“TRY FOR HER IN FIFTY.”
The following extraordinary story was told to me some years ago by the commander of a steamship in which I was making a voyage for my health. The captain, who, as we shall see, had himself shared in the experience he related, began his tale thus:—
“A good many years ago I was in Capetown, having been forced by illness to quit my post as second mate of a large ship bound to Bombay. A fortnight after the ship sailed, I recovered my health and was fit for work.
“In those days Capetown was without docks; nor does this carry the memory very far back, either. Colonial progress is the foremost of the miracles of our century. You visit some Antipodean shore after a few years and note a growth of docks, piers, warehouses, an expansion of suburbs, a magical embracing of the hillsides by roof upon roof of charming villas, as at Natal, for example; and whilst you look, you shall think it rational to hold that more than a century has gone to the creation of this noble scene of civilization, and that the little struggling village you remember arriving at a few years before, with its dockless bay and its three or four small ships blistering under the eye of a roasting sun at their poor moorings alongside a rustic wooden wharf, was an imagination of your slumber.
“I was entirely dependent upon my profession. Sickness had heavily taxed my slender purse, and I was exceedingly anxious, when I was well enough for work, to obtain a situation. Ships brought up in the bay in those days, and discharged for the most part in lighters. The spacious breast of waters would offer again and again a grander show than is ever likely to be seen there in these or succeeding times. There was no Suez Canal; steam was by no means plentiful. All the trading to the East was by way of the Cape, and nearly everything bound round Agulhas looked into Table Bay for refreshment.
“I remember one of those mornings whilst I was hunting for a berth, that I counted a hundred and ten vessels at anchor in Table Bay. To be sure, I have witnessed as much as five hundred ships straining at their ground tackle at one time in the Downs. But that forest of spars had a wide area to distribute itself over in the waters streaming from the South Foreland down to the stretch that lies abreast of Sandwich. The hundred odd craft in Table Bay made a more imposing sight than the Downs picture, thanks, perhaps, to the solemn and magnificent scenery of mountain, whose lofty, silent terraces seemed, in the colossal sweep of them, to swell and thicken the ships into a stately, rocking crowd, and they lay in a tall mass of symmetric spires, the rigging of one knitting that of another past her, and the bright wind was painted with the colours of a dozen nations.
“I stood at the head of a little jetty or pier. Was there nothing to find me a berth worth six pounds a month in all that gallant huddle of gleaming sides and coppered flanks? The water trembled like molten brass under the sun to the coral-white line of the opposite shore, where the land went away in strange hues of rusty red and sickly green, carrying the eye into the liquid blue distance in which hung a hundred miles off a range of magnificent mountains like pale gold in the far light, their sky-lines as clean cut in the full and even splendour of that magical climate as the top of Table Mountain, close at hand.
“I was watching a Malay fishing-boat sliding through the water with an occasional burst of spray off her weather bow, which arched a little rainbow for her to rush through, when I was accosted. I turned. It was the port-captain or harbour-master. I cannot remember the term by which his office was distinguished. He had sailed with my father some years earlier, and I had met him on two occasions in England. He had done me some kindness whilst I lay ill in lodgings in Capetown, and had assured me of his willingness to help me to find a ship when I should be well enough to go to sea. He was a Scotchman, with a hard, weather-coloured face, and a dry, arch expression of eye.