Master Rockafellar's Voyage

by William Clark Russell

I was glad to take his advice, and was presently at my length in the bunk, too ill to speak, yet with a glimmering enough of mind in me to bitterly deplore that I had not heeded my mother’s counsel and remained at home.

The wind hardened as the river widened, and much dismal creaking and groaning rose out of the hold and sides, the bulkheads, strong fastenings and freight of the lofty fabric as she went rolling stately in the wake of the tug that was thrashing through the hard green Channel ridges in a smother of foam. The wind was south-east, I heard some of our fellows say, with a lot of loose black scud flying along the marble face of the sky, and a gloomy thickness to windward, that was promise of tough weather, ere we should have settled the South Foreland well down upon the quarter. One of the lads said that if the wind headed us yet more, we should bring up in the Downs, and lie there till it blew a fair breeze, which might signify a fortnight’s waiting.

“If so,” says he, “I shall put on a clean shirt and go straight ashore, then button my ears behind me, and never stop running till I get to London town; for twenty miles of salt water’s enough for me; and here we are bound away for six thousand leagues of it, with all the way back again on top!”

In this fashion the lads would talk as they came below from the deck, and sick as I was I managed to heed enough of their conversation to pick up what was going forward. I cannot express how I envied their freedom from sea-sickness. Some were making their third voyage, others their second. I was the only “first-voyager” as they call it. It sometimes rained on deck, and the fellows would come below gleaming in oilskins, the sight of which made me feel pitifully girlish, insomuch that on three several occasions I made a desperate effort to get up and act my part of a sailor as they did theirs; but the oppression of nausea was too violent, and down I lay again, saving the third time when, contriving to feel my feet, the ship at the instant gave a lurch which sent me headlong into one of the fore and aft bunks where I lay half stunned, and so miserably sick that the third mate had to lift me in his arms to enable me to return to my own bed.

Sea-nausea is at all times distressing, and I do not know that one is easier for suffering in a fine saloon, with looking-glasses and flowers and the electric-light, and the fresh breezes of heaven blowing through the open skylights to keep the place sweet. But if this mal de mer, as the French call it, is more unendurable in one interior than in another it must be so I think in a midshipmen’s berth—at least such a berth as ours was:—Twelve sleeping shelves and nine lads to sleep in them, with a huge giant of a third mate to fill the tenth; a sort of twilight draining in through the three scuttles, the immensely thick glass of which was often eclipsed by the roaring wash of a green sea sweeping along the sides; a lamp burning night and day, from whose untrimmed flame there arose to the ceiling of the cabin a pestilential coil of smoke.

In these narrow gloomy quarters we lived and moved, and had our being. Here we ate our meals, here we slept, here we washed ourselves, here the youngsters smoked. Hardest part of all were the confusing noises made by the emigrants just outside our berth. Unlashed chests slided to and fro; children were incessantly falling down and squealing; many heart-disturbing lamentations arose from such of the poor wretches as lay sick and helpless in their dark bulkheaded compartments. They had to fetch their meals from the galley, and not yet having acquired the art of walking on a tumbling deck, those who had to bring the rations of beef or pork along, would repeatedly come with a run through the booby-hatch, and lie at the bottom of the ladder badly scalded in a little lake of pease-soup, or with the beef rolling away among the chests, whilst the air resounded with execrations, scarcely stifled by the complaining sounds of the ship’s fabric.

The third mate was very kind to me; told me there was no hurry; I was welcome to lie in my bunk till I felt equal to coming on deck.

“I was sick for a fortnight when I first went to sea,” I heard him say. “I was one of four apprentices. Those shipmates of mine were brutes, and the very first night we were out they hauled me from my hammock and ran me to the mizzen shrouds, up which they forced me to go, saying that the topgallant sail would be clewing up shortly, and I must be in the cross-trees in readiness to help furl it. A ratline carried away, and I fell through the rigging on to the deck. I broke no bones, but I lay senseless, which so terrified the young bullies that when I was taken to my hammock they never more offered to trouble me. I was ill for a fortnight, I say, and the memory of it makes me sorry for every youngster when he first comes to the life and is sea-sick.”

However, on the morning of the third day from our quitting Gravesend, though I was still very ill, I could stand no longer the miseries of my confinement to the cabin. Since I was bound to suffer, I thought it was better to feel wretched in the open air than amid the smells and noise and gloom of the midshipmen’s berth.