Round the Galley Fire

by William Clark Russell

He said his vessel had left Boulogne early that morning. There were four women and ten men and boys on board. He owned that they had had no lights burning. He trembled like a freezing man, and was then led below, with his hands to his face, sobbing as if his heart would break, and moaning in his rude French that amongst the drowned were his wife and boy.

“Are you sure there were no others afloat when you came away?” asked the captain of the mate, who had charge of the boats. “One man swam to us, I must tell you, and we have him aboard.”

“Sure, sir,” was the answer. “We pulled round and round, but there was nothing to be seen. The people were saved by the mainmast that was left afloat when the smack went down. Those who were drowned missed it, otherwise it was big enough to keep all of them up.”

For another twenty minutes the captain lingered, peering into the darkness, and keeping one boat overboard ready for the first sound. But the deep was as silent as the tomb, and nothing disturbed the deathlike stillness, unless it were the murmur of the men forward talking over the tragical incident, and the quick, passionate whispers of the passengers, as one would suddenly say, “Hush! what was that?” and another, “See! is not that something moving out yonder?” Nothing more could be done. Very reluctantly the captain quitted the stern of his vessel and gave orders to get the boat on board, and in a little while the steamer was slowly moving again through the blackness, her decks wrapped in darkness and silence, whilst the haze floated like steam round the masthead light, and the water gurgled like the cry of a drowning man as it eddied round under the counter and went away in a pale glimmer of froth into the midnight gloom astern.

This little incident will, I believe, fairly set before the reader one of the perils against which those particular captains to whom I referred in the beginning of this article have to contend. Here is a fishing-smack, lying becalmed, without a light showing, on a night made pitch dark by a drizzling haze. How could such a collision be averted, short of the captain of the steamer bringing up?—a remedy which his owners most assuredly would not think the better of him for adopting. I repeat that having regard to the difficult navigation of the mouth of the Thames, as far south as the southern limb of the Goodwins, to the mass of shipping of all kinds that is always crowding these waters, to the perilous weather to be found there, and to the negligence, foolhardiness, and indifference which are characteristic of the seamanship of scores of the men—English as well as foreigners—who have charge of small craft navigating that sea, the manner in which the masters I am speaking of carry their steamers from port to port, year after year, showing always the same clean bill of health, implies an amount of skill and vigilance which any one acquainted with the navigation and dangers of the English Channel from the Nore to the Bullock Bank will own cannot be too highly praised.

LOSS OF A SMACK’S CREW.

I fell once into conversation with a smack-boy—a Yorkshire lad—who told me a story which I privately declined to believe until I saw the printed report of the inquest, and had confirmation of his narrative from other hands. Men who go to sea meet with strange accidents, and perish through causes which landsmen would ridicule as impossibilities in marine novels; but seldom do a vessel’s crew encounter such a disaster as that which befell the people of the smack Apostle, of Hull. I wish I could tell the story as the fishing apprentice gave it me. No painter could imagine a finer study than the figure of the lad in his blue knitted overall, his big boots, his sou’wester, the hinder thatch of which forked out from the back of his head like the tail of a gull on the wing, his young face as he talked warming up into a kind of passionate awe and fear, as it might in his sleep when the dreadful circumstance stood out in the sharp configuration of a dream; whilst now and again he would pass the back of his rough hand across his forehead to rub off the gouts of sweat which gathered there. However, I can do no more than translate the lad’s yarn, and make it complete, in its way, by facts I got from others. The Apostle, then, was a smack, belonging to Hull. Will Stevenson was her master, and John Butler her mate. Besides these she carried two other men and a boy—the lad who told me the story—making in all five souls. She left Hull, however, with only four men, for the boy did not join her until she had been out cruising a week, when he was sent to her in a steamer.

Life on board a smack is but a dull affair, and such excitements as it has are all against the fisherman. It is tedious work drifting for hours with the trawl overboard; but what is to be made of it when, as sometimes happens, the trawl is got aboard and the net found torn to pieces by a piece of sunken wreck or something of that kind, and all the fish gone? Or take a gale of wind blowing for a week, keeping the fisherman waiting and waiting for a spell of moderate weather to fetch his ground. To be hove-to in a smack in the North Sea is such a dance as you must endure—not for a day, but for several days together—to understand. Who that has rolled in a big steamer across the tempestuous stretch of waters which wash our eastern coasts has not watched from the reeling, spray-swept deck the spectacle of some dandy or cutter-rigged boat, jumping as if by magic into the arena of the green, pelting, and foaming amphitheatre, with her storm jib-sheet to windward or well amidships, a slender band of dark, close-reefed mainsail tearing at the quivering gaff, whilst she tosses the high spring of her bows at the rushing snow of the surges, chopping sharply down into the livid vortex and making it flash up in white spume that smothers her like the smoking spray of a great waterfall, vanishing until her gaff is hidden, and nothing shows but the jerking vane at the masthead behind the glittering ridge of the sea that runs at her with the roar of a goods train sweeping through a tunnel; and then springing afresh to the height of the thunderous surge until some fathoms of her keel forward are exposed, and leaning down upon the slope of the mountainous wave, and under the giant pressure of the ringing gale, until her mast seems parallel with the water and her dark shred of canvas a mere black patch upon the snow-storm under her?

One wonders, looking at such a sight, how the big-booted fellows aboard of her hold on; how they manage to cook their food; by what inconceivable art they contrive to “fetch” their bunks, or sleeping closets, without numerous ineffectual struggles, first of all, to hit the holes. But, in truth, no class of sailors make less trouble of dirty weather than fishermen. With his tiller securely lashed, the storm jib slatting a moment or two as the reefed mainsail swings the little craft into the wind, then shoving her nose round again as the sea runs hissing away under her, the air forward dark with flying foam and the water draining overboard in bucketfuls with every send, the smacksman sits cosily in the companion, pipe in mouth, keeping one eye on the look-out and the other eye on the time when one of his mates shall come and take his place, and send him below to toast his hands at the little stove, whose ruddy glow pleasantly tinges the darksome twilight of the cabin, and enables him to find, without groping, another pipe of tobacco before he lies down.

Daybreak on Friday, the Apostle being then very nearly five weeks out from Hull, found the smack with her trawl over the weather quarter and near the north-east end of the Dogger Bank. There was a fresh breeze blowing and a middling sea running, and the smack, surging to leeward with the trend of the waves, rose and fell with the regularity of a pendulum. Many miles distant to windward was another smack, apparently heading for the same ground over which the Apostle was dragging her trawl; otherwise the sea was vacant, and the greenish dawn, flinging a sickly tint into the sky, but leaving the water dark by contrast, and throwing up the great circle of the horizon until the ocean resembled a black and solid disc centring the huge concavity of the heavens, made the immediate aspect of the deep indescribably wild and melancholy. Indeed, there is not a more desolate scene in the world than daybreak at sea. The shadow of the night still hangs in folds upon the water, and the dim illumination in the east only serves to accentuate the chilly sullenness and grim bleakness bequeathed by the black hours, the last of which is drawing away in gloom into the west. But the sun is a noble magician, and one stroke of his flashing wand converts the mystery of the dawn’s vague hints into a glorious revelation of blue heights and sparkling waters. The Apostle’s trawl had been over all night, but a further short spell of drifting could do no harm, and might furnish out another trunk of fish, and the interval would give them time to get breakfast. So the little fire in the stove was stirred into a good blaze, the coffee boiled, and the two men at rest in their bunks routed out for the meal. Fishermen are usually well fed, and that is one reason, I suppose, why they appear to relish their food in a manner you shall not find in any forecastle. They have generally a good freight of fish to pick from, and they are not slow to boil a cod or cook a big sole when fancy and appetite prompt them. Somehow or other, to me, the smoke that comes blowing away out of the little chimneys which pierce their decks always savours of good cheer, and I was not at all surprised, on looking over some victualling accounts shown me by a smack-owner, to discover that the fishermen’s sea-larders—many of them, certainly—are stocked with a liberality that must make owners very anxious indeed to know how much fish there is aboard, when their vessel’s number or burgee comes within reach of their telescopes.