“Why you young guinea pig, why don’t you obey orders?” he bawled; “to lay down at sea means to come down, and you know it too; I see it in your eye! Over with’ee, over with’ee.”
His large nervous fist closed upon the collar of my jacket, and I found myself lifted over the rim at the top.
“Catch hold of the futtock shrouds!” he roared, “those iron bars, d’ye hear?—quick, before I let you go!”
I gripped at something, but whether it was iron or rope I was too horrified to know. He let go, and my legs swung out into the air. But green-horns cling too tightly to be in much danger on such occasions as this. A heave of the ship swung me in again, my toes struck something hard, and with the swiftness of a monkey I coiled my little shanks round it. Down I slid, breathless, and with the eyes half out of my head, and was not a little astonished and rejoiced to find my foot upon a ratline in the mizzen rigging, whence the descent was as easy as walking the deck.
“That’s your lesson,” exclaimed the third mate as he jogged down the rigging past me. “You’ll never shirk the futtock shrouds again, will you?”
But I had no breath with which to answer him. It was a rough lesson, but it did me good. It made me see that climbing and descending were no such terrifying processes as they looked. Possibly I might not have got so much confidence out of this adventure had I known that the third mate had only pretended to let go; that in reality he was maintaining his hold of my collar after my legs had swung out, though I was too much terrified to be sensible of this.
I have always considered that the alarm of this little business cured me of sea-sickness. Whilst in the top, as I have told you, the nausea was over-poweringly strong upon me; but when I had come down I was no longer sensible of it, and from that moment, indeed, I never had a return of it. There can be no doubt that this distressing malady lies mainly in the nerves, and the fright I had received by being hung out over the top, so to speak, had acted upon me as an electric shock, healing and ending the prostrating complaint.
It blew a gale of wind for three days. I don’t doubt I should have heard a deal about my adventure aloft from the midshipmen but for the weather. The wet on deck and the discomforts below were too much for the youngsters’ spirits, and until the sun shone forth again we were a very sulky lot. The ship was miserably uncomfortable. It rained incessantly, with such a continuous blowing of spray over us, that it was sometimes above one’s ankles on the main deck. There were tarpaulins over the hatchways, and the ’tween-decks were as dark as the hold. There had been no time yet for the passengers to grow seasoned to the sea life; most of those in the “cuddy,” as the saloon was then called, kept their cabins. Now and again one of them at long intervals crawled into the companion-hatch, where he exhibited a face white as a spectre’s.
But the chief of the misery was amongst the emigrants. Boxes and chests were incessantly breaking loose, and menacing their lives as the poor creatures sat huddled in sea-sick groups under the booby-hatch, for the sake of the dim light that sifted down through it. There were times when the galley fire was washed out, and the emigrants had to content themselves with biscuit and molasses and cold water, and small doses of that nauseous food called “soup and boulli,” nick-named by the sailors soap and bullion. I have seen a little family of them squatting round a sea-chest belonging to one of us midshipmen, an old towel for a table-cloth, and on it a tin dish or two containing hard ship’s biscuit, a mess of soup and boulli, a lump of pork fat, probably two or three days’ old, along with other such cold and throttling fare as the ship’s third-class larder yielded; and while they were attempting to make a meal off this trough-like collection of victuals, I have seen the chest slip away from them, the food tumble on to the deck, and the whole family capsized on their backs.