Having arrived at this point poor Adolphe burst into French, and, regardless of my assurance that my knowledge of that useful tongue was growing every month more and more imperfect, he rattled himself into a violent fit of emotion, praising the English, lamenting his comrades, grieving over his past sufferings in the dialect any man may hear who will take a turn through the fish market at Boulogne, or linger on the quay there when a fleet of smacks is coming into the harbour. I was truly sorry not to get his story in his own tongue. How could he do justice to his terrible shipwreck in any other language than his? All his gesticulations went for little alongside his “dats” and “deys,” otherwise not a posture but would have helped the wild hoarse flow of recollection poured forth in French—the panic of the men rushing and stumbling upon the barrel-crowded deck; the horrible illumination of the oakum torches with the fires of the flaming paraffin oil streaming from them; the unspeakable anguish of the long twelve hours spent upon that raft, the land in sight, and the rough seas for ever trampling upon them. Is it because they go so heavily manned that disasters to French smacks rise to a height of tragedy that needs the loss of an English vessel of seven or eight hundred tons to parallel? Here was a vessel of forty-five tons furnished with a crew of eighteen souls. Why, a Blackwall liner would hardly need more seamen to work her, if, in calling over the muster-roll, you omit the “idlers.” And another feature that often makes disasters to French smacks peculiarly dreadful is their fashion of taking a number of women to sea with them. I cannot say whether or not they carry the ladies with them into the North Sea, but seldom a French fishing boat puts into an English harbour but half a dozen women and girls may be seen among the crowd of red and blue nightcap-shaped headgear worn by the men. One really cannot be surprised at the old British notion that one Englishman is equal to six Frenchmen when one compares a large Ramsgate, Grimsby, or Yarmouth dandy of fifty or sixty tons going for a six weeks’ cruise in the North Sea in winter manned by four or five men, with the lubbersome, apple-bowed, black-sided, heavily-timbered French three-masted lugger of forty tons, with her decks so crowded with fishermen and women that it seems impossible they can move without getting into one another’s road. Meanwhile, it is to be hoped that the long conference held at the Hague, the correspondence relative to which makes a volume of alarming dimensions, may be accepted as a preliminary to something like a good understanding subsisting among the smacks of various nationalities which drag their nets in the North Sea. Unquestionably the English fisherman has had a very great deal to complain of in the rough and cowardly treatment he has experienced at the hands of French, Dutch, and Belgian smacksmen. It is not only that his costly fishing gear has been irreparably ruined again and again by that mean and treacherous contrivance known as “the devil;” he has even been fired into, and his temper taxed so repeatedly by the basest professional treatment and the most studied insults, that the time was when those interested in the English fishermen expected day after day to hear of desperate battles at sea—small Trafalgars, Niles, and Copenhagens—between the fleets of Yarmouth, Grimsby, and the North and the allied squadrons of Belgium, France, and Holland.
OLD SEA CUSTOMS.
The changes which have taken place in the sea-life cannot be wholly restricted to the transformations of the shipbuilding yard. There is a mighty difference indeed between the line-of-battle ship of fifty years ago and the armour-clad of to-day—between the Atlantic passenger clippers of which Fenimore Cooper wrote and the iron mail steamers which have succeeded them; but there are changes in other maritime directions fully as remarkable, though perhaps not so deeply accentuated to the shore gaze. Where are the old customs of the ocean? Whither has fled the traditionary character of the sailor? His canvas remains. He still has his topsails (albeit halved) to hoist, his topgallant sails to sheet home, his royals to set; spite of steam, there are still scores of the old-fashioned windlasses for him to bawl his hurricane songs over; still scores of the old-fashioned capstans for him to wind round, “drunk, monotonous, and melodious,” davits at which he may cat his anchor, as did his forefathers, forecastles as clammy as the most reeking of the holes in which the Jacks of other days lay snoring, with purple faces, in clouds of cockroaches.
But, for all that, it will not do to pretend that the sailor is what he was. I do not speak of the caricatures of the fictionist; the monstrous pig-tailed figures with lanthorn jaws, broken teeth, wooden legs, and bloodshot eyes, the race of Hatchways, Trunnions, and Pipses, who stagger, full of drink and oaths, in clamorous procession through the pages of the sea novelists, losing, to be sure, something of their inexpressible garnishings as they enter the truer oceanic atmosphere of the Coopers and the Marryats of the present century. I refer simply to the old sailor, to the plain man-o’-warsman and merchantman of bygone years, not to the Frankenstein in flowing breeches and hat on nine hairs who trod the stage and procured his circulation in one, two, and three volumes, in the respectable name of Jack, prior even to the days when Sir Launcelot Greaves found the irresponsible anatomy willing to ship
“The broad habergeon,
Vant brace and greves and gauntlet.”
Let me be understood. The British or American mariner of to-day is as hearty, nimble, dexterous, determined a fellow as ever he was at any time during the choicest and most glorious period of his nation’s history. He needs but opportunity to test him. It is in his traditions, habits, superstitions, that he differs from his predecessors. I do not think it is the iron of his latter-day calling that has entered his soul and changed him. The very distinguishable difference is owing to a natural decay of marine sentiment. He is no longer superstitious—possibly because he is not without a tincture of education. Hard wear has attenuated his prejudices, and custom has lost its hold upon him. It would be difficult now, I should think, to find in any forecastle such a superstitious sea-dog as the old salt who, in Dana’s “Two Years Before the Mast,” agreed with the black cook as to the malignant and wizard qualities of the Finns. Familiarity with the grand liquid amphitheatre into which he descends and toils for his bread may have helped to rob the modern sailor of what I must call the romantic features of the seaman’s nature. In olden times the voyage was long, the art of navigation crude and halting; the wonders of the deep were many, at least they were found so; a man passed so long a while at sea that he was saturated with the spirit of it. Superstitions salt as the billow from which they were wrought begot peculiar forms of thought; customs grew out of the strange fancies and interpretations, and that they should now be dead means simply that they flourished for centuries, and that they died very hard at last.
How wide the difference is between the shipboard life of the mariners of the past and that of the present race of seamen may be collected by looking into a few of the customs which are now as extinct as the timbers of Noah’s ark. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was a practice on board Italian and Spanish, and possibly Portuguese ships, for the sailors on crossing the equator to erect a canopy on the forecastle, under which three seamen, absurdly dressed, seated themselves. One was called the president, the others judges. They started first with trying the captain, then the officers, finally the passengers. A sailor, dressed up as a clerk, read the indictments, after which the judges pronounced sentence of death. Careri, in his “Voyage Round the World,” explains the purpose of this tomfoolery. “The sentence of death,” says he, “was immediately bought off with money, chocolate, sugar, biscuit, flesh, sweetmeats, wine, and the like. The best of it was that he who did not pay immediately, or give good security, was laid on with a rope’s end, at the least sign given by the President Tarpaulin.” Apparently heavier punishments than rope’s-ending attended the poverty or contumacy of the convicted, for the same author tells of a passenger who was drowned on board a galleon through being keel-hauled for refusing to conform to this singular marine custom. The sport—if sport it can be called—lasted all day, and then at sundown the fines or forfeits were divided among the sailors.
It is possible that out of this old sea-joke rose the stupid and irritating practice of ducking men on their crossing the equator for the first time. This imbecile piece of horse-play was wonderfully popular among seamen down to quite recent days. I don’t think Jack ever saw much humour himself in the mere dressing up as Neptune and acting Jack Pudding in the waist; what he relished was the privilege, by prescription, of lording it over the captain and officers for a few hours, and tarring and soaking people to whom at other times he would have to pull his forelock, with the whole length of the ship between him and their nobility.