Master Rockafellar's Voyage

by William Clark Russell

I had read, when at home, a good deal about the customs practised by sailors on crossing the equator, and was not a little disappointed to find that the crew went on with their work as unconcernedly as though the Line were a thousand miles distant. I had been haunted by visions of a fine theatrical show, and had secretly longed for the hour that was to exhibit Neptune with a crown on his head, and a beard of oakum on his chin, attended by his wife, his physician, and the several courtiers who made up his train of state. I had followed, with boyish eagerness, the accounts of the ceremony in the works of Marryat and in other novels, and was much dejected on being told by Mr. Cock that this sort of skylarking was out of date.

“And well for you, young gentleman, maybe,” said he, “that it is so; for you’re a green hand, do you see, and it was always upon the like of you that the forecastle tomfoolery was poured out thickest. How would you relish, think you, being lathered with a mixture of tar and slush and filth; next, having your cheeks scraped with jagged bits of iron cask-hoops till they bled; then plunged backwards into water enough to drown you, and left to scramble out like a half-dead rat, amidst roars of laughter from the unfeeling Jack? No, no; I’m as fond as any man of honest skylarking, but there was always too much of Old Nick in the temper of the shaving and ducking custom to please my humour: and it’s a very good job, I think, that the mouldy bit of barbarity was long ago flung overboard.”

The ship was often brought to a stand by calms during our passage of the equator, and these intervals were very monotonous and hard to bear.

The midshipmen’s berth was so insufferably hot that during my watch below I was unable to remain in it, and would come on deck and hang about under the break of the poop where the side-wings of the saloon, or cuddy, made a recess, and where one was kept cool by the fanning of light draughts of air sent circling betwixt the rails by the swaying of the folds of the hauled-up main-course.

It was at this time that an old gentleman named Catesby—a passenger—who had lived in Australia for many years, related to some of us lads an extraordinary experience that had befallen him during a voyage he made to India when a young man. The old East-Indiaman was then afloat; pirates were also abundant; there was no steam then to be met with at sea, and the excitement and romance of the ocean were at their height. The old gentleman had known a relative of mine, and took a fancy to me, and would frequently bring a handful of almonds and raisins or some sweet biscuits from his pockets—purloinings from the dessert on the cuddy table—and slip the delicacies into my hand with a merry manner of cautiously looking around him as though he was afraid of the captain seeing him. I remember that he delightfully killed several long hot hours one day by telling two or three of us lads the story of his early adventure. I see him now with a cigar drooping between his lips as he went on reciting, and recall the stare of admiration and expectation we fixed upon his face as he proceeded.

The name which he said he always gave to his story when he told it to his friends was:

“LA MULETTE.”

All day long there had been a pleasant breeze blowing from abeam; but as the sun sank into the west the wind fined into light, delicate curls of shadow upon the sea that, at the hour of sundown when the great luminary hung poised like a vast target of flaming brass upon the ocean-line, turned into a surface of molten gold through which there ran a light, wide, long-drawn heave of swell, regular as a respiration, rhythmic as the sway of a cradle to the song of a mother.

The ship was an Indiaman named the Ruby; the time long ago, as human life runs, in this century nevertheless, when the old traditional conditions of the sea-life were yet current—the roundabout Indian voyage by way of the Cape—the slaver sneaking across the parching parallels of the Middle Passage—the piccaroon in the waters of the Antilles dodging the fiery sloop whose adamantine grin of cannons was rendered horribly significant to the eye of the greasy pirate by the cross of crimson under whose meteoric folds the broadside thundered.

I was a passenger aboard the Ruby, making the voyage to India for my pleasure. The fact was, being a man of independent means, I was without any sort of business to detain me at home. Your continental excursion was but a twopenny business to me. Here was this huge ball of earth to be circumnavigated whilst one was young, with spirits rendered water-proof by health. Time enough, I thought, to amble about Europe when Australia began to look a long way off. So this was my third voyage. One I had made to Sydney and Melbourne, and a second to China; and now I was bound to Bombay with some kind of notion beyond of striking into Persia, thence to Arabia, and so home by way of the classic shores of the Mediterranean.