Kenneth McAlpine: A Tale of Mountain, Moorland and Sea

Chapter Fourteen

Friday Night at Sea

Scene: A ship at sea, south of the Cape of Good Hope. A steamer evidently from her build, though the funnel has been lowered, and a gale of wind is roaring through her rigging, bellying out the few sails she is able to carry till it looks as though the cloth would bust. She is making heavy weather, dipping the ends of her long yards right into the water, and plunging so much, that at times neither her jib-boom nor bows are visible in the foam and spray. She must be shipping tons of water. Looking at her as we are now doing with the eye of imagination, it would seem there could be little else save discomfort on board of her. And the night, too, is closing around her dark and thick. The sea is very troubled, the waves are racing, brawling, foam-crested billows, lightning plays around the ship every now and then, and thunders hurtle in the air, the awful noise appearing to run along over the sea. But let us go on board of her.

Here are Kenneth and Archie. Neither is on duty. Kenneth’s watch will come on deck at midnight. Archie, who is engineer of this craft, may be called upon at any moment to stir up the banked fires and get up steam.

This is the ship in which Kenneth has been second mate for eighteen months, including the time he lay sick or roamed convalescent on the South American shore, where Archie found him. They have bidden farewell to that beautiful coast, which in some parts is so enchanting, with its wealth of vegetation, its grand old woods, its fruit trees, its flower-trees, its flowers themselves, the life and loveliness that teems everywhere on the earth, in the air, in the sea, on the little islands, green and feathery, that peep up here and there out of the blue, on mountain top, and even in its caves, that I feel sad as well as sorrowful. I cannot pause to describe it all.

But why should I? My descriptions, after all, would fall flat on the senses of the reader, even with the aid of the best of illustrations, for no artist can give colour and movement combined. Go, reader, and see the world for yourself if you feel so inclined, and if ever you have the chance, I can tell you from long experience it is a very beautiful one.

“Well,” said Kenneth, “we came up here, Archie, lad, to have a walk, but I don’t see much chance. What a night it is going to be! How black the sky! How vivid the lightning! How close the horizon is – ”

The last part of Kenneth’s sentence was lost in a peal of thunder.

“Stand by! Jump, Archie. There is a comber.”

They both leapt on the top of the capstan as an immense green sea swept over the bows and came tearing aft, carrying everything movable before it.

When it passed away, and the water found partial exit by the scuppers, —

“I don’t think there will be much pleasure in a walk to-night, Kennie,” said Archie. “Wouldn’t I like to be back again on that flower mountain of yours!”

“Poor dear old Gasco!” said Kennie with a sigh. “You find good among people of all nations.”

“He was very sad when you bade him good-bye.”

“Yes, and I won’t forget his last words. They are so true ‘Farewell,’ he sighed rather than said, ‘farewell, if farewell it must be. This meeting to part, and meeting but to part with those one gets to love, is one of the most soul-sobering feelings attached to our lot here below. Ah!’ he continued, lifting up a finger – you know his style, Archie – ‘Ah! my young friend, what a joyful place heaven must be, if only for this one reason, we shall meet all our dear, dear friends again, and parting will be unknown! Farewell; we’ll meet Yonder, if not on earth again.’”

There was a pause in the conversation, filled in by the whistling wind and the ceaseless rush of the dashing waves.

“Well,” said Archie at last, “I cannot say that a night like this, Kennie, makes one feel enamoured of a sailor’s life.”

“You must take the shadow as well as the sunshine, though,” returned Kenneth. “You would rather be back at my boathouse cave, I daresay, at Cotago, launching the tub for a pleasant day among the islands, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes, indeed. Stand by; there is another wave.”

“Hark?” said Kennie during a lull. “They are singing forward, round the galley fire. I’ve a good mind to go and join them; will you come? a second officer can do what a first can’t.”

“Yes, take your flute; that will be an excuse.”

Given a trim ship and plenty of sea room, and it isn’t all the wind that can blow that will succeed in lowering the spirits of the British sailor.

The jolliest of the crew of the Brilliant were seated to-night near the galley fire, or they clung to lockers or lay on the deck; it is all the same. It was cold enough to make a fire pleasant and agreeable, and they were all within speaking distance; they had pipes and tobacco and plates of sea-pie, for it was Friday night, the old custom of making Friday a kind of Banian day being still kept up in some vessels of the merchant service.

“Hullo! Mr McAlpine,” cried the carpenter. “Right welcome, sir. And you too, Mr McCrane. Glad to see the smiling faces of the pair of you. Ain’t we, mates?”

“That we are,” and “that we be,” came the ready chorus.

“Some sea-pie, gentlemen,” said the cook, handing each a steaming basin of that most savoury dish.

“I made it,” cried the bo’sun.

“Not all,” cried another. “I rolled the paste.”

“And I cut the beef.”

“And I sliced the bacon.”

“And I chopped the onions.”

“And I pared the ’taters.” This last from the cabin-boy.

“Ha! ha! ha!” roared the jolly carpenter. “I say, maties, blowed if we haven’t all had a hand in the pie.”

“Well, it is jolly eating anyhow,” said Kenneth.

“The smell of it’s enough to raise a dying man,” quoth Archie.

“Bravo, sir,” cried the bo’sun, “and I hopes it makes ye both ’appy.”

“Happy, yes,” said Kenneth. “I’m so happy now, I can sing and play.”

“Oh I give us a toot on the old flute first.”

Kenneth gave them “a toot.”

“Now give us a song.”

“Let the gentleman take his breath,” the carpenter remonstrated.

“Never a breath,” persisted the bo’sun. “He must pay his footin’, I says. And I warrant you, too, he has as much pleasure in singing as we has in listenin’ to ’im.”

“Oh! shut up, old Barkshire,” said somebody.

“Barkshire be bothered,” cried the bo’sun. “I’m not ashamed to own my shire. You comes from the land o’ Tres and Pens; you’re west-country, you be. Have to fish for your breakfast every mornin’, else ye doesn’t get none: He! he!”

“Well, never mind,” said the good-natured carpenter, smiling. “We’re all nationalities here. Bill here is York; Tim is Irish; I’m just what Pipes calls me, Barkshire.”

“And I and my friend are Scotch,” said Kenneth.

“Hurrah! for a Scotch song, then.”

It wasn’t one, but several songs Kennie and Archie had to sing, but all Scotch, and what can beat them, reader mine?

There was no satisfying his audience, so once more Kennie had to fall back upon the flute. While playing, a heavy sea struck the vessel on the weather bow, and the water came tumbling down the hatchway; although it rushed forward among the men and hissed against the hot iron fending of the copper, they hardly shifted their positions.

But Kenneth played a selection of the best English, Irish, Scotch, and Welsh airs now, now merry, now plaintive and sad, now almost wailing, and anon merry again, once more.

There was a perfect chorus of applause when he had finished. The old bo’sun must crawl over to the corner where the musician was – although, owing to the motion of the ship, it was no easy task – and shake Kenneth by the hand.

“God bless you, young sir,” he said, and the tears were in his eyes. “I was back in bonnie Berkshire all the time you was a-playin’, sir. I saw my children, sir, runnin’ among the daisies, the crimson poppies growin’ among the corn’s green, the waving lime trees all in flower and covered with bees – ah! sir, you took the old man home, you took him home.”

“Don’t talk twaddle,” cried his tormentor; “he took us all home, for the matter o’ that.”

“Sit down, ye ould fool!” cried Tim O’Flaherty.

Kenneth put up his flute, and the bo’sun sat down beside him.

“Hark to the thunder!” he said; “listen to the thud o’ the seas. My eye! it is a night and a half. Just like the night we went over in the old Salanella.”

“Went over!” cried the carpenter. “What d’ye mean?”

“Why, I means what I says, to be sure. We turned turtle. Every soul below was called to his account, and only myself and five more managed to cling to the keel.”

“She must have been a barnacley old tub,” said the cook, “else you wouldn’t ha’ got over the copper.”

“You just mind your ladle, old man,” said the carpenter. “You’re only a cook, arter all, and Pipes knows what he’s a-talking about.”

“O’ course I does,” said Pipes. “Thank ye, Chips; it ain’t very often you takes my part. O’ course I knows what I’se a-talkin’ about. The keel rolled over to us, and we easily got on top.”

“Suffer much?”

Pipes did not look at the speaker, but away into vacancy as if he were recalling the past.

“Suffer!” he said. “I hope it may never be the lot o’ anybody in this galley to know what we suffered. For three days and nights o’ storm I and one other clung to that ship’s bottom; the rest dropped off one by one or slipped willingly into the sea, glad to end their terrible misery.

“I never did think the ocean was so vast and empty-like till then, mates. All the weary days we did nothing but gaze and gaze around us, and hope and hope, and pray and pray. Well, blessed be His name, mates, God heard our prayers at last. A ship – ’twas the second we’d seen, for the first took no notice of us – bore down and took us off, and that was no easy task in the condition our misery had reduced us to.”

“Listen,” cried one of the men.

There were three distinct knocks on the deck with a heavy boot; (A plan adopted in some merchant ships for calling the attention of those below to an order about to be given) then a stentorian voice sang down the hatchway, —

“All hands, shorten sail! Look alive there, lads. Tumble up. Tumble up.”

A fiercer squall than any the vessel had yet encountered struck her before the men had time to reach the yards, and the sails they would have furled were rent into ribbons, and the noise they made as they fluttered out in the breeze was like the volley-firing of a company of soldiers. It was two hours before those whose watch was not on deck got back to the galley fire. It had just gone eight bells in the last dog watch, so the evening was still young.

Chapter Fifteen

Christmas Day in the Doldrums

Scene: A ship in the Doldrums. It is the saucy Brilliant. She has been to Calcutta, and is now on her way back to the Cape. And it is Christmas Day, and she ship is in the Doldrums. Longitude 90 degrees East; latitude nothing at all, for she is as nearly “on top o’ the ’quator,” as Jack calls it, as possible. She encountered a tornado farther north, which gives the reason for her being now somewhat out of her course. But she stood it well, and to see her now, with her long black lines, her tapering spars, and snow-white decks, you could not believe that but a fortnight before she had hardly a morsel of bulwark left, that, in fact, the bulwarks were more like sheep hurdles than anything shipshape.

The Doldrums! There isn’t a breath of wind; the surface of the great rolling waves is as smooth as polished steel, and much about the same colour. The sun is beating straight down from a blue but cruelly hot sky. The pitch is soft in the deck seams; the men in the stoke-hole are to be pitied.

Yes, steam is up, there is a frothy wake behind her, and her bows cut through the water like a knife.

But the awning is spread all over the quarter-deck, and her tables are laid, for the captain is a right good fellow, and the men are all coming to dine with him.

They are dropping aft even now, one by one or twos and twos, somewhat shy-looking, but with beaming faces, and dressed in their best, bare-footed, in blue serge pants and clean spruce white jerseys.

“How different Christmas in the Doldrums is,” said Captain Smith, “from what we are used to have it at home in old England. Sit in, men; no ceremony to-day. Mr McAlpine, you’ll carve the beef. Mr McCrane, I’m sure you will show the men a good example at your end of the table. Now, doctor, will you ask a blessing?”

Fiddles were placed across the table – long sticks shipped together by pieces of line – and the cloth was laid over that, so that, in spite of the incessant and most uneasy motion of the vessel, the dishes themselves were kept fairly steady.

As soon as eating was well commenced, tongues were loosed, and the conversation flowed freely enough, and why should it not? The captain was jolly, frank, and open, and his officers gentlemen in manners, so the men were not afraid to speak before them.

Yarn followed yarn, and tale tale, but all short and crisp; the captain joked himself, and encouraged his men to joke, so that, despite the heat, it really was a very pleasant Christmas dinner-party.

But the coming of the pudding was the great event. For, you see, it was an immensely large one, and as the ship rolled so much, the danger of its being sent flying into the scuppers before reaching the table, and being all smashed, was very great indeed.

Even the night before, the captain had commissioned the doctor to superintend its safe delivery. And that worthy had positively got Chips to make a kind of ambulance stretcher, partly canvas and partly bamboo cane, to put the trencher on, and this was borne by two men.

“Now,” said the captain, when the roast beef had been taken away, “are you all ready, doctor?”

“Yes,” said the man of physic, wiping the sweat off his brow. “I’m all ready if the pudding is.”

“The cook’s waiting, sir,” said the steward, who was trying to steady himself by keeping firm hold of the mizen rigging.

“Well, here’s for off,” said the surgeon, getting up.

“Do your duty like a man,” cried the captain, laughing, as the doctor went staggering forward. “And keep to your legs, doctor, keep to your legs.”

There was silence now around the table for many long anxious minutes.

It was a solemn time. There was nothing to be heard but the throb-throb of the engines – the beating of the ship’s great heart.

Would the doctor and his party succeed in landing the pudding aft? That was the great question for the time being, which every one was asking himself. Would the pudding arrive in safety?

Every eye was turned forward.

Behold, they come. Their heads are already above the fore hatch. Slowly they emerge, and stand for a moment swaying hither and thither. The doctor heads the procession. The cook himself brings up the rear. Now the doctor’s voice is heard.

“Are you all ready again, men?”

“All ready, sir.”

“Steady, then; steady as you go. March!”

How steady they move! How quietly! A soldier’s funeral is nothing to it! How they rock, and how they sway, taking advantage of every seeming break in the ship’s motion, cautioning each other with uplifted fingers, the doctor with his left hand over the prize, the cook with his right, ready to clutch it if it moves, ready to fall with it if it falls.

Nearer and nearer they come. Nearer and nearer the great IT – the pudding – comes. And now it is almost alongside the captain and the expectant crew, when – oh moment of grief and horror! – the ship gives a fearful lurch, and the whole procession, pudding and all, is sent flying across the deck and brought up all of a heap close under the port bulwarks.

A groan of disappointment rises up from the table. The pudding is smashed to pieces, of course. No, for see – bravo! the doctor – he has clutched the trencher at a critical moment. Phoenix-like, he uprises with it from that chaos of arms and legs. He watches the chance. He gives one quick glance around him, at sea, at sky, at moving ship. He stakes his honour, his fame, and the very existence of that glorious globe of fragrant dough on one bold manoeuvre. Bearing it high over his head, he glides, he slides, he skates, one might say, towards the table; and in shorter time by far than it takes me to describe the gallant deed, he plumps the “great champion of the pudding race” down in front of the captain’s pile of plates.

“Hurrah! hurrah!”

Why, the very sharks deep down in the ocean’s blackest depths heard the shout; they took it for a battle-cry, and came surface-wards in all haste, making sure of a glorious feast. And an answering shout came up from the engine-room, where the stokers were at work. For they knew that the pudding was safely landed, and that their share would shortly come.

And the captain must needs shake the doctor by the hand, while tears of joy and admiration stood in his eyes.

“Doctor,” he said, “you’re a brick, sir, a brick and a half, sir. I never saw a bolder move. I never saw anything so pluckily done in my life before. I’m proud of my surgeon, proud of you.”

Then he sat down.

The doctor made some reply, which was hardly heard amid the exclamations of accord in the captain’s speech, which uprose from all round the table.

A rough old sea-dog of a doctor he was, too, a thorough sailor. Any one could have seen that at a glance. Rough he was, yet kindly-hearted, and there was not a man on board, from the captain to the Kroo boy who helped the cook, who wouldn’t have risked his life for their surgeon.

I leave you to guess whether or not justice was done to that Christmas plum-pudding. Indeed, I only wish you could have seen the happy smiling faces that now surrounded the table, and really – though it was not polite of them – several of the crew had no less than three helps, for “Cut and come again” was the captain’s motto on this Christmas Day in the Doldrums.

Well, of course songs and yarns followed dinner. The captain told a story, Archie told a story, Kenneth sang and played, the old bo’sun called Pipes had something queer to say, and so had the carpenter called Chips.

“Now then, doctor,” cried the captain. “It’s your turn. Tell us something good.”

The doctor cleared his throat.

“I’ll do my best, sir,” said the doctor with a modest smile.

Chapter Sixteen

Frozen up in the North

“It is twenty years ago! Twenty years ago! Twenty years!” began the doctor.

“Yes, I own to it; no need for this matter-of-fact memory of mine to nudge me so, and keep on reminding me of the flight of sly old Father Time. ’Tis twenty years ago this very summer since I sailed away to Polar seas, in a small but sturdy brig of barely three hundred tons. A medical student I was, in charge of fifty men, all told, and with all a medical student’s audacity and ignorance of the noble profession to which I have now the honour to belong. What cared I then if half the crew fell ill? There was plenty of medicine in the chest. I would do my best, and dose them. Well, if, after being dosed, they should die, why, the sea was deep enough – they should not want for decent burial! And what cared I that a fearful accident might take place, and heads be gashed, and limbs be crushed? There were surgical instruments galore on board, practice makes perfect, and if my patients succumbed after an operation, well, every dog has his day, and the post hoc propter hoc argument has been proved to be unsound.

“Gentlemen, have ever you roughed it in the Arctic Ocean, in a bit of a ship so small that a schoolboy, with average length of legs, could clear its decks from binnacle to bowsprit with a hop, step, and jump, the saloon not larger than two railway compartments, your state-room not half so big as one? Have you been in a gale of wind in such a craft? Was she on her beam-ends, with the cold, green seas, curling higher and higher as they advanced, forming awful arches of water, into which the vessel seemed to be sucked, and which broke, not on, but over and beyond her? Have you been ice-logged in a sea-way in such a vessel, no land, nor even a berg, in sight – only the restless waves, that twanged and hummed, and sang in the frosty air as they passed you, with bows and bulwarks, decks and spars, and rigging and blocks, mere shapes of ice, and ice alone to all appearance, the men’s caps and coats, and hair and beards, so white with the freezing spray, that they looked, as they moved to and fro on the slippery decks, like the ghostly crew of a ghost ship? Have you been in such a craft when she was being squeezed in this pack, the one dark spot in the midst of a limitless plain of dazzling snow-clad ice, all lifting and rolling and moving with the pressure of the invisible waves that are passing swiftly underneath? Have you ever heard the terrible sounds an ice-pack emits, when the swell from a distant storm comes sweeping under it, the groaning, the wailing, grinding, griding noise, as if the ocean on which you stood were filled with old-world monsters in their dying agonies? Have you ever listened to the roaring thunder of a lofty iceberg rent in pieces, and falling headlong into the sea? Have you stood on the pack and seen two bergs crush an acre of bay ice between them, piling the pieces one over the other, like leaves of a book or cards in a pack, till they stood high as the tallest tree in a forest of pines? Have you been out alone on the ice-field at night, far away from your ship, amid a silence that, like Egyptian darkness, could be felt, watching the glorious tints of the —

“And, even while gazing and admiring, have you seen dark clouds roll rapidly up from the horizon and blot this aurora out, so that ere you could reach your brig you were surrounded by swirling drift and blinding snow, more dangerous far than the sand-storms that sweep over the Soudan deserts, with the thunder rattling close o’erhead, and the bewildering lightning in swift diffusive gleams intensifying the cave-like darkness that followed?

“If such experiences have not been yours, you may have been tossed about on the giant waves of the broad Atlantic, you may have weathered the Cape in a gale, and the Horn in a snow-storm, you may have sweltered for weeks in a rolling calm under a tropical sun, and been the sport of a tornado in the Indian Ocean, yet there are wonders in the mighty deep seen by some who go down to the sea in ships to which you are a total stranger. From beginning to end, our voyage in that little brig, twenty years ago, was a non-propitious one. We ran before a gale all the way to Lerwick, where the Greenland fleet lay anchored. We had hardly left the rock-bound shores of Shetland – that ‘sea-begirdled peat moss’ – ere the blackness of darkness settled down on the ocean around us; and storm and tempest became our constant companions for three long weeks, till sheltered at last under the lee of the pack, with bowsprit and topmasts gone, and the bulwarks more like the palings one sometimes sees around a cattle-field than anything else in the world. But even worse was to follow: with several other ships we took the ice, which was loose, and in three weeks’ time we found ourselves all alone in the midst of a hard frozen ice-field, and fully one hundred miles from the open water, a bright blue frosty sky above us, and in silence – a silence never broken even by the cry of a bird or guttural roar of Arctic bear.