"Old Croasan came out of the bunk when the trouble was over. I felt too proud of what I'd been through to be hard on the poor old chap, proud of being in the thick of it. I was seeing life at last. This was what I'd come for. 'Ah,' says the Chief, his glass eye fixing me over his whisky glass, 'you'll be marked if you stay on the Corydon.'
"I was. It took that old box of misfortune thirty-two days to make Port Duluth. Every day we had some breakdown or other. She was like a good many other ships that fly the Red Ensign, worn out. But did I grumble? Not a bit of it. I looked at it as any man will who's got sand in him. It was a fight. There was no fighting in Victoria Street; it was simply riding through life on rubber tyres. Books, art, comfort, philosophy, all these things are well enough; but the Corydon, the rusty, leaking, treacherous old Corydon, with her starting rivets and banging old engines, she was the real thing, the thing to mark a man and teach him what he's made of.
"I don't suppose any of you people have ever heard of Port Duluth. I certainly hadn't. When I asked where it was, the others told me it was 'up a creek.' In England this would have meant very little; but I had learned from my mother to call even the Thames a creek, and so I was able to swallow the apparent paradox of a seven-thousand-ton ship insinuating herself up to what was known locally as 'a railhead.' When I persisted and wanted to know the name of the creek, nobody knew, but they said it was one of the channels of the Niger River. Then, I argued in my bookish way, Port Duluth must be in Nigeria. But this wasn't so certain at all. I became acquainted with the ragged edge of the British Empire. I gathered that the boundaries were not entirely settled, but that when the railway was carried along some watershed into the interior, it would link up with another system and our sphere of influence would automatically extend to include Port Duluth. And when I kept on at my shipmates and wanted to know what made the sphere of influence so very precious I received the staggering answer that it was nuts. We were building battle-ships and recruiting armies and building railways and bridges and harbours, for nuts. To me, walking to and fro on the after-deck in the glow of a tropical sunset, it seemed absurd. You see, I knew nothing of raw products. Until I went to sea I didn't know how far the common things come. I didn't know that Yorkshire pig-iron was smelted from Tunisian and Ionian ore, or that the sugar in my tea had gone from Java to New York and from there to Liverpool. I didn't know where things came from nor where they went. The geography at school had some of it no doubt. I can recall some few vague facts about flax at Belfast and jute at Dundee. Humph! That trip to Port Duluth was worth a million geography lessons.
"To begin with, I learned much about rivers. In England a river is something easily comprehended. You can see along it, and across it, and it is locked, bolted and barred with towns and bridges and weirs and tow-paths. It is no more like an African river than a tame cat is like a leopard. Yet on the map the only difference is that perhaps the large river will have two mouths, and several tributaries running into it, exactly like a branch running into a tree. It wasn't like that at all. I had an atlas with me and when we reached the mouths of the great river I tried to find out where we were on the map. But it was hopeless. Where the map showed one channel there were hundreds on the chart. And the chart was out-of-date. It seemed a dream to me. I was under the impression that navigation nowadays was a humdrum affair of making points, steering on a ruled pencil line on the chart, so much for currents, so much for tides and so on. So it is, no doubt, in a great measure; but we can hardly realize how much of it is sheer skill and gallant daring. Even the men who do it don't realize it because they are always doing it. That first voyage to Port Duluth was a revelation to me in several ways. I had my own private troubles you may be sure. I was as green as grass. My hands blistered and my heart sickened many a time. But I am glad to think I could see other things as well. To me it was thrilling to look out across the oily blue glitter and see a hazy line which was the Ivory Coast. There was the Slave Coast and the Gold Coast—the words had a new significance now! And when I came up out of that awful engine-room and saw the land close in, the eternal grey-green line of mangrove swamp holding up the blazing vault of the sky, I forgot my troubles. I said to myself in a whisper, 'This is what I came for. This is the world!'
"I asked where we had anchored, seeing no sign of life ashore, and they told me it was the Bar. We must wait for high water. Away ahead was the bar buoy, a white blob on the water. I stood leaning against a stanchion trying to sense the atmosphere of the place until the Second called me, for there was something to do. There was always something to do in that terrible old ship. I went down, and together we wrestled with the dynamo-engine, a cheap contraption with a closed crank chamber full of muddy oil which was supposed to splash into all the bearings, and didn't. We needed a washer, a special sort of thing. The old one was worn out. We needed screws, too, to fasten it with, small brass screws with flat heads that sank in out of sight. When I asked where these were coming from if we hadn't got them on the ship, the Second said with some asperity, that it would be my job to make them on my anchor watch that night. I was surprised at this and made some remark about getting them from ashore, and it so tickled the poor over-worked Second that he stood up suddenly, spun round towards the reversing engine and broke into peals of hysterical laughter. I shall never forget the sight of him as he stood there in his sodden, filthy singlet and dungarees, his arms knotted and burned and bruised, his common little face twisted into an expression of super-human scorn. For a single moment he was sublime, lifted out of himself, with the mere effort of pouring contempt upon my ignorance. He tried to put it into words, and sputtered. He looked as though in a trance and some stormy spirit was struggling within him. The sweat ran off us in streams as we stood there in the light of a couple of slush-lamps flaring in the draught from the stokehold door. Then he abruptly abandoned his search for vitriolic language and rushed into the store for a piece of brass rod. It was a curious performance. I was impressed. I realized in a dim way that there was no longer a hardware shop round the corner. The making of those screws was nothing in itself, but it was the principle behind it, the principle of never being stumped. And these rough, uncultured, north-countrymen were my teachers. The Chief fixed me with his one good eye at lunch. 'We don't get things from ashore in this employ,' he observed, and left me to soak it in.
"I suppose I ought to have been downhearted at being so ignorant and dirty and tired, but I wasn't in the least. It was too interesting. There was a grim irony, to me, in the appalling contrast between the behaviour of that worn-out dynamo and the smug theory in the text-books and trade catalogues I had been used to so long. I had read of the way to detect faults in a circuit, but it seemed to me there was no need to look for faults on the Corydon; it was the virtues, the sound places, that needed looking for. And yet, strange to say, out of her decrepitude loyalty was born. I found it growing on me day by day, a jealous regard for her, the pity that becomes a sort of cantankerous affection.
"But to go on with that day, we crossed the bar. It was high water at four in the afternoon and I had to go down again to stand by the telegraph. With my head against the reversing engine wheel I could feel the slow vibration of the anchor coming up, and hear the sough of the exhaust coming back from the windlass. The Second and old Croasan stood near by, their faces blank with waiting and fatigue, like the faces of dead men. Old Croasan's eyelid would flicker now and then and the tip of his tongue would move stealthily round the inside of his lips. He hadn't shaved for several days and his face was vague and venerable, glistening grey bristles. When he leaned gently against the vice-bench and folding his arms, closed his eyes, he looked like a hundred-years'-old corpse. He closed his eyes. It was not interesting to him, this crossing of the bar.
"Suddenly we got an order, and we started. I went along the tunnel to see the bearings were all oiled, and while I stood in the dark gloom at the far end, with my hand on the dribbling stern-gland, there came a sudden thump and a grinding shock. The turning shaft shook and chattered before my eyes, the propeller outside caught in something, shuddered, broke clear and beat like a flail. Then the ship lifted bodily and fell, bump, bump, bump. I stood there transfixed. What could it be? I looked along the dark tunnel to where the lights of the engine-room showed in a pale glint and I could have sworn I saw the whole bag of tricks move slowly up and subside as the keel floundered across that ridge of mud and soft rock. She must be breaking in half, I thought. I had heard of such things. I gathered myself up and hurried back to the engine-room, where I found everybody perfectly calm. The ship, it appeared, was now on the bar and it was our business to keep the engines going at full speed until she was gradually urged over. At intervals she bumped. Some mass of rock or clay on which she rested would collapse and immediately the propeller would shove her a little further over. Our vacuum almost disappeared, for the injection pipe got blocked with mud. This meant more work for me in starting the ballast pump, and when that got choked too, I had to open it up and clean the valve-boxes. It didn't seem to matter what happened, there was a new job for me. I wondered with a sort of temporary bitterness whether they would miss me if I dropped suddenly dead. And I was obliged to admit to myself that in all probability they wouldn't. They would just go ahead and do the job themselves and bury me when they got through.
"And this, mind you, was no breakdown, no emergency, but just the ordinary day's work. If the owners didn't want to risk breaking the ship's back on the bar there were plenty of others who would. It was like putting a horse at a dyke, getting his fore-feet across, and then lashing him furiously until he had kicked a lot of earth away and finally got himself over. When I had put the doors on the ballast pump again I noticed the main engines were running normal once more. We were over. We had crossed the bar. My mind was running on the romantic nature of this performance when I went up to get my tea. I recalled Tennyson's poem and wondered what he would have thought of the old Corydon and her undignified scramble across the bar. The others caught something of this in my face, I suppose, for the Second said to the Chief, 'I suppose the Fourth'll be for the beach to-night, eh?' and they laughed. 'Don't you go ashore here then?' I asked, and they laughed again. 'No, there's nothing to go ashore for,' said the Chief, and he fixed me with his eye. 'Why,' he added, 'don't you know where you are? You're in the middle of all the atrocities here.' The others nodded 'That's right. Any amount of atrocities—round here.' It seemed a silly way of putting it. Here we'd come thousands of miles just to get into the middle of atrocities! For a moment the word conveyed nothing to me. I had been getting into the way of thinking the Corydon was by way of being something of an atrocity, but I knew that was not what my shipmates meant. I'm not sure even now that there ever had been any atrocities in that part of the world. I read about them in a book once; but the things that get into books have always eluded me. Already I had laid hold of that cardinal fact in my new life. The old ideas, the old conventional phrases and assumptions, were cumbersome, inadequate or untrue. Take that word 'atrocity.' Well enough in a radical leading article; but what core of real truth was there in it when it was used by a living man at a railhead up the Niger River? To anyone with imagination it was comic. But my shipmates were not given to much imagination. In the business of their lives they were alive and original and racy. They used phrases and turns of thought that sometimes thrilled me with their vivid power. But outside of that narrow channel they had nothing but newspaper phrases, like 'atrocities,' mere catchwords that chill one's soul with their bald, withered and bloodless pretensions. The Chief gave me an example of this after tea that night. For a brief spell, by some unforeseen miracle of good fortune, there was nothing to do for the moment, and the four of us, in clean singlets and dungarees, were leaning on the off rail of the after well-deck smoking. Port Duluth was behind us. In front lay a broad, placid sheet of copper-tinted, forest-rimmed water, the confluence of a number of stagnant creeks and back-streams, a sort of knot in the interminable loops and windings of the delta. Here and there in the line of tree-tops was a gap showing where some waterway came through. Here and there, too, I could descry a tiny beach of mud a yard or two wide, with a hut and a canoe tied to the mangrove roots, and black, naked people crouched on their hams in the shadows cast by the forest, engaged in their—to me—mysterious business of living. They were far-away and more or less picturesque. So, too, were the fishermen a mile away on the shining water silhouetted in solid black against the western glow. At the time I was so full of new impressions that I regarded the scene very much as one turns over the pages of a 'book of views' in a friend's drawing room. I couldn't take it in. That needs time, and also one must have the Key. I was musing upon the apparent meaninglessness of a life that had thrown me up for a moment at a place I'd never heard of before, thrown me up there to assist in the astonishing job of transporting nuts, when the Chief remarked, pointing with the stem of his pipe, 'Here's a chief coming.' I looked round, expecting to see another stout, middle-aged man in singlet and dungarees, with perhaps an old uniform patrol jacket whose brass buttons were green with verdigris. But it was not so. He was indicating a large canoe emerging rapidly from the waterway astern of us. As it came more into our angle of vision I watched with extraordinary expectancy. I was dazed, not only by the spectacle, but by the aplomb with which my shipmates took these things. Here was a savage chief sitting under an immense parasol in the stern of his state canoe, propelled by a score of naked, black paddlers in white loin-cloths and scarlet cricket-caps, coming to call on us. This was evidently his intention, for the accommodation ladder went down with a rattle, and the canoe with her twenty spear-shaped paddles swung alongside like a naval pinnace, and a fat old chap, dressed in a vast white flannel nightgown with a sort of dress-shirt front pleated on it in blue thread, came slowly up the ladder. Came up and walked past with a heavy, flat-footed tread, and disappeared into the saloon with the Old Man. I was too astonished to speak for some time. That old fellow's face behind its broad benevolence and its confusing tattooings and mutilations, had an expression of power. It was an expression you do not find in London suburbs. You do not find it in the faces of men who sit at a desk and hire you and fire you. The momentary glimpse I had of that chief's face made clear to me many passages in history, many things in literature, many dark and tortuous riddles in the adventures of my own little tinpot soul. And in the light of this discovery I heard the Chief, our chief, saying, 'Yes, these chaps have power of life and death over their people, power of life and death.'
"And for once the hackneyed, battered, old conventional newspaper gibberish had in it the breath of life. I believed it. At that moment, on the threshold of new experiences, I took the words on trust. Perhaps, for once, the things I had read in books had not eluded me! Perhaps the old gentleman in the flannel nightgown really was a potential African despot. In the midst of my reflections I heard another newspaper phrase, 'Not long ago the rivers ran blood.' This was the Second, who was fond of stories inside comic supplements, and who was recalling a bygone 'atrocity,' I suppose. But it was curious to me, to notice how abruptly they all dropped the journalist jargon the moment they spoke of something they really understood. They regaled me with 'atrocities,' with 'rivers running blood' and 'gold in the forests that no white man had ever penetrated,' with 'power of life and death' and so on, but when I inquired anxiously what this omnipotent monarch had come aboard of us for, they replied without any hesitation,