Round the Galley Fire

by William Clark Russell

“None, sir.”

“You think this institution a good and honest charity?”

“God knows what we should do without it,” he exclaimed, looking round at the old men who were taking their seats at the dinner-tables. Here the house-governor brought up some other aged men, whom he introduced as shipmasters. One of them was a North Shields captain, eighty years of age; he supported himself on two sticks, was a little, white-faced, ancient creature, with strange silver hair, and he spoke with a wistful expression of countenance. He had been seized with paralysis by “farling doon” the main hatch of his vessel. He told me in his rich, plaintive, North-country brogue, how the doctor had measured his leg and thigh with a tape—for some purpose I could not clearly understand—and how the accident had flung him upon the world, a beggar, and forced him to take a refuge in this institution. Was he happy? Ay, it was a man’s own fault if he wasn’t happy here. He was grateful to God for the care taken of him. At eighty a man was “na’ langer a laddie,” and with a bright old laugh he hobbled hungrily towards one of the dinner-tables.

In a few moments two bells were struck, signifying one o’clock, and all hands being seated, I followed the house-governor to the bottom of the room to have a look at the tables before the old men fell-to. The dinner consisted of salt fish, butter, potatoes, and plain suet pudding.

“This is Tuesday’s fare,” said the house-governor. “On Sundays they get boiled beef, potatoes, and plum pudding; on Mondays, vegetable soup, boiled mutton, and vegetables at discretion; on Tuesdays, what you see; on Wednesdays, soup, boiled beef, and potatoes; on Thursdays, roast mutton, vegetables, and bread and cheese; on Fridays, salt pork, pea soup, and calavances; and on Saturdays, soup and boulli—not soap and bullion, as Jack says, one onion to a gallon of water—but a very good preserved soup, with potatoes or rice and bread-and-cheese. Taste this fish.”

I did so, and found it excellent; so, likewise, was the suet pudding. The potatoes were new. The beer was the only doubtful feature of the repast; it was thin, insipid, and flat. I made haste to taste and approve, for I could see that the old fellows were very hungry. The governor left me, and went to the top of the room, where, in a loud and impressive voice, he said grace, bidding the ancient mariners be thankful for what they were about to receive; they all half rose, and in one feeble, rustling old pipe, sung out “Amen,” and then, like schoolboys, made snatches at the dishes, and in a minute were eating with avidity. It warmed my heart to see them. It made me feel that there must yet be plenty of goodness left in this world, when—through the benevolence of strangers and their large-hearted concern for poor Jack—ninety-three old, very old seamen, tottering on the verge of the grave, so poor and so destitute, so feeble and so friendless that but for the benevolence of those whom Providence had brought to their succour, they must have miserably starved and died, were clothed, and fed, and sheltered, and tenderly watched over. I know not that I have ever been so moved as I was in my passage through that dining-room. It was not only the pathos that lies in the helplessness of old age; I could not but think of the great compass of time these men’s experiences embraced, of the changes they had witnessed, of the sorrows and struggles which had made up the sum of their long lives, and how eighty and ninety years of privation, endurance, and such pleasures as sailors take, and such ambitions as sailors have, had ended in these bowed and toothless shapes, clutching at their plain repast with child-like selfishness, indifferent as death itself to the great machine of life that was whirring with its thousand interests outside the silent sphere of their present existence, and dependent for the bread their trembling hands raised to their poor old mouths upon the bounty of those who love the noble profession of the sea, and who will not let the old and bruised and worn-out seaman want for such help as they can send him. Here and there were men too infirm to feed themselves; and I took notice how thoughtfully their aged messmates prepared their meal for them. Some of those thus occupied were more aged than the men they assisted.

“Bless your honour, he’s but a child to me,” said one of them, in answer to my questions; “he’s but three and seventy, and I shall be eighty-nine come next September.”

One pitiful sight deeply affected me. It was an old man stone deaf and stone blind. How is the helplessness in his face to be conveyed?

“He’s losing his appetite fast,” said a seaman of about eighty who sat near him. “His senses is all locked up. Ye never hear him speak.”

There were sadder sights even than this; but I dare not trust myself to write of them.