Round the Galley Fire

by William Clark Russell

How much Gravesend is a point of arrival and departure I was reminded as I stood overhanging the stone projection and looking down on the landing-steps. From a large sailing-ship towing up the river, a waterman’s boat shot away and made for the Gravesend pier. In it was a middle-aged man, bronzed with the suns and winds of four months, and dressed in clothes which it scarcely needed a tailor to guess were of an Antipodean cut. His luggage was heaped about him in the bottom of the boat. I watched him land, and followed him as he came up the steps, when a rush was made by a little group of people dressed in mourning, and in a breath a woman, tossing up her black veil, was in his arms, and sobbing on his shoulder. Those sombre garments threw a shadow upon the happiness of this meeting; but still, he had come back, he was well, and by-and-by the dead, never to be forgotten, let us hope, would be buried indeed, and the living heart reassert itself. The watermen seemed to know when that ship had left her port on the other side of the world, and so I found that this man had been four months in making his way to England. And how much longer had he been absent? But then think of the glory of the green trees and fragrant beauties of our English May to this traveller fresh from one hundred and twenty days of salt water! Figure the flavour he will find in a cut from a prime sirloin! the sweetness of “soft tack”—ay, even such bread as is now baked—after the bilious little bits of dough manufactured in the galley by the baker, and sent aft under the satirical title of “rolls!”

Scarcely had the sunburnt man and his friends disappeared, when there came a little figure that I could not view without lively concern and compassion. This was a small midshipman, resplendent in the newest of uniforms. The buttons glittered on his tiny jacket, and the brand-new badge on his cap shone like a freshly minted sovereign. There lay his ship a short way down the stream—a good-looking iron vessel, very long and very narrow, without an inch of that “swell of the sides” one loves to see, as I had taken notice when she slewed on her heel to the first of the flood and gave us a view of herself end on, with double topgallant yards, skysail poles, and the capacity for an immense spread of lower cloths. The poor little chap took a long squint at his new home, and then a peep at the lady alongside of him, who, from the strong family likeness between them, I reckoned at once to be his mamma. She had been crying, her eyes were red, but she looked at her youngster with a kind of quivering smile now, for it would clearly not do to capsize his sensibilities at this most trying point. He had insisted upon going to sea, no doubt, much against poor mamma’s will. He had fine notions of the marine calling, I dare say, all acquired by days and nights of study of nautical romances; and here he was ready to sail away, handsomely brass bound, mamma red-eyed at his side, bravely fighting with her heart. Hundreds of men have gone through this, and something betwixt a laugh and a sigh will come from them when they think of this little brass bounder and look back to their first voyage. What ideas had the young fellow formed of the life? But, alas! what mariner has not allowed his boyhood to gull him in the same way? “There is,” says Dana, “a witchery in the sea, its songs and stories, and in the mere sight of a ship and the sailor’s dress, especially to a young mind, which has done more to man navies and fill merchantmen than all the pressgangs in Europe. I have known a young man with such a passion for the sea, that the very creaking of a block stirred his imagination so that he could hardly keep his feet upon dry ground.” These sentences recurred to me as I watched the little midshipman. But for how many days was the spell of the ocean’s witchery to lie upon him? Probably, if they had head winds down Channel, he would be sick of the life and longing to be ashore in a warm bed, with his mother to tuck him up, and a good breakfast to go downstairs to next morning, before they were abreast of the Start. “Oh, my golly!” said a negro whom I met at Gravesend, selling flowers, “S’elp me, sah, as I stan’ here, I’d gib dis basket—yas, ah would—and all de close horff my back, for a good blow-out of lobscouse!” But that little middy will have to be a black man if he wants to enjoy sea-fare as my negro-friend did. A few days of dark and evil-looking pork, and salt beef out of which he might cut models of ships for his friends at home, and “duff” made of copper-skimmings, not to mention the being routed out in his watch below, and having to tumble up aloft in a night blind with storm and rain, are pretty sure to disillusion him. But his buttons are new, and his hopes are young and fresh; there is no tarnish of salt water on either as yet; so let him take his mother’s yearning, passionate kiss, and bundle into the boat and be off. She could not bear to see him row away, and the moment he went down the steps she hurried off; whilst he, to show what a man he was, squatted himself in the stern sheets, and pulled out a short wooden pipe and lighted it. In a few minutes he was out in the stream. I watched him get alongside his ship, trot up the gangway ladder, and vanish in a kind of twinkle of new brass and gilt over the side.

It is these constant comings and goings which give Gravesend its interest and its memories. One hour it is a party of people newly arrived from the bottom of the world; another it is a couple of drunken firemen tumbling into a boat, and shoving off for some lump of a steamer that lies abreast of the Obelisk or Denton Mill. But, in spite of the heaps of nautical conditions which beset it, Gravesend cannot be called wholly marine. It may be thought fishy, but it certainly is not salt. Contrast it with Deal, which it resembles in its lower streets. The wind may pipe never so merrily, but there is no shrewd briny pungency in the shrilling gusts as they sweep round the corners. The boatmen have a fresh water look. Their sou’westers and jerseys cannot deceive the practised eye. They can handle an oar capitally; but they have not the toughened and bronzed and Channel-tossed look of the fellows whom you encounter lolling in blanket trousers over the Ramsgate piers, or arguing in groups at the entrance of the Margate jetties, or heightening the picturesque appearance of the Deal and Folkestone shingle. Yet I cannot conceive of any place better calculated to delight a man of maritime studies and scenes than Gravesend. You may linger all day on the queer-looking roofed-in pier, with the old barge moored against it, and never feel weary. Hour after hour unfolds the canvas of a never-ending panorama of shipping. Picture after picture goes by—the great ocean steamship, the little ratching ketch, the sturdy old collier, the white and shining yacht, the large and loftily rigged ship, the eager tug hissing through the trembling current, and all the life and light and colour and wondrous transformations of the river take a certain character of remoteness akin to unreality, as though what you gazed at was nothing but a series of noble paintings, indeed, from the quietude that prevails about you; an atmosphere of lazy stillness broken by the muffled, rushing sound of the current sweeping under the pier, the dulled voices of men conversing outside the wooden structure, and the straining noise of boats as the tide sets the little craft chafing one another’s sides.

A CHAT WITH A FISHERMAN.

A few days after the dreadful gale that had wrecked whole fleets of smacks belonging to the eastern and north-eastern ports, and drowned many hundreds of fishermen, I was visited by a Hull smacksman, who came to tell me that he had lost a son in one of the vessels which had gone down on the Dogger Bank during the storm, and to inform me of the misery and destitution into which the widows and children of the poor drowned men were plunged. He told me in a rough, plain, earnest way how his son was to have been married to a young girl on his return, and how the poor lad had saved up a few pounds to purchase a little furniture for the home, which she was preparing, when the news reached her that the smack in which her sweetheart was had gone down with all hands; how, in house after house, down whole streets, there was a constant sound of wailing and moaning, with misery and hunger indoors, amongst the weeping women and the sobbing children; and, said my fisherman to me, though God knew he was a poor man, yet such was the suffering he had witnessed, so unspeakably great was the calamity that had overtaken the fishing population of Hull—and of other ports, but he spoke of Hull because he belonged to it—that, had the thirty shillings he subscribed to the fund for the relief of these widows and orphans been the last bit of money he had in the world, he must have given it and taken his chance for himself.

The subject was a deeply interesting one to me, who had lived among fishermen, written about them, knew their heroism well, their hardships, the simple-heartedness of them. We got talking about the smacksman’s life, his risks, of various features connected with his calling; and, as the subject is one that has been commended to the British public in an appeal for charity for those whom the frightful storm bereaved, I offer no excuse for repeating in print some of the observations made by this smacksman on his own vocation. His reference to what is known as the “boxing system” enabled me to lead off with my questions. The term boxing, I may say, is applied to the conveyance of fish in boats from the smacks to the steamers which bring the fish home. As the vessels fill up with fish they transfer them to steamers, which, by relieving them of their freight, enables them to remain for weeks on the fishing ground.

“Is it a fact,” I inquired, “that smacksmen object to the boxing system?”

“It is, sir,” was the reply.

“Why?”

“Because it’s dangerous to life, sir. It keeps men working for a considerable time in open boats in all kinds of weather. It answers the owner’s purpose; he shares in the profits of carrying the fish, and it enables him to keep his vessel at sea as long as it is possible for her to remain there; and by this means the men are deprived of all home comforts and of the management of their families.”