while, however, he yielded; the mate, deceived by some lights, mistook his course, the vessel struck and went to pieces. Of the passengers, sixteen only escaped, one of them being Captain Jones, a son of Lord Ranelagh. Think of an Irish “mimber” in these days, thirsting to be in his place at Westminster at a given hour, forced to take ship after the manner of his ancestors! A gale of wind would make a large difference in the number of votes, and at times might prove superior to the closure.

War-time also communicated a degree of discomfort to voyagers beyond all capacity of realization in this age. It was common enough for an Indiaman to be engaged by an enemy’s ship or a privateer which, if she did not carry and seize the vessel, repeatedly succeeded in killing and maiming the passengers amongst others. “Two gentlemen,” you may read in an Annual Register of the beginning of this century, “passengers from Holland, landed at Margate. They affirm they were in the evening boarded in sight of the North Foreland by an English privateer cutter, whose crew, in disguise, confined the captain and crew of the vessel in the cabin, and then plundered it of goods to the value of £2000, demanded the captain’s money, and took what the passengers had.”[^[49]] This sort of thing furnishes engaging reading to boys when told in story-books; but how about the reality? To be tossed for days and days in sight of land; to be horribly sea-sick and barbarously used by captains and mates: to be battened down in foul weather in loathsome interiors, there to expire after a little of suffocation; to be coarsely fed and often starved; to be boarded and massacred and mutilated; to be plundered of the very coat on one’s back—such were the pleasures of the short-voyage passengers in the good old times, of the people who went to France, or sailed to the kingdom of Ireland, or to the Scotch ports, or those of Flanders.