A Life on the Ocean Wave—Where They kept the Dynamite—How far from an Iced Drink?—The Peacefulness of a Pacific Calm—A Golden Dust Heap—Among the Rookeries—Sailing on the Land—All about Guano.
THE pirate captain was gone when the schooner reappeared off Niué, and a certain ancient mariner had taken his place. Things were not quite so exciting on the Duchess under the new régime, but the order which reigned on board was something awful; for the ancient mariner had been a whaling captain in his day, and on whaling ships it is more than on any others a case of “Growl you may, but go you must,” for all the crew. The ancient mariner was as salty a salt as ever sailed the ocean. He had never been on anything with steam in it, he was as tough as ship-yard teak, and as strong as a bear, though he was a grandfather of some years’ standing, and he was full of strange wild stories about the whaling grounds, and odd happenings in out-of-the-way comers of the Pacific—most of which he seemed to consider the merest commonplaces of a prosaic existence.
We suffered many things from the cook, in the course of that long burning voyage towards the Line. The Duchess’s stores were none of the best, and the cook dealt with them after a fashion that made me understand once for all the sailor saying: “God sends meat, and the devil sends cooks.” Pea-soup, salt pork and beef, plum duff, ship’s biscuit, sea-pie—this was the sort of food that, in the days before I set foot on the Duchess, I had supposed to form the usual table of sailing vessels. I fear it was a case of sea-story-books, over again. What we did get was “tinned rag” of a peculiarly damp and viscous quality, tea that usually tasted of cockroaches, biscuit that was so full of copra bugs we had to hammer it on the table before eating it, an occasional tin of tasteless fruit (it ran out very soon), and bread that was a nightmare, for the flour went musty before we were out a week, and the unspeakable cook tried to disguise its taste with sugar. Board-of-trade limejuice, which is a nauseous dose at best, we were obliged, by law to carry, and I think we must have run rather near scurvy in the course of that long trip, for the amount of the oily, drug-flavoured liquid that the mates and myself used to drink at times, seemed to argue a special craving of nature. But à la guerre comme à la guerre—and one does not take ship on a Pacific windjammer expecting the luxuries of a P. and O.
We were not going direct to Malden, having to call first at Samoa and Mangaia. Three days of rough rolling weather saw us in Apia, about which I have nothing to say at present, since I paid a longer visit to Stevenson’s country later on. We had about forty native passengers to take on here for the Cook Islands and Malden. There was nowhere to put them, but in the South Seas such small inconveniences trouble nobody.
I am very strongly tempted here to tell about the big-gale that caught us the first night out, carried away our lifeboat, topsail, topgallant, and main gaff, swamped the unlucky passengers’ cabin, and caused the Cingalese steward to compose and chant all night long a litany containing three mournful versicles: “O my God, this is too much terrible! O my#God, why I ever go to sea! O my God, I never go to sea again!” But in the Pacific one soon learns that sea etiquette makes light of such matters. So the wonderful and terrible sights which I saw once or twice that night, clinging precariously to anything solid near the door of my cabin, and hoping that the captain would not catch me out on deck, must remain undescribed.
Nearly seven weeks were occupied by this northern trip—time for a mail steamer to go out from London to New Zealand, and get well started on the way home again. We were, of course, entirely isolated from news and letters; indeed, the mails and papers that we carried conveyed the very latest intelligence to islands that had not had a word from the outer world for many months. Our native passengers, who were mostly going up to Malden Island guano works as paid labourers, evidently considered the trip one wild scene of excitement and luxury. The South Sea Islander loves nothing more than change, and every new island we touched at was a Paris or an Ostend to these (mostly) untravelled natives. Their accommodation on the ship was not unlike that complained of by the waiter in “David Copperfield.” They “lived on broken wittles and they slept on the coals.” The Duchess carried benzoline tins for the feeding of the futile little motor that worked her in and out of port, and the native sleeping place was merely the hold, on top of the tins.
“Do you mind the dynamite remaining under your bunk?” asked the ancient mariner, shortly after we left Samoa.
“Under my bunk?”
“Yes—didn’t you know it was there? The explosives safe is let into the deck just beneath the deck cabin. I’ll move it if you’re nervous about it—I thought I’d tell you, anyways. But it’s the best place for it to be, you see, right amidships.” And the ancient mariner, leaning his six foot two across the rail, turned his quid, and spat into the deep.
“What do we want with dynamite, anyhow?” asked the bewildered passenger, confronted with this new and startling streak of local colour.
“We don’t want none. The Cook Islands wants it for reefs.”
“Oh, leave it where it is—I suppose it’s all the same in the end where it starts from, if it did blow up,” says the passenger resignedly. “What about the benzoline in the hold, though?”
“Every one’s got to take chances at sea,” says the captain, easily. “The mates have orders to keep the natives from smokin’ in the hold at night.”
And at midnight, when I slip out of my bunk to look on and see what the weather is like (it has been threatening all day), a faint but unmistakable odour of island tobacco greets my nose, from the opening of the main hatch! Benzoline, dynamite, natives smoking in the hold, one big boat smashed, one small one left, forty native passengers, five whites, and three hundred miles to the nearest land!
Well, à la guerre comme à la guerre, and one must not tell tales at sea. So I don’t tell any, though tempted. But I am very glad, a week later, to see the Cook Islands rising up out of the empty blue again. We have had head winds, we have been allowanced as to water, we are all pleased to have a chance of taking in some fruit before we start on the thousand miles’ run to Malden—and above all, we leave that dynamite here, which is a good thing; for really we have been putting rather too much strain on the good nature of the “Sweet little cherub that sits up aloft, to keep guard o’er the life of poor Jack,” this last week or two.
If proof were wanted that the cherub’s patience is about at an end, our arrival at Mangaia furnishes it—for we do take fire after all, just a couple of hundred yards from shore!
It does not matter now, since half the natives of the island are about the ship, and the case of explosives has just been rowed off in our only boat, and the blaze is put out without much trouble. But, two days ago!
Well, the sweet little cherub certainly deserved a rest.
Now the Duchess’s bowsprit was pointed northwards, and we set out on a thousand miles’ unbroken run up to Malden Island, only four degrees south of the Line. For nine days we ploughed across the same monotonous plain of lonely sea, growing a little duller every day, as our stores of reading matter dwindled away, and our fruit and vegetables ran out, and the memory of our last fresh mess became only a haunting, far-off regret. Squatting or lying about the white-hot poop in the merciless sun—which burnt through our duck and cotton clothing, and scorched the skin underneath, but was at least a degree better than the choking Hades of a cabin below—we used to torture each other with reminiscences and speculations, such as “They have real salt beef and sea-pie and lobscouse and pea-soup, and things like that, every day on Robinson’s schooner; no tinned rag and musty flour”; or “How many thousand miles are we now from an iced drink?” This last problem occupied the mates and myself for half a morning, and made us all a great deal hotter than we were before. Auckland was about 2,300 miles away, San Francisco about 3,000 as far as we could guess. We decided for Auckland, and discussed the best place to buy the drink, being somewhat limited in choice by the passenger’s selfish insistence on a place where she could get really good iced coffee. By the time this was settled, the captain joined in, and informed us that we could get all we wanted, and fresh limes into the bargain, only a thousand miles away, at Tahiti, which every one had somehow overlooked. Only a thousand! It seemed nothing, and we all felt (illogically) cheered up at the thought.
Late in the afternoon we came near attaining our wish for a temperature of thirty-two degrees in rather an unexpected way. The bottom of the Pacific generally hovers about this figure, some miles below the burning surface, which often reaches the temperature of an ordinary warm bath; and the Duchess had a fairly narrow escape of going down to look for a cool spot without a return ticket. A giant waterspout suddenly formed out of the low-hanging, angry sky that had replaced the clear heat of the morning. First of all, a black trunk like an elephant’s began to feel blindly about in mid-air, hanging from a cloud. It came nearer and nearer with uncanny speed, drawing up to itself as it came a colossal cone of turbulent sea, until the two joined together in one enormous black pillar, some quarter of a mile broad at the base, and probably a good thousand feet high, uniting as it did the clouds and the sea below. Across the darkening sea, against the threatening, copper-crimson sunset, came this gigantic horror, waltzing over leagues of torn-up water in a veritable dance of death, like something blind, but mad and cruel, trying to find and shatter our fragile little ship. Happily, the dark was only coming, not yet come; happily, too, the wind favoured us, and we were able to tack about and keep out of the way, dodging the strangely human rushes and advances of the water-giant with smartness and skill. At one time it came so close that the elephant trunk—now separately visible again—seemed feeling about over our heads, although the captain afterwards said it had been more than three hundred yards away—and the immense maelstrom underneath showed us the great wall of whirling spindrift that edged its deadly circle, as plain as the foam about our own bows. Every one was quiet, cool, and ready; but no one was sorry when the threatening monster finally spun, away to leeward and melted into air once more. A waterspout of this enormous size, striking a small vessel, would snap off her masts like sticks of candy, kill any one who happened to be on deck, and most probably sink the ship with the very impact of the terrible shock.
“One doesn’t hear much about ships being sunk by waterspouts,” objected the sceptical passenger to this last statement.
“Ships that’s sunk by waterspouts doesn’t come back to tell the newspapers about it,” said the captain darkly.
Life on a South Sea schooner is not all romance. For the officers of the ship it is a very hard life indeed. Native crews are the rule in the South Seas, and native crews make work for every one, including themselves. Absolutely fearless is the Kanaka, active as a monkey aloft, good-natured and jolly to the last degree, but perfectly unreliable in any matter requiring an ounce of thought or a pennyworth of discretion, and, moreover, given to shirk work in a variety of ingenious ways that pass the wit of the white man to circumvent. Constant and keen supervision while at sea, unremitting hurry and drive in port, are the duties of a South Sea mate, coupled with plenty of actual hard work on his own account. I have known a case where a small schooner was leaking badly, many days from port, and almost constant pumping was required. The pump broke while in use; and the watch, delighted to be released, turned in at eight bells without having done their spell, and without reporting the accident. The water gained steadily, but that did not trouble them; and when the mate discovered the accident, and set them to mend the pump at once, they were both surprised and grieved!
“Watch and watch” is the rule on small sailing-vessels: four hours on and four hours off, day and night, except for the “dog watches,” four to six and six to eight in the evening, which create a daily shift in order that each man may be on watch at a different time on successive days. Always provided, of course, that the ship has any watches at all! I have sailed in a Pacific schooner where the crew spent most of their time playing the accordion and the Jew’s harp, and slept peacefully all night. In the daytime there was generally some one at the wheel; but at night it was usually lashed, and the ship was let run, with all sails set, taking her chances of what might come, every soul on board being asleep. One night the cook came out of his bunk to get a drink from the tank, and found the vessel taken aback. The whole spirit of South Sea life breathes from the sequel. He told nobody! The galley was his department, not the sails; so he simply went back to his bunk. In the morning we fetched up off the northern side of an island we had intended to ?approach from the south; having, strange to say, somehow escaped piling our bones on the encircling reef, and also avoided the misfortune of losing our masts and getting sunk.
If there is a good deal of hard work on most schooners, and something of risk on all, there is also plenty of adventure and romance, for those who care about it. One seldom meets an island skipper whose life would not furnish materials for a dozen exciting books. Being cut off and attacked by cannibals down in the dangerous western groups; swimming for dear life away from a boat just bitten in two by an infuriated whale; driving one native king off his throne, putting another on, and acting as prime minister to the nation; hunting up a rumour of a splendid pearl among the pearling islands, and tracking down the gem, until found and coaxed away from its careless owner at one-tenth Sydney market prices—these are incidents that the typical schooner captain regards as merely the ordinary kind of break to be expected in his rather monotonous life. He does not think them very interesting as a rule, and dismisses them somewhat briefly, in a yarn. What does excite him, cause him to raise his voice and gesticulate freely, and induce him to “yarn” relentlessly for half a watch, is the recital of some thrilling incident connected with the price of cargo or the claims made for damaged stuff by some abandoned villain of a trader. There is something worth relating in a tale like that, to his mind!
The passenger on an island schooner learns very early to cultivate a humble frame of mind. On a great steam liner he is all in all. It is for him almost entirely that the ships are built and run; his favour is life or death to the company. He is handled like eggs, and petted like a canary bird. Every one runs to do his bidding; he is one of a small but precious aristocracy waited on hand and foot by the humblest of serfs. On a schooner, however, he is ousted from his pride of place most completely by the cargo, which takes precedence of him at every point; so that he rapidly learns he is not of nearly so much value as a fat sack of copra, and he becomes lowlier in mind than he ever was before. There is no special accommodation for him, as a rule; he must go where he can, and take what he gets. If he can make himself useful about the ship, so much the better; every one will think more of him, and he will get some useful exercise by working his passage in addition to paying for it.
Here is a typical day on the Duchess.
At eight bells (8 a.m.) breakfast is served in the cabin. The passenger’s own cabin is a small deck-house placed amidships on the main deck. The deck is filled up with masses of cargo, interposing a perfect Himalayan chain of mountains between the main deck and the poop. It is pouring with tropical rain, but the big main hatch yawns half open on one side, because of the native passengers in the hold. On the other side foams a squally sea, unguarded by either rail or bulwark, since the cargo is almost overflowing out of the ship. The Duchess is rolling like a porpoise, and the passenger’s hands are full of mackintosh and hat-brim. It seems impossible to reach the poop alive; but the verb “have to” is in constant use on a sailing-ship, and it does not fail of its magical effect on this occasion. Clawing like a parrot, the passenger reaches the cabin, and finds the bare-armed, barefooted mates and the captain engaged on the inevitable “tin” and biscuits. There is no tea this morning, because the cockroaches have managed to get into and flavour the brew; and the cabin will none of it. The captain has sent word by the native steward that he will “learn” the cook—a strange threat that usually brings about at least a temporary reform—and is now engaged in knocking the copra-bugs out of a piece of biscuit and brushing a colony of ants off his plate. Our cargo is copra, and in consequence the ship resembles an entomological museum more than anything else. No centipedes have been found this trip so far; but the mate-stabbed a big scorpion with a sail-needle yesterday, as it was walking across the deck; and the cockroaches—as large as mice, and much bolder—have fairly “taken charge.” The captain says he does not know whether he is sleeping in the cockroaches’ bunk, or they in his, but he rather thinks the former, since the brutes made a determined effort to throw him out on the deck last night, and nearly succeeded!
It grows very warm after breakfast, for we are far within the tropics, and the Duchess has no awnings to protect her deck. The rail is almost hot enough to blister an unwary hand, and the great sails cast little shade, as the sun climbs higher to the zenith. The pitch does not, however, bubble in the seams of the deck, after the well-known fashion of stories, because the Duchess, like most other tropical ships, has her decks caulked with putty. A calm has fallen—a Pacific calm, which is not as highly distinguished for calmness as the stay-at-home reader might suppose. There is no wind, and the island we are trying to reach remains tantalisingly perched on the extreme edge of the horizon, like a little blue flower on the rim of a crystal dish. But there is plenty of sea—long glittering hills of water, rising and falling, smooth and foamless, under the ship, which they fling from side to side with cruel violence. The great booms swing and slam, the blocks clatter, the masts creak. Everything loose in the cabins toboggans wildly up and down the floor. At dinner, the soup which the cook has struggled to produce, lest he should be “learned,” has to be drunk out of tin mugs for safety. Every one is sad and silent, for the sailor hates a c............