Part 5
It is rather surprising that Captain Scruggs doesn’t take an interest in keeping track of his various voyages, plotted off on the different charts, as Captain Kingdon did. The latter used some which had sixteen voyages pricked off on them as plain as ink could make it, forming a very useful aid for future work, as he could select the average from them all, for each voyage as it progressed. Our skipper, however, takes no such pains, and so far hasn’t even looked at an ordinary chart. To-day my wife asked him to show her where we were, at noon, and he hauled out from under the sofa an old, ragged, hydrographic wind-chart, and after much stertorous breathing he managed to stab the position on the paper with the dividers, being so palsied from last night’s potations that he had to steady one hand with the other before he could hit the chart within several degrees of where we were. Latitude, 8° 24′ north; longitude, 31° 40′ west.
+May 29+
The end of the Trades is at hand. After blowing us through nearly twenty-five degrees of latitude, the wind began to let go yesterday afternoon and to simultaneously haul to the southward, while an immense pall of blue-black cloud rose slowly out of the southwest and solemnly spread itself over the clear sky, with an indication of thunder-squalls in the “white heads” which crowned its summit. Sure enough, in the middle watch there was some mild thunder and lightning, but hardly any rain. However, a drizzle started later on, and as the morning was a soft one and the atmosphere almost as heavy and hot as the steam from a kettle,--a typical tropical morning,--the men were turned to scrubbing the paint-work generally. It was a very long, tedious job, for every particle of white paint had been transformed into a dirty drab in the New York docks. I never saw such a change in a vessel as the men, starting at the taffrail, worked their way forward--poop, bulwarks, boats, skids, everything putting off the grimy look, and assuming in its stead a glossy whiteness which almost hurt the eye.
It is strange that we have no head-pump here. On the “Mandalore” there was a very powerful one, worked by four men, and a line of two-inch hose that reached to the after hatch. Our method of washing down the decks, though, is as primitive as irrigation in India, for all the water must be hoisted over the side in a canvas bucket and dumped into a cask, whence it is taken out as wanted.
Speaking of the “Mandalore” reminds me of a gruesome tale which MacFoy, the bosun, told me last evening. So broad is his brogue that it was rather hard to understand him, but I gathered the following: One day, about nine years ago, there started from Hamburg, bound to San Francisco, the big Liverpool ship “Falls of Ayr.” The weather growing very bad in the Channel, though, she up helm and ran back for the Downs, to anchor till the gale should break. Shortly before she sailed the “Mandalore” left Hull, also bound around the Horn to San Diego, on what MacFoy said was her maiden voyage. After getting well out into the Channel, though, and finding it as thick as pea-soup, she, too, ran back for the Downs, and before anybody knew what was happening, with a fearful crash she hit the “Falls of Ayr” head on, well aft on the quarter, dividing her nearly in two and smashing her boats, which she carried aft, Liverpool fashion. Very curiously, the “Ayr” had no after companion-way, entrance to the main cabin being effected solely by means of the doors on the main-deck. These, being of iron, crumpled like paper under the impact of collision, and then jammed, so that in the hurry and confusion they baffled all attempts at opening, and before anything could be done the ship foundered, carrying down with her every soul aft,--captain, two mates, steward, and cook, caught like flies in a trap. Nor was this all. Three boats had been broken into match-wood, leaving but one unharmed, in which only a handful of the men and two apprentices escaped. “And look again, sir,” continued David, “she’s the unluckiest ship that ever left a yard. Two years later she ran down a large Belfast ship off Pernambuco, one of the Star Line,--I think ’twas the ‘Star of Greece,’--though both ships finally made Buenos Ayres for repairs.”
And this was the dear old “Mandalore” which carried us so happily across thirteen thousand miles of ocean only a short time ago! We had absolutely no suspicion of those accidents before, and I asked the bosun if he couldn’t be mistaken, but he answered, “I never forget a ship, sir; this one I mean is a London ship built at Stockton nine years ago.” That settled it; but how strange that we should never have heard of either case!
There are two boxes of Sicilian oranges on board which are holding out remarkably well; for though they are getting a little dry, not one has so far spoiled. We also have good cool water to drink yet; for in spite of the great heat of the last two days, it has not penetrated the big galvanized iron tanks below. Indeed, the water is so much cooler than the air that a blur forms on the outside of a tumbler. But this will soon change, and we will have drinking-water at a temperature of ninety degrees for a fortnight. Latitude, 6° 5′ north; longitude, 30° 30′ west.
+May 30+
This afternoon was very hot and calm, and we had the first hard rain of the voyage. As we had had no wind at all previous to this shower, the courses had been hauled up to prevent chafing; but some of the buntlines and clew-lines had been let go when the rain came, although as there was not much wind in the squall, the men were allowed to drop braces and everything else and run for tubs and buckets to be filled with fresh water, so that for the next thirty minutes the decks presented a remarkable sight. The head-yards were braced up, while the main- and after-yards were still squared, with the starboard clew of the foresail, both clews of the mainsail, and the port-clew of the cross-jack hauled up, while the decks were covered with a wonderful snarl of ropes. However, we filled every bucket, tub, and cask on board, while the men ran for their soiled clothes and spread them out all over the forward deck to soften in the warm rain, the mate producing three pairs of old trousers which he carefully deposited on the after-hatch. Odd notion, this washing of ordinary clothes; I had never heard of such a thing. The rain lasted for an hour, and the captain had the bathtub filled and I had a delightful fresh-water bath, the temperature of the rain being 79°. Only those who have been compelled to bathe for weeks in brine can appreciate the luxury of fresh water.
Our calm reminded the mate at dinner of a curious circumstance which happened once in the Pacific. Quite a fleet of ships started out together from San Francisco bound around the Horn; and, keeping well together, they all fell into a calm streak just north of the line which lasted for twelve days. During this time several ships passed this fleet about fifty miles to the westward of them (among which was the “Wandering Jew,” an American ship, since burned) with half a gale of wind! This story seems to be quite true, as the “Jew’s” log-book for that day showed that she was a degree west of the becalmed vessels, and mentioned that they stowed the fore and mizzentop-gallant sails. A fact of this sort shows what different weather conditions may exist at a distance of less than one hundred miles.
We witnessed a punishment this afternoon which I thought was never resorted to except in the navy; and, even there, the construction of a modern war-ship necessarily precludes it. We were sitting at the break of the poop, when we saw a man coming down from aloft in a hurry, as though he were especially anxious to reach the deck; when, to our surprise, no sooner had he done so than MacFoy gruffly said to him, “Back you go; and this time to the sky-sail-yard; d’ye hear?”
So up he went again (it was Louis Eckers, the youngest and dullest seaman in the ship) till he reached the main-royal, when of course he had to “shin” up to the sky-sail-yard, as there are never any ratlines above the royals. Presently, though, he stood upon the yard, one hundred and eighty feet above the water, grasping the slender sky-sail pole with one arm, and surveying the deck quite comfortably. When he had been there about half an hour, the bosun roared out “Come down”; and it was not till then that we realized that he had been mast-headed for bad conduct. It seems incredible that a punishment so humane should be resorted to on a Yankee ship.
The eating on board, aft at any rate, is still extremely good, particularly the coffee, which is put up in convenient packages for sea use and labelled “Best Maracaibo”; thus there is no deception, the greater part of “Mocha” having its origin in Central or South America. Every day at meals the mate seems to grow more hideous and grotesque, and he is the only man whom I ever saw to whom the latter adjective could be applied. His nose, which is enormous, is canted far over to the right; one nostril is the size of a slate-pencil, while the other would fit a small gas-pipe, and his dense, kinky moustache becomes at meals the lurking place of various liquids and solids; while ears like water-lilies expand from his head like those of a bat. His table manners are actually shocking, though in some ways he is perhaps not much worse than the skipper, who contrives to decorate the lapels of his coat with a spray of soup at each dinner. Some men embellish the region of their waist-bands with various fluids, but Captain Scruggs is dexterous enough to decorate his entire front with such things.
Mr. Goggins has a stock phrase which is simply too absurd, when he declines anything further at table. Suppose the captain to say, “Have some more potatoes, sir?” he will reply, closing one eye and leering at the dish with the other, “No-o-o, sir, I thank you, sir; I’ve ’ad sufficient, sir, I thank you, sir.” This answer is invariable, and it is never abbreviated or curtailed in any way. He has also of late acquired the extremely objectionable habit of coming to the table with bare feet, which I am going to ask the skipper if he cannot prevent. Latitude, 5° 16′ north; longitude, 30° 5′ west.
+May 31+
Our progress for this twenty-four hours was not such as would delight the heart of a steam-yachtsman, for our difference of latitude was precisely nothing, and we made twenty-five miles of westing, which would indicate a current. The heat, of course, is great, and also the oppressiveness, everything being indescribably sticky and soft. The temperature of the sea has risen to correspond with that of the air, both standing at about eighty-four degrees; severe rain-squalls with little or no wind necessitate oil-skins on deck, for if your clothes get wet they will be hours drying in this weather; indeed, they will not dry at all, unless you put them on, when the heat of the body evaporates the moisture. As we have been several days now in very hot weather, we have had plenty of opportunity of comparing the cabins of a wooden and an iron ship in the tropics. As might have been expected, that of the “Higgins” is cooler than that of the iron “Mandalore”; but the difference is surprisingly little, not more than two or three degrees. The principal disparity we notice at night, as the “Mandalore’s” top-sides used to retain the heat of the sun for so long a period that it was frequently two o’clock in the morning before the temperature fell perceptibly. The thermometer now in our room stands at about 85° day and night as against 87° and 88° in the other ship.
Yesterday we caught a dolphin. It was a true dolphin, _delphinus delphis_, a mammal, the bottle-nose of sailors; seafaring people giving the name to a small beautifully-colored fish, _coryphœna hippuris_, which isn’t a dolphin at all.
Scores of the big, graceful creatures had been disporting themselves around the ship for several hours, as many as a dozen sometimes simultaneously breaking the water in a space which apparently could have been covered with a table-cloth. By and by they aroused the blood-loving propensities of the mate, who forthwith rigged his harpoon and stationed himself on the bowsprit-shrouds to watch for his prey. Presently a dolphin shot under the martingale-boom, when zip, the heavy iron flew through the air and passed completely through the unhappy creature, whose blood instantly transformed the lovely blue of the sea to a rich crimson. Here Mr. Goggins showed indications of insanity and bawled for the watch, who came running up on the forecastle-head with beaming faces. A dozen hands seized the harpoon-line, and a few hearty pulls landed the dolphin alongside the starboard anchor amid the wildest acclamations from the men. As he was to furnish fresh food for them for several days, however, their joy was natural, and he was dragged down on the main deck, cleaned, and skinned, which latter process was accomplished by slitting the hide into longitudinal sections, and then, starting each strip, three hands would take a strong hold and with a hard wrench the strip or ribbon would be ripped off with a noise like the tearing of heavy silk; one of the men, the facetious Charley Neilsen, suggesting the propriety of starting a chanty. After this had been accomplished, the carcass was suspended from the mainstay, bearing a singular resemblance to a hind-quarter of beef.
This morning we had dolphin liver for breakfast, which could scarcely have been detected from calf’s liver, and this, with some new-laid eggs and salt mackerel, afforded us much the same breakfast which we would have had ashore. “And the flesh you won’t know from beef; eh, cap’n?” said Mr. Goggins. But we hardly believed this and our distrust was justified when a strange dish was placed before the skipper at dinner. “What on earth is that?” I asked.
“Oh, this is a dolphin stew,” quoth Captain Scruggs, with much satisfaction, “and that’s just pork fat on top to flavor it.”
Whatever it was, the thing was in a deep yellow dish and looked like a wretched meat pie, the slabs of pork taking the place of crust. But yet stranger things were to be disclosed; for when the captain inserted a spoon and sculled around in the recesses of the cavernous redoubt, he brought to light and placed upon our plates irregular lumps of what seemed to be coke, while some of the fragments were of that dead black that pitch assumes, smooth in places, and in others sharp and ragged. I can assure the reader that a dolphin ragout is a strange thing.
It will no doubt surprise some people to know that the largest steamship line in the world is the Hamburg-American Company. That is, its vessels, which number one hundred and twenty-four, aggregate the greatest number of tons. The new freight steamers “Pennsylvania” and “Pretoria” of this line are mammoth vessels, and two more of the same class are now building by the Vulcan Works at Stettin. Their gross tonnage is about twelve thousand five hundred, with a displacement of twenty-three thousand tons, and a carrying capacity of twenty thousand tons. It is marvellous that a vessel should be able to carry, safely, twenty-twenty-thirds of her own weight. The new White Star freighter “Cymric” slightly exceeds these vessels in carrying capacity, and it requires six hundred and twenty-five carloads of freight to fill her enormous hull.
Below will be found a list of the five largest steamship lines, with the aggregate tonnage of each.
Tons
Hamburg American 341,000 British India 295,000 North German Lloyd 266,000 Peninsular and Oriental 251,000 Messageries Maritimes 279,000
The Cunard Line is simply swallowed up in these figures, and even the White Star Line, with all its freighters, falls below them; while the Japanese Nippon Yusen Kabushiki, with one hundred and sixty-two thousand tons, exceeds the Cunard, which the average citizen would perhaps place first on the list. Latitude 5° 16′ north; longitude, 30° 30′ west.
+June 1+
Three weeks at sea this day, and we are involved in the vortex, so to speak, of the Doldrums, with all which the name implies: intense heat, sultry, humid atmosphere, a baking sun which glares down between heavy showers and an almost total absence of wind. We were congratulating ourselves last night, for at 8.30 we took a northeasterly wind, which sent us along at seven knots through a sea spangled with phosphoric jewels and leaving a wake of silvery light astern, like the trail of a meteor.
“About, about, in reel and route, The death-fires danced at night.”
But on issuing from the companion-way this morning, lo! a great calm was lying upon the waters; while the sun, like a globe of incandescent gold, sent down terrible rays of heat, trebly intensified by the brassy glare from the ocean. Perspiration dripped from the faces of the weather-hardened seamen upon the least exertion, the pigs breathed in short gasps and the poultry stalked about the deck with open bills.
[Illustration: The companion-way]
“Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down, ’Twas sad as sad could be, And we did speak only to break The silence of the sea.
“All in a hot and copper sky The bloody sun at noon Right up above the masts did stand, No bigger than the moon.”
A typical day of the low latitudes this. To me there is ever something wonderfully impressive in an absolute calm, when no breath of wind tarnishes the surface, and the only evidence that the ship is not resting upon a plane of glass is to be found in an occasional slow, deep surge, hardly ever absent when in the profound depths of the ocean.
All around the northern and eastern horizon hung superb, dense masses of violet cloud, descending at intervals in steaming showers, while broad on the port bow lay becalmed a large square rigger, hull down, but lifting at times on the swell till we could see her courses hanging in the buntlines in easy, graceful curves. Nearer and nearer, by imperceptible degrees, she approached, till at eleven o’clock she lay not more than three miles distant,--a magnificent four-masted bark, bearing the stamp of the Clyde upon her powerful iron hull, and presenting, with her double top-gallant-yards and splendid sheer, a perfect illustration of the modern sailing ship, of the largest and finest class. How beautiful and stately and proud she looked as she floated along, apparently conscious that she was homeward bound, and fully aware that she was one of the “swift shuttles of an empire’s loom” which Kipling mentions in those fine verses “The Coastwise Lights of England!”
“I’ll bet there’s nothin’ ter eat aboard there but rice, hard bread, and water,” said a croaking voice at my elbow, and the greasy countenance of the grizzly old mate was thrust suddenly into the foreground, totally destroying the beauty of the scene. Mr. Goggins (always Mr.) never loses a chance to blackguard his native country, which shows better than anything else what sort of creature he is. We made our number to the ship, to which she replied with her own name, but which we unfortunately could not make out, though, owing to the position of our flags, she may have been able to do so.
It is pleasant to study a great vessel like this, and to wonder how old she is and what great gales she must have witnessed in her career, walking up and down the world; now perhaps carrying five thousand tons of grain from California to the starving multitudes in India; now beating her way round tempestuous Agulhas, full to the hatches with tea and silk; now struggling against the thunderous southwesterly monsoon in the Bay of Bengal, homeward bound from Calcutta with twenty thousand bales of flossy jute in her great body. God speed the gallant ship! Latitude, 4° 24′ north; longitude, 29° 35′ west.
+June 2+
This afternoon was a perfect scorcher, even worse than yesterday, and the sun glittered down from a sky absolutely cloudless. Half a dozen albacores gambolled lazily around the ship all day, sometimes casting themselves several feet out of the water and then falling back with such a splitting crack that it was marvellous how their skins withstood it; and as these fish usually weigh about two hundred pounds and are some five or six feet in length, they made quite a fascinating display.
Last night we had what will probably be our last look at the pole-star for a couple of months. The sky was very clear then in the north, showing Polaris just above the horizon; theoretically, the altitude of this star is the approximate latitude in, and it ought to be visible at, the equator; but owing to vapors, etc., the polar star is generally not visible south of 5° north.
My wife is remarkably well in all this heat, a fact well illustrated by her hearty appetite at meals, considering that what we eat for dinner is usually supposed to be the accompaniments of cold weather. Our noon repast to-day, as an example, comprised a liberal portion of dense, steaming pea soup, hot Boston baked beans, and brown bread, followed, topped off with, oh, heavens! smoking plum pudding and Edam cheese in lumps as large as walnuts! Most people would consider this a throttling diet on the equator, and so it is, more or less; but our appetites are so fine that just now we don’t mind such a little inconvenience as Boston beans bubbling in pork fat.
At supper the heat was worse than ever and we were hurrying to get on deck, when my wife called attention to the strange, yellow tinge of a cloud-bank right ahead, which we could see through the cabin door.
“Oh, it’s nothing at all,” said the skipper; but, as if to nail his words, there came a blast of cold wind, which heeled the ship over to the scuppers and sent the captain and mate flying on deck. We followed instantly, and beheld a thrilling sight. Ahead, from southwest to east, the sky was covered with thick, windy-looking, saffron clouds, rushing rapidly toward us; while the sea, as black as beneath a summer thunder-squall, was whipped into angry, spitting white-caps, through which we were just beginning to force our way. In the northwest, over against this gloomy scene of dun vapor and dark, foam-flecked water, gleamed the sun, just setting in golden splendor, encircled with wonderful clouds of the most delicate blues and grays.