XIV.
The sailing-ship, when I knew her in her days of perfection, was a
sensible creature. When I say her days of perfection, I mean
perfection of build, gear, seaworthy qualities and case of
handling, not the perfection of speed. That quality has departed
with the change of building material. No iron ship of yesterday
ever attained the marvels of speed which the seamanship of men
famous in their time had obtained from their wooden, copper-sheeted
predecessors. Everything had been done to make the iron ship
perfect, but no wit of man had managed to devise an efficient
coating composition to keep her bottom clean with the smooth
cleanness of yellow metal sheeting. After a spell of a few weeks
at sea, an iron ship begins to lag as if she had grown tired too
soon. It is only her bottom that is getting foul. A very little
affects the speed of an iron ship which is not driven on by a
merciless propeller. Often it is impossible to tell what
inconsiderate trifle puts her off her stride. A certain
mysteriousness hangs around the quality of speed as it was
displayed by the old sailing-ships commanded by a competent seaman.
In those days the speed depended upon the seaman; therefore, apart
from the laws, rules, and regulations for the good preservation of
his cargo, he was careful of his loading,--or what is technically
called the trim of his ship. Some ships sailed fast on an even
keel, others had to be trimmed quite one foot by the stern, and I
have heard of a ship that gave her best speed on a wind when so
loaded as to float a couple of inches by the head.
I call to mind a winter landscape in Amsterdam--a flat foreground
of waste land, with here and there stacks of timber, like the huts
of a camp of some very miserable tribe; the long stretch of the
Handelskade; cold, stone-faced quays, with the snow-sprinkled
ground and the hard, frozen water of the canal, in which were set
ships one behind another with their frosty mooring-ropes hanging
slack and their decks idle and deserted, because, as the master
stevedore (a gentle, pale person, with a few golden hairs on his
chin and a reddened nose) informed me, their cargoes were frozen-in
up-country on barges and schuyts. In the distance, beyond the
waste ground, and running parallel with the line of ships, a line
of brown, warm-toned houses seemed bowed under snow-laden roofs.
From afar at the end of Tsar Peter Straat, issued in the frosty air
the tinkle of bells of the horse tramcars, appearing and
disappearing in the opening between the buildings, like little toy
carriages harnessed with toy horses and played with by people that
appeared no bigger than children.
I was, as the French say, biting my fists with impatience for that
cargo frozen up-country; with rage at that canal set fast, at the
wintry and deserted aspect of all those ships that seemed to decay
in grim depression for want of the open water. I was chief mate,
and very much alone. Directly I had joined I received from my
owners instructions to send all the ship's apprentices away on
leave together, because in such weather there was nothing for
anybody to do, unless to keep up a fire in the cabin stove. That
was attended to by a snuffy and mop-headed, inconceivably dirty,
and weirdly toothless Dutch ship-keeper, who could hardly speak
three words of English, but who must have had some considerable
knowledge of the language, since he managed invariably to interpret
in the contrary sense everything that was said to him.
Notwithstanding the little iron stove, the ink froze on the swing-
table in the cabin, and I found it more convenient to go ashore
stumbling over the arctic waste-land and shivering in glazed
tramcars in order to write my evening letter to my owners in a
gorgeous cafe in the centre of the town. It was an immense place,
lofty and gilt, upholstered in red plush, full of electric lights
and so thoroughly warmed that even the marble tables felt tepid to
the touch. The waiter who brought me my cup of coffee bore, by
comparison with my utter isolation, the dear aspect of an intimate
friend. There, alone in a noisy crowd, I would write slowly a
letter addressed to Glasgow, of which the gist would be: There is
no cargo, and no prospect of any coming till late spring
apparently. And all the time I sat there the necessity of getting
back to the ship bore heavily on my already half-congealed spirits-
-the shivering in glazed tramcars, the stumbling over the snow-
sprinkled waste ground, the vision of ships frozen in a row,
appearing vaguely like corpses of black vessels in a white world,
so silent, so lifeless, so soulless they seemed to be.
With precaution I would go up the side of my own particular corpse,
and would feel her as cold as ice itself and as slippery under my
feet. My cold berth would swallow up like a chilly burial niche my
bodily shivers and my mental excitement. It was a cruel winter.
The very air seemed as hard and trenchant as steel; but it would
have taken much more than this to extinguish my sacred fire for the
exercise of my craft. No young man of twenty-four appointed chief
mate for the first time in his life would have let that Dutch
tenacious winter penetrate into his heart. I think that in those
days I never forgot the fact of my elevation for five consecutive
minutes. I fancy it kept me warm, even in my slumbers, better than
the high pile of blankets, which positively crackled with frost as
I threw them off in the morning. And I would get up early for no
reason whatever except that I was in sole charge. The new captain
had not been appointed yet.
Almost each morning a letter from my owners would arrive, directing
me to go to the charterers and clamour for the ship's cargo; to
threaten them with the heaviest penalties of demurrage; to demand
that this assortment of varied merchandise, set fast in a landscape
of ice and windmills somewhere up-country, should be put on rail
instantly, and fed up to the ship in regular quantities every day.
After drinking some hot coffee, like an Arctic explorer setting off
on a sledge journey towards the North Pole, I would go ashore and
roll shivering in a tramcar into the very heart of the town, past
clean-faced houses, past thousands of brass knockers upon a
thousand painted doors glimmering behind rows of trees of the
pavement species, leafless, gaunt, seemingly dead for ever.
That part of the expedition was easy enough, though the horses were
painfully glistening with icicles, and the aspect of the tram-
conductors' faces presented a repulsive blending of crimson and
purple. But as to frightening or bullying, or even wheedling some
sort of answer out of Mr. Hudig, that was another matter
altogether. He was a big, swarthy Netherlander, with black
moustaches and a bold glance. He always began by shoving me into a
chair before I had time to open my mouth, gave me cordially a large
cigar, and in excellent English would start to talk everlastingly
about the phenomenal severity of the weather. It was impossible to
threaten a man who, though he possessed the language perfectly,
seemed incapable of understanding any phrase pronounced in a tone
of remonstrance or discontent. As to quarrelling with him, it
would have been stupid. The weather was too bitter for that. His
office was so warm, his fire so bright, his sides shook so heartily
with laughter, that I experienced always a great difficulty in
making up my mind to reach for my hat.
At last the cargo did come. At first it came dribbling in by rail
in trucks, till the thaw set in; and then fast, in a multitude of
barges, with a great rush of unbound waters. The gentle master
stevedore had his hands very full at last; and the chief mate
became worried in his mind as to the proper distribution of the
weight of his first cargo in a ship he did not personally know
before.
Ships do want humouring. They want humouring in handling; and if
you mean to handle them well, they must have been humoured in the
distribution of the weight which you ask them to carry through the
good and evil fortune of a passage. Your ship is a tender
creature, whose idiosyncrasies must be attended to if you mean her
to come with credit to herself and you through the rough-and-tumble
of her life.
