I was now looking very close into the sea life, and was of opinion that it was a sickening, tedious calling. The atmosphere of romance which had coloured my early thoughts of it, got from my father’s and his friends’ merry or wild or exciting yarns, had perished out of my mind long before we were up with the Equator, as the term is. The captain was burdened with enormous responsibilities. The safety of a large, valuable ship freighted with human lives was dependent upon him, and his pay was perhaps less than the wages of a head-waiter of a City tavern. The mates were at the mercy of the captain, who could break them if he chose, send them forward to do common sailor’s work and ruin them. They lived without friendship. One was superior to the other. The captain addressed them only on matters of ship work, and talked familiarly with nobody but the doctor and military officers. There were three mates. Two of them led lives as lonely as the ship’s figure-head; the third, who was a person of no consequence, would carry his pipe into the boatswain’s or apprentices’ berth, and so kill time for himself.
I had not guessed that this was the life of the deep when I used to listen to the ocean talk of my father’s friends at Stepney or view the ships in the Thames, and create a fairy sea with rich skies and spicy breezes for them to sail over. It was my acquaintance, however, with the forecastle side of the life that completely ruined my idealism. I could not wonder that sailors should be the mutinous and growling dogs they are represented when I peeped into the forecastle and smelt the smells and blinked at the gloom and beheld the damp and the dirt, the half-clad figures of men who had shipped without a shift of clothes and whose wage would not bring them within hail of the slop-chest; when I saw the lumps of green pork or blue and iron beef carried from the galley into the forecastle along with the slush-thick peasoup or the dingy, bolster-hard duff at which any famished mongrel of the London streets might hiccough.
‘Is it the same everywhere at sea?’ I once asked Will.
‘No,’ he answered, ‘the crew are well fed and well treated aboard us—comparatively speaking,’ he added, with a grin.
‘And do you like the life?’ said I.
‘The country must have sailors, young woman?’
‘I would rather be a convict,’ said I.
‘Yet it was not always thus, you know, my pretty Mary Jane,’ he exclaimed, singing. ‘When Butler was a sailor you nailed your heart to the foremast; now he’s a convict you want to clank it through life, eh?’
‘It was not always thus, Mary Jane, because I had never been to sea. I read in books and listened to talk and painted on clouds. Now I am at sea. I have watched the life and swear that I would rather take a convict’s discipline along with a convict’s chances than be a foremast hand.’
My work was light, and this was a wonderful mercy, seeing that I had been made a cuddy-servant without anybody knowing I was a girl. I washed glasses, fetched and carried dishes, cleaned knives and plate and so on. This was no more than housemaid’s work, down even to the scrubbing of the deck, which was the same as washing the floor of a room. Added to this, I slept alone in a comfortable cabin and had all such conveniences as a young woman who masquerades as a boy could need.