LIST, YE LANDSMEN!
CHAPTER I.
I ARRIVE IN THE DOWNS.
Sailors visit many fine countries; but there is none—not the very finest—that delights them more than the coast of their own native land when they sight it after a long voyage. The flattest piece of treeless English shore—such a melancholy, sandy, muddy waste, say, as that which the River Stour winds greasily and slimily through past Sandwich, into the salt, green, sparkling waters of the Small Downs—the English sailor will look at with a thirstier and sharper pleasure than ever could be excited in him by the most majestic and splendid scenery abroad.
Thus in effect thought I, as I stood upon the quarter-deck of the Royal Brunswicker, viewing the noble elevation of the white South Foreland off which the ship was then leisurely rolling as she flapped her way to the Downs with her yards squared to the weak westerly breeze; for—to take you into my confidence at once—this part of the coast of old England I had the best of all reasons for loving. First of all, I was born at Folkestone; next, on losing my parents, I was taken charge of by a maternal uncle, Captain Joseph Round, whose house stood on the road between Sandwich and Deal; and then, when I first went to sea, I was bound apprentice to a master sailing out of Dover Harbor; so that this range of coast had peculiar associations for me. Consider. It comprised the sum of my boyish, and of most, therefore, of my happiest, memories; indeed, I could not gaze long at those terraces of chalk, with their green slopes of down on top, and with clusters of houses between sparkling like frost, and many a lozenge-shaped window glancing back the light of the sun with the clear, sharp gleam of the diamond, without recollection stealing in a moisture into my eyes.
The ship was the Royal Brunswicker. I was her first mate. The name of her master was Spalding; mine William Fielding. Captain Spalding had married a relative of my mother’s. He was a north-countryman, and had sailed for many years from the Tyne and from the Wear; but two years before the date of this story—that is to say, in the middle of the year 1812—he had been offered the command of the Royal Brunswicker, a small, cozy, lubberly, full-rigged ship of 490 tons, belonging to the Port of London. I was stopping at Deal with my uncle at that time, and heard that Captain Spalding—but I forget how the news of such a thing reached me at Deal—was in want of a second mate. I applied for the post, and, on the merits of my relationship with the captain’s wife, to say no more, I obtained the appointment.
We sailed away in the beginning of September, 1812, bound to the east coast of South America. Before we were up with the Line the mate—a sober, gray-haired, God-fearing Scotsman—died, and I took his post and served as mate during the rest of the voyage. We called at several ports, receiving and discharging cargo, and then headed for Kingston, Jamaica, whence, having filled up flush to the hatches, we proceeded to England in a fleet of forty sail, convoyed by a two-decker, a couple of frigates, and some smaller ships of the King. But in latitude 20° north a hurricane of wind broke us up. Every ship looked to herself. We, with top-gallant masts on deck, squared away under bare poles, and drove for three days bow under in foam, the seas meeting in slinging sheets of living green upon the forecastle. We prayed to God not to lose sight of us, and kept the chain-pumps going, and every hour a dram of red rum was served out to the hearts; and there was nothing to do but to steer, and pump, and swear, and hope.
Well, the gale broke, and the amazing rush of the wings of seas sank into a filthy, staggering sloppiness of broken, rugged surge, amidst which we tumbled with hideous discomfort for another two days, so straining that we would look over the side thinking to behold the water full of tree-nails and planks of bottom sheathing. But the Royal Brunswicker was built to swim. All the honesty of the slow, patient, laborious shipwright of her time lived in every fiber of her as a noble conscience in a good man. When the weather at last enabled us to make sail and proceed from a meridian of longitude many degrees west of the point where we had parted company with the convoy, we found the ship staunch as she had been at the hour of her birth.
All the water she had taken in had tumbled into her from above. What say ye to this, ye sailors of the paddle and the screw? We made the rest of the passage alone, cracking on with the old bucket to recover lost time, and keeping a bright lookout for anything that might betoken an enemy’s ship.
And now on the afternoon of September 19, in the year of God 1814, the Royal Brunswicker was off the South Foreland, languidly flapping with square yards before a light westerly breeze into the Downs that lay broad under her bows, crowded with shipping.
The hour was about three. A small trickle of tide was working eastward, and upon that we floated along, more helped by the fast failing run of the stream than by the wind; but there would be dead water very soon, and then a fast gathering and presently a rushing set to the westward, and I heard Captain Spalding whistle low as he stood on the starboard quarter, sending his gaze aloft over the canvas, and looking at the shipping which had opened upon us as the South Foreland drew away, seeking with his slow, cold blue north-country eye for a comfortable spot in which to bring up.