The Honour of the Flag

by William Clark Russell

We carried four forecastle hands and three apprentices. There was Charles Petersen, a Swede, who had once been "fancy man" in a toy shop; there was David Burton, who had been a hairdresser and proved unfortunate as a gold-digger in Australia; there was James Lussoni, an Italian, who claimed to be a descendant of the old Genoese merchants; and there was John Jones, a runaway man-of-warsman, pretty nearly worn out, and subject to apoplexy.

Four sailors and three apprentices make seven men, a cook and a boy are nine, and a mate and a captain make eleven; and eleven of a crew were we, all told, men and boy, aboard the three-masted schooner Lightning when we sailed away one April morning out of the river Mersey, bound to Boston, North America.

My name was then as it still is—for during the many years I have used the sea, never had I occasion to ship with a "purser's name"—my name, I say, is David Kerry, and in that year of God 1855 I was a strapping young fellow, seventeen years old, making a second voyage with Captain Funnel, having been bound apprentice to that most excellent but long-departed mariner by my parents, who, finding me resolved to go to sea had determined that my probation should be thorough: no half-laughs and pursers' grins would satisfy them; my arm was to plunge deep into the tar bucket straight away; and certainly there was no man then hailing from the port of Liverpool better able to qualify a young chap for the profession of the sea—but a young chap, mind you, who liked his calling, who meant to be a man and not a "sojer" in it—than Captain Funnel of the schooner Lightning.

The four sailors slept in a bit of a forecastle forward; we three apprentices slung our hammocks in a bulkheaded part of the run or steerage, a gloomy hole, the obscurity of which was defined rather than illuminated by the dim twilight sifting down aslant from the hatch. Here we stowed our chests, and here we took our meals, and here we slept and smoked and yarned in our watch below. I very well remember my two fellow apprentices. One was named Corbin, and the other Halsted. They were both of them smart, honest, bright lads, coming well equipped and well educated from respectable homes, in love with the calling of the sea, and resolved in time not only to command ships, but to own them.

Well, nothing in any way noteworthy happened for many days. Though the schooner was called the Lightning, she was by no means a clipper. She was built on lines which were fashionable forty years before, when the shipwright held that a ship's stability must be risked if she was one inch longer than five times her beam. She was an old vessel, but dry as a stale cheese; wallowed rather than rolled, yet was stiff; would sit upright with erect spars, like the cocked ears of a horse, in breezes which bowed passing vessels down to their wash-streaks. Her round bows bruised the sea, and when it entered her head to take to her heels, she would wash through it like a "gallied whale," all smothered to the hawse-pipes, and a big round polished hump of brine on either quarter.

We ambled, and wallowed, and blew, and in divers fashions drove along till we were deep in the heart of the North Atlantic. It was then a morning that brought the first of May within a biscuit-toss of our reckoning of time: a very cold morning, the sea flat, green, and greasy, with a streaking of white about it, as though it were a flooring of marble; there was wind but no lift in the water; and Salamon Sweers, in whose watch I was, said to me, when the day broke and showed us the look of the ocean:

"Blowed," said he, "if a man mightn't swear that we were under the lee of a range of high land."

It was very cold, the wind about north-west, the sky a pale grey, with patches of weak hazy blue in it here and there; and here and there again lay some darker shadow of cloud curled clean as though painted. There was nothing in sight saving the topmost cloths of a little barque heading eastwards away down to leeward. Quiet as the morning was, not once during the passage had I found the temperature so cold. I was glad when the job of washing down was over, and not a little grateful for the hook-pot of steam tea which I took from the galley to my quarters in the steerage.

I breakfasted in true ocean fashion, off ship's biscuit, a piece of pork, the remains of yesterday's dinner, and a potful of black liquor called tea, sweetened by molasses and thickened with sodden leaves and fragments of twigs; and then, cutting a pipeful of tobacco from a stick of cavendish, I climbed into my hammock, and lay there smoking and trying to read in Norie's Epitome until my pipe went out, on which I fell asleep.

I was awakened by young Halsted, whose hand was upon the edge of my hammock.