Master Rockafellar's Voyage

by William Clark Russell

Well, it happened this 18th of June to be the captain’s birthday. His name was Bow; he would be fifty-three years old that day he told us, and as he had used the sea since the age of thirteen he was to be taken as a man who knew his business. And a better sailor there never was, and never also was there a person who looked less like a sailor. If ever you have seen a print of Charles Lamb you have had an excellent likeness of Captain Bow before you—a pale, spare creature of a somewhat Hebraic cast of countenance, with a brow undarkened by any stains of weather. His memory went far back; he had served as mate in John Company’s ships, had known Commodore Dance who beat Linois and spoke of him as a perfect gentleman; deplored the gradual decay of the British sailor, and would talk with a wistful gleam in his eye of the grand and generous policy of the Leadenhall Street Directors in allowing to their captains as much cubic capacity in the ships they commanded for their own private use and emolument as would furnish out the dimensions of a considerable smack.

It was his birthday and long ago all of us passengers had made up our minds to celebrate the occasion by a supper, a dance on deck, and by obtaining permission for Jack forward to have a ball on condition that we should be allowed to ply him with drink enough to keep his heels nimble and no more. We were in the Indian Ocean climbing north, somewhere upon the longitude of Amsterdam Island, so formidable was the easting made in the fine old times. The latitude, I think, was about 12° south, and desperately hot it was, though the sun hung well in the north. Spite of awnings and wet swabs the planks of the deck seemed to tingle like burning tin through the thin soles of your boots. If you put your nose into an open skylight the air that rose drove you back with a sense of suffocation, so heavily was the fiery stagnation of it loaded with smells of food and of the cabin interior, though there never was a sweeter and breezier cuddy, with its big windows and windsail-heels when the thermometer gave the place the least chance. But when the sun was nearly setting, some sailors quietly came aft and fell to work to make a ball-room of the poop. They took the bunting out of the signal locker and stretched it along the ridge-ropes betwixt the awning and the rail until it was like standing inside a huge Chinese lantern for colour. They hung the ship’s lamps along in rows, roused up the piano from its moorings in the cuddy, embellished the tops of the hencoops with red baize, and in fifty directions not worth the trouble of indicating, so decorated and glorified the after-end of the ship that when the lamps came to be lighted with streaks of pearl-coloured moonshine glittering upon the deck betwixt the interstices of the signal flags, and movement enough in the tranquil lift of the great fabric to the swell to fill the eye with alternations of swaying shadow and gleam, this ball-room of almond-white plank and canvas ceiling of milky softness and walls of radiant banners was more like some fairy sea-vision than a reality, especially with the glimpse you caught of the vast silent ocean solitude outside with its sky of hovering stars and a stillness as of a dead world in the atmosphere—such a contrast, by heaven! to the revelry within the shipboard pavilion, when once the music had struck up and the forms of women in white gowns fluffing up about them like soapsuds were swimming round the decks in the embrace of their partners, that a kind of shudder would come into you with the mere thinking of the difference between the two things.

The music was good; there was a steerage passenger, a lady, who played the piano incomparably well; then there was a cuddy passenger who blew upon the flute very finely indeed. A military officer returning to India after a long spell of sick-leave at home had as light, delicate and accomplished a hand on the fiddle as any of the best of the first violins which I have heard in the crackest of orchestras. When the committee of passengers had been talking about and arranging for this band the chief officer told them that if they thought there would not be instruments enough there was a man forward, a fellow named Ratt, who played the fiddle exquisitely, and, if we wished it, he would make one of the instrumentalists. We consented, and for several days previous to this night you might have heard Ratt rehearsing in the ’tween decks, scraping in a way that made the military gentleman returning from sick-leave look somewhat grave. He spoke of Ratt with a foreboding eye, and what he feared happened. The man could indeed play, but he had no sense of time. All went wrong with the first dance-air that was struck up. The tune he made was right enough; but it was always darting ahead and bewildering the others and finally the band came to a stop, though Ratt continued to play several bars, whilst the military gentleman in great temper was shouting to him to go away. I should have felt sorry for the poor fellow had he not been saucy, for he had dressed himself with extraordinary care, greased every separate hair upon his head as though it had been a rope-yarn and had arrived aft with a sailor’s expectation of seeing plenty of fun and getting plenty of drink. It ended in the chief mate grasping him by the collar and tumbling him down the poop ladder. I afterwards heard that he went forward and in a towering passion threw his fiddle overboard, swearing that he would never play upon anything again but the Jew’s harp and then only for hogs to dance to; there was no longer any taste left amongst human beings, he said, for good music.

The merriment aft was scarcely affected by this instant’s failure. The moment Jack had been tumbled off the poop the instrumentalists began afresh and the decks were once more filled with sliding and revolving couples. I had slightly sprained my ankle that morning by kicking against a coil of rope and was unable to dance; but this was no deprivation to me on a burning hot night, with no place for the draughts out of the fanning canvas to come through, and the smell of blistered paint rising in a lukewarm breathing off the sides of the ship as though the sun still stood over the main-truck. So squatting myself on a hencoop I sat gazing at the merry, moving, radiant picture and listening to the music and to the laughter of the girls which came back from the canvas roof of the poop in echoes soft and clear as the notes of the flute.

There were thirty-two cabin passengers in all, and we had a poopful, as you will suppose. There were more than a dozen girls, dark and fair, most of them pretty enough. There were a few young married ladies too and a little mob of dignified mammas. The men were of the old-fashioned mixture, a few military officers, a sprinkling of Civil Service young gentlemen, fierce old men with white whiskers and gleaming eyes, with peppercorns for livers and with a capacity of putting on the tender aspects of Bengal tigers when anything went wrong—merchants, judges, planters—I can scarce remember now what they were. There were lanterns enough to make a bright light, and some of them being of coloured glass threw bars of ruby and of emerald against the yellow radiance of the clear flame and the ivory streaks of moonlight. Far aft was the wheel with the brass upon it reflecting the lustre till it glowed out against the blackness over the stern like a circle of dull fire upon the liquid obscurity. Grasping the spokes of it was the figure of a seaman, smartly apparelled in flowing duck and a grass hat on “nine hairs”; his shape, dim in the distance, floated up and down against a bright star or two; but there was little need for him to keep his eye on the course. The calm was dead as dead could be. Half-an-hour since the ship’s head was north-west and now it was west, and the swell was under the bow with a strange melancholy sob of water breaking into the pauses betwixt the music and sounding like the sigh of a weeping giant somewhere in the blackness over the side.

And black the water was spite of the air being brimful of the soft silver of the moonlight. On either hand the planet’s wake the ocean ran in ebony to the indigo of the night sky; but you only needed to steal to the break of the poop clear of the awning to mark how gloriously the luminary was limning the ship as if she had no other magic for the deep that night. Every sail was a square of pearl, every shroud and back-stay, every brace and halliard a rope of silver wire, the yards of ivory, with hundreds of stars of delicate splendour sparkling and flashing in the dew along the rails. The Jacks had rigged up lanterns forward and were cutting capers on the forecastle and in the waist to some queer music that was coming out of the darkness upon the booms. It was strange enough to see their whiskered faces revolving in the weak, illusive light, to witness apparitions of knobs and warts and wrinkles storm-darkened to the hue of the shell of a walnut showing out for an instant to the glare of a lantern. There was great laughter that way and a jovial growling of voices. I believe the sailors had got, with the captain’s leave, some of the women of the steerage passengers to dance with, and their happiness was very great; for give Jack a fiddle, and a girl to twirl to the sawing of it, and a drink of rum and water to fill up the short measures of his breathing-times, and he will ask for no other paradise ashore or afloat.

Much was made of old Captain Bow. He looked as if he had taken all day to dress himself, so skewered was he in a garb of the old school; tail-coat, a frill, a collar half way the height of the back of his head, buff waistcoat, tight pantaloons; shoes like pumps, and a heavy ground-tackle of seals dangling from the rim of his vest.

“Captain shows nobly to-night, sir,” said the chief mate to me.

“Ay!” said I, “little enough of the salt in him you’d think.”