After four days loading in Cardiff the vessel was an inch deep in coal dust, and as the heavy-swearing hands in the forecastle began “cleaning up” we slowly glided out of the Bute Docks to the accompaniment of shouting, gesticulating, and strong language. At Seal’s suggestion I had provided myself with certain articles of food to my taste, but as the grit of coal and the taste of tar were inseparable from the cuisine, and the cook’s galley the most evil-smelling corner in the whole vessel, I enjoyed eating least of all. The weather was, however, perfect, even in the long roll of the Atlantic, and the greater part of each day I spent with the burly skipper on his bridge, lolling in an old deck-chair behind a screen of canvas lashed to the rail to keep off the wind. I had quite a cosy corner to myself, and there I smoked my pipe, breathed the salt ocean breezes, and yarned with my deep-chested friend.
“We don’t carry forty-quid salooners on this ’ere boat,” remarked Joe Thorpe, the first mate, when I mentioned casually that the rats gnawed my boots at night and scampered around my cabin and over my bunk. “When a passenger comes with us he has to rough it, but he sees a sight more than if he travelled by the P. and O. or the Orient. You’ll see a lot, doctor, before you’re back in London.”
His words were prophetic. I did see a lot, as you will gather later on.
Craft and crew were, as I have said, as forbidding as can be well imagined. The vessel was black, save for a dirty red band around her funnel, old, ricketty, and much patched. On the second day out from Cardiff Mike Flanagan, the first engineer, imparted to me the disconcerting fact that the boilers were in such a state that he feared to work them at any undue pressure lest we might all take an unwelcome flight into space. Hence at night, when I lay in my bunk sleepless owing to the dirty weather in the Bay of Biscay, the jarring of the propeller caused my medical mind to revert to the instability of those boilers and the probability of catastrophe. I am not a seafaring man, but I have often since wondered in what class the Thrush might have been entered at Lloyd’s.
Day followed day, and after we sighted Finisterre the weather became delightful again. Seal told me long yarns of his younger days in the Pacific trade, how he had been wrecked off the Tasmanian coast, and how on another occasion the steamer on which he sailed was burned at sea. The dreamy hours passed lazily. We ate together, laughed together, and at night drank big noggins of rum together. Cape St. Vincent loomed up in the haze one brilliant evening, and afterwards the great rock of Gibraltar; then, on entering the Mediterranean, we steered a straight course for that long, sun-blanched town with the high lighthouse lying at the foot of the blue Apennines, Leghorn, which port we at last entered with shrieking siren and flying our dirty red ensign.
But it is not with foreign towns that this narrative concerns. True, I went ashore with Seal and drank vermouth and seltzer at Nazi’s, but during the weeks I sailed in company with the big-handed, big-hearted skipper and his villainous-looking crew we visited many ports in search of a cargo for London. Naples, Palermo, Smyrna, and Tunis were to me, an untravelled man, all interesting, while Job Seal was, I discovered, a most popular man ashore. Shipping agents welcomed him, and he drank vermouth at their expense; Customs officers were civil, with an eye to the glass of grog that would follow their inspection; and even British consuls were agreeable, unbending and joking with him in their private sanctums.
Yes, Job Seal was a typical Mediterranean skipper, a hard drinker in port, a hard swearer at sea, and a hard task-master at any time. In bad weather he put on his pluck with his oilskins. From the bridge he addressed his men as though speaking to dogs, and woe betide the unfortunate hand who did not execute an order just to his liking. He would roar like a bull, and conclude with an interminable cascade of imprecations until he became red in the face and breathless.
“I’ve done this round trip these nineteen years, doctor,” he explained to me one night while we were having our grog together, “and I really believe I could take the old tub from the Gib. to Naples without a compass.” And then in his deep bass tones he began to yarn as sailors will yarn, telling tales mostly of adventures ashore in foreign towns, adventures wherein Mike Flanagan—to whom he always referred as his “chief”—and alcoholic liquors played leading parts.
After leaving Tunis for Valencia, homeward bound, we experienced bad weather. The wind howled in the rigging, and the sea ran mountains high, as it often does in those parts at certain seasons of the year. One afternoon, attired in the suit of yellow oilskins I had purchased in Cardiff, I was seated on the bridge, notwithstanding the stiff breeze and the heavy sea still running, for I preferred that to my stuffy, tarry cabin with its port-hole screwed down.
Seal, in ponderous sea-boots, black oilskins, and his sou-wester tied beneath his chin, had been chatting, laughing and pacing the deck, when of a sudden his quick eye observed something which to my unpractised vision was indistinguishable. He took his glass from its box, stood astride, and took steady sight of it.