XII.
So sail did get shortened more or less in time even in that ship,
and her tall spars never went overboard while I served in her.
However, all the time I was with them, Captain S- and Mr. P- did
not get on very well together. If P- carried on "like the very
devil" because he was too deaf to know how much wind there was,
Captain S- (who, as I have said, seemed constitutionally incapable
of ordering one of his officers to shorten sail) resented the
necessity forced upon him by Mr. P-'s desperate goings on. It was
in Captain S-'s tradition rather to reprove his officers for not
carrying on quite enough--in his phrase "for not taking every ounce
of advantage of a fair wind." But there was also a psychological
motive that made him extremely difficult to deal with on board that
iron clipper. He had just come out of the marvellous Tweed, a
ship, I have heard, heavy to look at but of phenomenal speed. In
the middle sixties she had beaten by a day and a half the steam
mail-boat from Hong Kong to Singapore. There was something
peculiarly lucky, perhaps, in the placing of her masts--who knows?
Officers of men-of-war used to come on board to take the exact
dimensions of her sail-plan. Perhaps there had been a touch of
genius or the finger of good fortune in the fashioning of her lines
at bow and stern. It is impossible to say. She was built in the
East Indies somewhere, of teak-wood throughout, except the deck.
She had a great sheer, high bows, and a clumsy stern. The men who
had seen her described her to me as "nothing much to look at." But
in the great Indian famine of the seventies that ship, already old
then, made some wonderful dashes across the Gulf of Bengal with
cargoes of rice from Rangoon to Madras.
She took the secret of her speed with her, and, unsightly as she
was, her image surely has its glorious place in the mirror of the
old sea.
The point, however, is that Captain S-, who used to say frequently,
"She never made a decent passage after I left her," seemed to think
that the secret of her speed lay in her famous commander. No doubt
the secret of many a ship's excellence does lie with the man on
board, but it was hopeless for Captain S- to try to make his new
iron clipper equal the feats which made the old Tweed a name of
praise upon the lips of English-speaking seamen. There was
something pathetic in it, as in the endeavour of an artist in his
old age to equal the masterpieces of his youth--for the Tweed's
famous passages were Captain S-'s masterpieces. It was pathetic,
and perhaps just the least bit dangerous. At any rate, I am glad
that, what between Captain S-'s yearning for old triumphs and Mr.
P-'s deafness, I have seen some memorable carrying on to make a
passage. And I have carried on myself upon the tall spars of that
Clyde shipbuilder's masterpiece as I have never carried on in a
ship before or since.
The second mate falling ill during the passage, I was promoted to
officer of the watch, alone in charge of the deck. Thus the
immense leverage of the ship's tall masts became a matter very near
my own heart. I suppose it was something of a compliment for a
young fellow to be trusted, apparently without any supervision, by
such a commander as Captain S-; though, as far as I can remember,
neither the tone, nor the manner, nor yet the drift of Captain S-'s
remarks addressed to myself did ever, by the most strained
interpretation, imply a favourable opinion of my abilities. And he
was, I must say, a most uncomfortable commander to get your orders
from at night. If I had the watch from eight till midnight, he
would leave the deck about nine with the words, "Don't take any
sail off her." Then, on the point of disappearing down the
companion-way, he would add curtly: "Don't carry anything away."
I am glad to say that I never did; one night, however, I was
caught, not quite prepared, by a sudden shift of wind.
There was, of course, a good deal of noise--running about, the,
shouts of the sailors, the thrashing of the sails--enough, in fact,
to wake the dead. But S- never came on deck. When I was relieved
by the chief mate an hour afterwards, he sent for me. I went into
his stateroom; he was lying on his couch wrapped up in a rug, with
a pillow under his head.
"What was the matter with you up there just now?" he asked.
"Wind flew round on the lee quarter, sir," I said.
"Couldn't you see the shift coming?"
"Yes, sir, I thought it wasn't very far off."
"Why didn't you have your courses hauled up at once, then?" he
asked in a tone that ought to have made my blood run cold.
But this was my chance, and I did not let it slip.
"Well, sir," I said in an apologetic tone, "she was going eleven
knots very nicely, and I thought she would do for another half-hour
or so."
He gazed at me darkly out of his head, lying very still on the
white pillow, for a time.
"Ah, yes, another half-hour. That's the way ships get dismasted."
And that was all I got in the way of a wigging. I waited a little
while and then went out, shutting carefully the door of the state-
room after me.
Well, I have loved, lived with, and left the sea without ever
seeing a ship's tall fabric of sticks, cobwebs and gossamer go by
the board. Sheer good luck, no doubt. But as to poor P-, I am
sure that he would not have got off scot-free like this but for the
god of gales, who called him away early from this earth, which is
three parts ocean, and therefore a fit abode for sailors. A few
years afterwards I met in an Indian port a man who had served in
the ships of the same company. Names came up in our talk, names of
our colleagues in the same employ, and, naturally enough, I asked
after P-. Had he got a command yet? And the other man answered
carelessly:
"No; but he's provided for, anyhow. A heavy sea took him off the
poop in the run between New Zealand and the Horn."
Thus P- passed away from amongst the tall spars of ships that he
had tried to their utmost in many a spell of boisterous weather.
He had shown me what carrying on meant, but he was not a man to
learn discretion from. He could not help his deafness. One can
only remember his cheery temper, his admiration for the jokes in
Punch, his little oddities--like his strange passion for borrowing
looking-glasses, for instance. Each of our cabins had its own
looking-glass screwed to the bulkhead, and what he wanted with more
of them we never could fathom. He asked for the loan in
confidential tones. Why? Mystery. We made various surmises. No
one will ever know now. At any rate, it was a harmless
eccentricity, and may the god of gales, who took him away so
abruptly between New Zealand and the Horn, let his soul rest in
some Paradise of true seamen, where no amount of carrying on will
ever dismast a ship!
