well, the sailors made a great pet of this immense monkey, who proved a very inoffensive, gentle, well-tamed creature, abounding in such tricks as a rough forecastle would educate a monkey in. the jacks tried him with a pipe of tobacco, and he was observed to take several whiffs with an air of great relish, though he put the pipe down long before the bowl was empty. once, seeing a man shaving, he imitated the fellow to such perfection as to show that he had been taught to feign to handle a razor; whereupon the carpenter shaped a piece of wood to resemble a razor, with which the monkey, whenever he was asked, would shave himself, pretending to lather his beard, after, with his own hands, putting a little bit of canvas under his chin. the sailors also discovered that the creature could play the fiddle—that is to say, if you put two sticks in his hand and told him to fiddle, he would adjust one of them to his shoulder, and saw away with[244] the other, making the most horrible faces the while, as though ravished by the exquisite sounds he was producing.
again and again would i stand watching him till the tears flowed from my eyes. the sailors called him old jacob, dimly conceiving that was a good name for anything with a white beard. but alas! the ocean had marked him for her own, and poor old jacob did not live to see land again. his death was very tragical, and the manner in which i was startled by it leaves the incident, to this moment, very clear in my memory.
we had run out of the north-east trades, and were sweeping along over a high sea before a strong breeze of wind. we had met with a bothersome spell of baffling weather north of the equator, and the captain was now “cracking on,” as the term goes, to make up for lost time, carrying a main-royal, when, at an earlier season, he would have been satisfied with a furled topgallant sail, and through it the lady violet was thundering with foam to the hawse-pipe, the weather-clew of her mainsail up, and the foretop-mast staysail and jibs flapping and banging in the air over the forecastle, where they were becalmed by the forecourse and topsail.
there was a sailor at work on the rigging low down on the fore-shrouds. i had been watching him for some minutes, observing the carelessness[247] of his pose as he stood poised on a ratline, whilst i thought how utterly hopeless would be the look-out of a man who should fall overboard into the white smother roaring alongside; and i turned my back to walk aft, when i heard a loud cry of “man overboard!”
i looked; the fellow i had been watching had disappeared! i rushed to the side and saw poor old jacob skimming along astern! he had his spectacles and his cap on, and he was swimming like a man, striking out with vigour. he swept to the height of a sea, and his poor white-whiskered face most tragically comical with its spectacles stood out clear as a cameo for a breath, ere it vanished in the hollow. it then disappeared for good.
i glanced forward again and perceived the man whom i thought had fallen into the sea climbing out of the forechains to the part of the rigging where he had been at work.
the mate, coming forward, cried, “who was it that sang out man overboard?”
“i did, sir,” answered the sailor.
“step aft!” said the mate.
the fellow dropped on to the deck and approached the officer.
“what do you mean,” cried the mate in a passion, “by raising over a monkey such an alarm as man overboard?”
[248]
“i thought it was a man, sir,” answered the sailor. “i had caught sight of him on the jibboom, and believed it was bill heenan.”
“what!” shouted the mate, “with those spectacles on?”
“i didn’t notice the spectacles, sir,” said the man; “i see a figure out on the jibboom, and whilst i was looking the jib-sheet chucked him overboard, and that’s why i sung out.”
the mate stared hard at the man, but seemed to think he was telling the truth, on which he told him to go forward and get on with his work, biting his underlip to conceal an expression of laughter, as he walked towards the wheel.
that evening, in the second dog-watch, there was a fight between the sailor, whose name was jim honeyball, and bill heenan. bill had heard that jim had mistaken him for old jacob, and had told the mate so; and thereupon challenged him to stand up like a man. there was a deal of pummeling, much rolling about, encouraging cheers from the sailors, and “language,” as it is called, on the part of the combatants; but neither was much hurt.
such was the end of the poor monkey; yet he seemed to have found a successor in bill heenan, for, to the end of the voyage, the irishman was always called old jacob.
we were talking in the midshipmen’s berth over[249] the loss of the monkey, when poole, the long midshipman, who was in my watch, spun us the following yarn:—“i made my first voyage,” said he, “in a ship called the sweepstakes, to madras, calcutta, and hong kong. on our way home we brought up off singapore for a day on some business of cargo, of which i forget the nature. i was standing at the gangway, my duty as midshipman being to keep the ship’s side clear of loafers, when i saw a large boat heading for us. she was like one of those surf-boats you see at madras. there were five fellows rowing her, and one chap steered with a long oar. they were all darkies, naked to the waist. i was struck by the manner in which one of them, as the boat approached, looked over the shoulder at our ship. the others kept their eyes on their oars or gazed over the stern; but this chap stared continuously behind him as the boat advanced; by which i mean that he looked ahead, for of course a fellow rows with his back upon the bow of a boat. they came alongside, and i found that the men had a great number of monkeys to sell. i looked hard at the fellow whose chin had been upon his shoulder as he rowed, and was wondering what on earth sort of native he was, when, on a sudden, i caught sight of his tail! he was a huge ape, of the size of a man—at all events, of the size of his shipmates. he so much resembled the others at a little distance that there[250] was nothing wonderful in my not having distinguished him quickly. he had pulled his oar with fine precision, keeping time like one of the university eight, and there had been nothing odd about him at all, saving his manner of looking over his shoulder. the others held up monkeys to show us, and, i tell you, i burst into a roar of laughter when i saw this great ape pick up a bit of a marmozette and flourish it up at me as if he would have me buy. in a very little while the ship was full of monkeys. almost every man amongst us bought one. i chose a pretty little creature that slept in the clews of my hammock all the way home; but he grew so tall and quarrelsome that my mother, when i was absent last year, gave him away to an old gentleman, who shortly afterwards, in the most mysterious manner, disappeared, together with the monkey.”
“where wath the mythtery?” asked kennet.
“well,” said poole, “the notion was that the monkey had eaten up the old gentleman, dressed himself up in his clothes, and gone to london to consult a solicitor, with a view of contesting the old man’s will, as being next of kin.”
we were gradually now drawing near home. the english channel was no longer so far off but that we could think of it as something within reach of us. all my clothes had shrunk upon me, whence i might know that i had grown much[251] taller and broader than i was when i left england. my face was dark with weather, the palms of my hands hard as horn with pulling and hauling. i had the deep-sea rolling gait that is peculiar to sailors, and, indeed, i had been transformed during the months i had been away into as thorough a little “shellback” as was ever made of a boy by old ocean. i was wonderfully hearty besides—had the appetite of a wolf and the spirits of a young spaniel. i was equal to doing “my bit” on board ship, whatever might be the job i was set to. i could put as neat a bunt to the furl of the mizzen-royal as any lad aboard, knew how to send the yard down, how to pass an earing—though i was too small, and without sufficient strength, to jockey the yard-arm in reefing—was well acquainted with all the parts of the rigging, and the various uses of the complicated gear; could steer, make knots of twenty different kinds—in short, i had picked up a great deal of sea knowledge of a working sort; but i knew nothing of navigation beyond the art of bringing the sun down to the horizon through a sextant, and working out a simple proposition of latitude, for which i had to thank mr. cock; captain tempest taught me nothing.
i was very eager to get home; i had never before been so long absent from my parents. i was pining, too, for comforts which when at home i had made nothing of, but which i would now[252] think upon as the highest luxuries. how often when hacking with a black-handled knife at a piece of iron-hard salt junk and rapping the table with a biscuit to free the mouthful of any stray weevil which might be lurking in the honeycombed fragment—how often, i say, has the vision of my father’s table arisen before my eyes: the basin of soup at which i have known myself to sometimes impatiently turn up my nose; the fried sole or delicious morsel of salmon; the roast leg of mutton or sirloin of beef, with its attendant vegetables—things not to be dreamt of at sea—the jam tarts, the apple pies, the custards, not to mention the dessert! oh, how often has the lump of cold salt fat pork or the mouthful of nauseous soup and bouilli come near to choking me with those thoughts of breakfast, dinner, and supper at home, which the odious nature of the food on our cabin table has excited in my hungry imagination!
after we had crossed the parallels of the horse latitudes, as they are called, we met with some strange weather: thick skies with a look of smoke hanging about the horizon, sometimes the sun showing as a shapeless oozing, like a rotten orange, a dusky green swell rolling up out of two or three quarters at once, as it seemed, and shouldering one another into a jumble of liquid hills which strained the ship severely with rolling, making every tree-nail, bolt, and strong fastening cry aloud with a[253] voice of its own, whilst the masts were so wrung that you would have expected them any minute to snap and fall away overboard.
some of our passengers whom the mountainous seas of the horn had not in the least degree affected were now sea-sick; in fact, i heard of one lady as lying below dangerously ill with nausea. the men declared it made them feel squeamish to go aloft. i should have laughed at this in such salt toughened jacks as they but for an experience of my own; for being sent to loose the mizzen topgallant sail, i was so oppressed with nausea on my arrival at the cross-trees, that it was as much as i could do to get upon the yard and cast the gaskets adrift. this was owing to the monstrous inequalities of the ship’s movements, to the swift jerks and staggering recoveries which seemed to displace one’s very stomach in one; added to which was the close oppressive temperature, a thickness of atmosphere that corresponded well with the pease-soup-like appearance of the ocean, and that seemed to be explained by the sulphur-coloured, smoky sort of sky that ringed the horizon.
it was on this same day, or rather in the night of it, during the first watch, from eight o’clock to midnight, that a strange thing happened. it was very dark, so black indeed that though you stood shoulder to shoulder with a man you could see nothing of him. there was no wind, but a heavy[254] swell was running on whose murky, invisible coils the ship was violently rolling. there was not a break of faintness, not the minutest spot of light in the sky, whose countenance, with a scowl of thunder upon it, seemed to press close to our wildly sheering mast-heads.
there was something so subduing in the impenetrable gloom, something that lay with so heavy a weight upon the spirits, that the noisiest amongst us insensibly softened his voice to a whisper when he had occasion to speak. i particularly noticed this when some of the watch came aft to clew up the main topgallant sail and snug the main sail with its gear; there was no singing out at the ropes; instead of the hoarse peculiar songs sailors are wont to deliver when they drag, the men pulled silently as ghosts, and not a syllable fell from them that was audible to us when they were upon the yard rolling the sail up.
i was holding on to a belaying pin to steady myself when there suddenly shone out a light upon the boom iron at the extremity of the main-yard. it was of a greenish hue, sickly somewhat, so as to make one think of a corpse-candle or a graveyard jack-o’-lantern. it swayed as a bladder would or as a soap-bubble might ere it soars from the pipe out of which it is blown. it had some power of illuminating in spite of its wan complexion, for i observed that it threw a very feeble light[257] upon the clew of the sail, and that, as the ship rolled the yard-arm on which it shone towards the sea, the huge, round, ebony black swell mirrored it in the shape of a dull star like a phosphoric jelly-fish.
i had never seen such a sight before, nor indeed had i ever heard of the like of such a thing. i was standing close to poole at the time, and he said to me—
“what do you think it?”
“why, but what is it?” i responded.
“a spirit of the sea!” he exclaimed in a sepulchral voice; “the ghost of a dead sailor who has grown tired with flying and is resting himself on the yard-arm. the souls of dead seamen always carry lanterns with them to show them the road on dark nights after this pattern.”
as he spoke the fiery exhalation disappeared.
“ha! he’s started again!” cried poole. “he’ll meet with another ship presently and take another spell of rest.”
“a very good explanation, mr. poole,” exclaimed the voice of the mate, “but not strictly scientific, sir.”
he had been standing within earshot of us, yet was utterly indistinguishable in the blackness.
“the light, rockafellar,” continued the officer, “is what is called by sailors a corposant. it is supposed that the points of iron on board a ship[258] kindle into a flame some quality of electricity in the air. i daresay it will show again in a minute. yes, as i thought.... it is on the topsail yard-arm now.”