All the passengers came on deck after breakfast; the ladies brought out their work, the gentlemen lighted cigars, and those who had made a voyage before looked knowing as they cast their eyes about and asked nautical questions of the captain.
As to the pilot, he was ungetatable. Moreover, his language was so clouded with marine expletives that his lightest answer was generally a shock to the sensibilities.
Every boatman from Margate to Penzance calls himself a pilot nowadays; but the genuine pilot—such a man as this who was taking the “Meteor” down Channel—stands out upon the marine canvas with an individuality that makes him unique among seafaring human kind. Figure a square, bow-legged man, in a suit of heavy pilot cloth, a red shawl round his neck, a tall hat on his head, a throat the colour of an uncooked beefsteak, and a face of a complexion like new mahogany, small moist rolling eyes, a voice resembling the tones of a man with the bronchitis calling through a tin trumpet, and an undying affection for Jamaica rum. Such was Mr. Dumling, the “Meteor’s” pilot, a man to whom the gaunt sea-battered posts, the tall skeleton buoys, the fat wallowing beacons, and the endless variety of lights ashore and at sea, from the North Foreland to the Land’s End, were as familiar and intelligible as the alphabet is to you; who was so profoundly acquainted with the Channel that he boasted his power to tell you within a quarter of a mile of where he was, by the mere faculty of smell! A man who could look over a ship’s side and say, “Here are four fathoms of water, and yonder are nine,” “And where the shadow of the cloud rests the water is twelve fathoms deep;” and so on, every inch of the road, for miles and miles—a miracle of memory! To appreciate the value of such a man you should be with him in the Channel in a pitch-dark night, blowing great guns from the north-east, with the roar of the Goodwin on the lee bow, and a sea so heavy that every blow the ship receives communicates the impression that she has struck the ground, while the black air is hoarse with the gale and fogged with stinging spray.
The wind is nowhere more capricious than in the English Channel. At one o’clock the spanking breeze swept round to the south-east; the watch went to work at the braces; up went the foretopmast-stun’sail, and the “Meteor” rushed ahead at twelve knots an hour.
“We shall be off Plymouth at eight o’clock,” says the pilot, and went below to lunch with a serene face.
He was right. At eight o’clock the “Meteor” was lying with her main yards backed, dipping her nose in a lively sea, with a signal for a boat streaming at her mast-head.
The passengers might take their last look at old England then, whilst the glorious sunset bathed the land in gold, and made the wooded shores beautiful with colour and shadow. And now, dancing over the waters, came a white sail, which dimmed slowly into an ashen hue as the crimson in the skies faded and the waters darkened.
“Any letters for shore?” says Captain Steel, moving among the passengers, and soon his hand grows full. Many of the men come forward and deliver missives for the wife, for Sue, for Poll, to the skipper, who gives them to the pilot. The boat, glistening with the sea-water she has shipped, sweeps alongside, ducks her sail, and is brought up by a line flung from the main chains.
“Good-bye, cap’n,” says the gruff pilot; “wish you a pleasant voyage, I’m sure, gen’l’men and ladies;” drops into the main chains, and from the main chains drops into the boat; the sail is hoisted, a hat waved, a cheer given from the ship’s forecastle, and away bounds the lugger in a cloud of spray.