my many professions—i turn poet—on a tramp steamer—“shivering timbers”—modern seamen—struck by lightning—i leave the ship
i have been almost everything in my travels. stow-away, sailor before the mast, bandmaster on a mail steamer, wet-nurse to samoan twins,[13] bushman, boundary rider, woodcutter, sundowner, post-digger, snow-sweeper in north america, painter, deck-hand, “shilling-a-monther” in a liner’s stokehold, messroom steward, native overseer, private grave-digger, author, violinist to south sea kings and chiefs, solo violinist and orchestral violinist in the large cities of the world, music teacher, song-writer, cornet-player, composer of music for military bands, actor and singer, trader, canvasser for crank patents and medicine, banana planter in jamaica, nut planter in the south sea islands, gold miner in australia, violinist to geisha girls in japan, and the leader of numerous splendid schemes that mostly failed. glorious schemes they were; but you can never be sure of anything except that you will be certain to attend your own funeral.
13. their mother, a native woman, was drowned by the upsetting of a canoe. a norwegian sailor and i found the infants, screaming, in a hut on the coast. we secured a ripe coco-nut, and opening the eye-hole in the shell, we placed it in turns at the mouths. they both tugged away and pressed the shell with their hands as though they were at the breast! and soon went off fast asleep. in the morning we gave them into the charge of a native girl, who took them both away to the dead mother’s relations.
i have also been a poet. i wrote a little volume of australian lyrics which are all burnt now. i was so pleased with the first proofs that i put them on my bedroom mantelpiece, so that i could see them ere i slept and directly i awoke at daybreak. the reviews in the newspapers and journals thrilled me. “full of sincerity, spirit and impulse.” “marvellous descriptive ability.” “a real barbarian poet of the south seas.” i thought my fortune was made, and i could not sleep through thinking of coming fame and fortune. i thought surely such reviews in the newspapers will sell thousands of copies of my book, and i was very happy over my bright outlook. it was summer-time. i became restless, and with the reviews in my pocket i went off, walking very fast in my excitement. i soon arrived in the country at a beautiful spot.
a windmill on the hill-top whirled its big black hands as though trying to catch the winged music of skylarks in the deep blue morning sky. by the lane-side stood a cottage for sale. the very place for me, i thought. i will buy it and write there. what glorious poems of australia and the south seas they will be! the bird singing in a clump of firs just by my future front door rippled out notes as though its little body would burst with joy. i took an old envelope from my pocket and started to write a lyric—how happy i was—even the lyric was good!
a month later i wrote to the publisher and said:
“dear sir—will you kindly send me a cheque in settlement for copies of my australian lyrics sold. i would not trouble you before the quarter, but unexpected calls on my purse have arrived at an inopportune moment.”
two weeks later i received this reply:
“dear sir—in reply to yours of the 16th, no copies of your book have been sold, and we would call your kind attention to balance of ￡2, 10s. overdue for binding, and ￡1, 18s. for corrections in proof, etc., and 9s. 4d. for postage in sending out review copies.”
so ended my volume of poetry, though i must add that the publisher turned out a good sort. i would sooner deal with publishers, some of them, than with stokehold bosses and concert managers. music and book publishers cannot publish authors’ inspirations that do not sell and keep the author as well. i wish they could. as for the reviewers of my poetry, they made me feel the happiest of aspirants for four weeks, and i feel grateful for that four weeks of greatness.
i think it was after a voyage to the cape that i stayed in london for a week, and then secured a berth on board the s.s. port adelaide, a tramp steamer. we called at las palmas, and then went slap, bang across the world for sydney. it was a monotonous voyage. we had a stowaway on board; they sent him down into the stokehold. he had been a london street arab and street singer, was a jolly youth and sang the ivy and the myrtle were in bloom. then he came round with the hat and got tobacco from the amused crew. the sailors encouraged him to tell his experiences and were delighted to hear how he carried parcels for passengers at the railway stations, and often bolted with the parcel if it looked valuable! he would finish, and then take his tin whistle out and blow it, do a jig and sing some mournful street prayer.
we had very bad weather after rounding the cape, “running the easter down.” there were four passengers on board, and one died of consumption. he lay on the hatchway for two days and nights: the weather was so bad that we couldn’t stop the ship and decently bury “it.” he was canvassed up and weighted with lead, and seas came over the body all night long; we crept by it on deck like frightened shadows. when it was calmer the captain said the burial service, and then all the crew, standing round the tied canvas length, said “amen.” then gently, with the chief mate, i pushed it forward into the grave of wandering waters and heard the awful plomp as it touched the sea. at once the bell in the engine-room rang full speed ahead, the engines started banging and we were off again.
about a week after that we sighted a full-rigged sailing ship bound for new zealand, a shaw saville boat painted with white squares. she was doing about twelve knots and coming right across our bows. the main-mast was snapped off by the main-yard and two of the boats were gone; she had been through some terrible weather. she came dipping and rolling by, so close that as we looked over the side we saw the apprentices wave their hands; we all waved back as she passed by, dipping her flag to us, and we saluted back with ours. i felt a choky feeling as i watched her pass, with her broken spars and torn sails, flying away towards the mist of the sunset, the figure-head with hands stretched in prayer at the bows. the white-crested, curling waves lifted their arms and plucked at her sides as she went rolling and pitching by. there was something in the sight of that beaten ship that inspired me with more tenderness than anything i have ever seen at sea.
i would often sit in the dim, oil-lit fo’c’sle as we swayed and dipped along. the tiny round port-holes lifted to the fall and rise of the bows, revealing the tossing blue moonlit seas outside. in that roaming home of merchant sailormen, at regular intervals, came the steady-drawn, thundering music of the steamer’s onward plunge as the screw urged her across the world. from the middle of the deck roof swung the oil lamp, its faint beams showing the outlines of the huddled sea-chests on the deck floor and, all around, the narrow coffin-sized bunks wherein lay the sleeping or wakeful crew. some snored, their bearded mouths wide open; others smoked and made ribald remarks, as jim english the boatswain, a typical sailor of the old school, yarned of long-ago voyages on windjammers. a real old shellback he was, and the only sailor whom i ever heard use the expressions “shiver my timbers!” and “avast there!” i had voyaged in many sailing ships and tramp steamers, and mixed with many crews in foreign seaports, but never till then had i heard a living mouth utter those ancient nautical phrases so familiar to me in my old sea novels. “stow yer gab,” “holy moses,” “who the hell?”, “gawd lummy” and “gorblimy” were almost the only typical remarks in which sailors of my experience expressed their various moods.
this old shellback, jim english, was about sixty-five years of age, and had sailed the seas before most of the crew were born. sitting on his huge brown sea-chest, he would half close his eyelids as i played.
“give us that again, matey; my old mother sang that to me when i was a nipper,” he would say as i scraped some old melody out of the carpenter’s cheap fiddle, and his thin, wrinkled lips smiled as though he dreamed pleasantly in sleep. i never tired of listening to his yarns as he sat and took bites from his tobacco plug, his kind grey eyes moving quickly as he brought his fist down with a crash to emphasise the main facts of his wonderful tales. at night, when the wind was blowing and you could only just see the outlined forms of the watch tramping to and fro on the bridge, he would sit and tell us eerie things—how he had seen the phantom ship off the cape on moonlight nights, dead shipmates climbing aloft among the grey sails, singing chanteys.
“chummy,” he would say, “my wife’s been dead these ’ere twenty years, but often at night she sits on that old sack by my bunk there, looks at me in the old way and sez: ‘jim, keep off the booze, and don’t make the round trip a dead ’orse.’ and never a drop have i touched these ten years; and the old girl comes with me and sits there and looks at me with her laughing grey eyes on every trip now.”
so earnest was he that our heads instinctively turned as we looked at the sack in the dark corner. we half expected to see his dead wife sitting there staring. he believed implicitly in dreams, for all the dire disasters of his life had been foretold in them. he was a kind of old priest of the sea; he wore an oilskin skull-cap and looked upon all of us as mere children; and we felt like children as we listened to his advice and experiences. he had cures for all our ailments, and was most superstitious. once while he was yarning and sewing his socks he put one of them on inside out. suddenly discovering it, he whipped it off, then turned almost purple to the centre of his bald head and said: “now i’ve done it, mates! some cursed thing’s sure to happen before the trip’s over. i’ve lost four shipmates overboard and all through them putting their socks on inside out!” as he said this anguish wrinkled his sea-beaten face, and i too almost cursed the unfortunate mistake. the sailors shuffling cards at the fo’c’sle table looked over their shoulders through wreaths of tobacco smoke and wondered. as for me, i believed all he said. my awestruck eyes watched him as he yarned on and fed my imagination till i was a child again. his personality filled me with admiration; i almost worshipped him. i really think if he had mutinied, and secured the old tramp steamer, i should have followed him, as a son his father, and thrown in my lot with him.
nor do i exaggerate in saying this, for his weird personality took me out of myself and away back. he refired the magic blaze, the still smouldering embers of my boyhood’s romance, and i was romantic, almost to madness, as a boy. old bearded heroes, with unflinching eyes, stared through my memories, and fell, striking that last brave blow for right! beautiful women, running by the magic moonlit sea-foams of undiscovered shores, stretched their arms seaward as the wooden galleons with reefed topsails stood inland for the shore. forlorn, lovelit eyes shone like stars through the dead sunsets on the sky-lines of vanished yesterdays, till i heard the windy poplar-trees wailing in the lanes outside my bedroom window and the robin singing on the leafless apple-tree. once more the stolen candle shone, and the light never seen on sea or land blazed through my eyes as i travelled across magic seas and enchanted distant lands, lands peopled with warriors and the beautiful creations of the torn novel by my bedside.
that old sea priest loved hymns. he was truly religious, and often sat turning the leaves of his well-fingered bible. abide with me, fast falls the eventide was a favourite hymn of his. i think i must have played it to him a hundred times, so that now the melody to me suggests ships far out at sea; and the old shellback, whom i loved, used to sit on his sea-chest telling us boys of the wooden ships that went down the seas and came back from other lands laden with scented cargoes, and that have faded away into the romantic dreams of this generation.
the remainder of the crew were a mixed lot, not very different from the usual run of sailors on tramp steamers. they were quiet men, and had little to do with the firemen and trimmers, who inhabited that half-fo’c’sle that was portioned off for them. i remember one of them was a “shilling-a-monther,” working his passage to the colonies for his health. he was a fine, broad-chested fellow, but in consumption, and whenever he was off duty he seemed to be busy rubbing his chest with oils. he had quite a dozen bottles at the foot of his bunk, which he had purchased in london from quacks: each bottle held oil that was a certain cure for consumption! we were very friendly with each other. i often helped him and, following his instructions, rubbed his back with the oils till the flesh was red. his little hacking cough would disappear for several days and he would be quite cheerful; then the cough would return and blood-spitting follow, and i felt very sorry for him, especially as, when he felt better, he would hit his chest with his fist and show me that he was at last cured.
playing cards or dominoes, sleeping and smoking were the usual excitements of the crew. on duty, they washed the decks down with the hose, tramped their watches, rolled ropes, cleaned brass work, and followed the most monotonous life under the sun. after rounding the cape to run the easter down they became busy with the sails, which helped the engines, when the wind was fair, to urge the vessel on the lonely voyage. a trip across the world on a sailing ship is very different from a voyage on a tramp steamer. she rides the waves and seeks the winds, and like a mammoth bird thing, with men singing chanteys climbing along the bones of her spread wings, she races the clouds that fly overhead, and seems to sway the moon, stars or sun as she rolls and pitches along.
the crews of sailing ships when i was a boy were a different type of men from the crews of tramp boats. they were real sailors, or young fellows who had taken to sea life to learn to be sailors. a few of the old-time men among them, with their weather-beaten faces and old sea ways, gave that atmosphere to the fo’c’sle that has now gone for ever.
it must have been the romantic dreamer’s paradise to go down to the sea in sailing ships before the world was worldly. i can imagine those old sailors, uneducated and superstitious, on the great ocean waters, watching the sky-lines and the dying sunsets as they dreamed of undiscovered shores, or by night on deck fancied they could hear the breakers beating against the starlit sky-line where loomed the shores of eternity. time and science have swept all that away from the sea for ever. to-day the seaman stands on the deck and thinks of the latest trade union grievance.
the ways of the ocean no longer suggest eternity behind the stars, or undiscovered lands afar inhabited by strange peoples. to him the ocean tracks are simply the main highways to new york, london and the colonial cities, and to ports that are like railway stations of the high seas. passengers get off at suez, colombo, sydney or apia and catch the next boat or train as the quartermaster shouts: “all aboard! make haste, ladies and gentlemen.” rich puffing ladies and gentlemen with their daughters reship with their touring luggage for the next port, and they drag their deck-chairs and pet poodles behind them.
old-time romance of thought has hardened and petrified into our stone carved, grey terraced cities; but the blue horizons of dreams sparkle on for ever! yet withal, i have enjoyed two blessings in life. one is to have been born civilised, for i have never wanted to hurt a man or do anything really outrageous. the other is to have been born in civilised times that have enabled me to wander the world unarmed and safe; to have sniffed the tropical winds, seas and flowers of far-off countries, and gazed across primeval plains or on the mountain peaks of lonely isles; to have heard the mighty silence of vast forests and peered into the eyes of semi-savage peoples.
the cook of that tramp steamer was a strange old seaman, who drank gin and seldom spoke. he had a gnarled, stolid-looking face and expressionless eyes, very deep set. the green and flower of his youth had left him for ever; not a sentimental leaf or faded flower lingered in his memory.
he reminded me of the mummified, blackened face of an old native i saw once, who still stood erect, just as he had died, in the hollow of a huge tree trunk in a forest of new caledonia, a tree wherein he had taken shelter just before it was struck by lightning! heat had blistered the dead face till it resembled gnarled bark. there was still a glassy gleam deep in the eye-sockets, for though the eyes had gone ants had eaten the back of the head away, and so light crept through from behind, where there was a small decayed hole in the tree trunk. it was very faint though, and as i stood a little way off that awful facial expression reminded me of some hideous living mortal, whose soul slept, mole-like, in the cold, winter sleep of age, dead, yet still alive long after the real owner had committed suicide by strangling all his passions.
it is strange how such sights impress us and cling to our memory, for we meet dead men daily, whose faculties are fungus growths; we see their moving lips, shake their dead hands and wonder on the stony expression of their eyes, eyes that have not even the light of heaven behind them, as it lit up that caledonia mummy’s eye-sockets.
our captain was a naval reserve man who carried himself with incurable haughtiness. he saw life’s great drama and the light of creation only by being awestruck at himself and measuring all vastness from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head. the chief engineer was a jolly scotsman, who tipped the convivial chief steward and so always had a bottle of whisky under his bunk. when he was “half-seas-over” he sang ye banks and braes and will ye no’ come back again? as the engines thumped and the tramp steamer rolled and pitched along the highway of the world. we ran into terrifically bad weather, and with the sails set, for the wind was fair, the old engines crashed away as she pitched and the screw blades bobbed up behind.
i have never followed the sea directly as a profession, but i have lived and communed with the hearts of sailors, held their hands in warm comradeship, as well as shared their hardships at sea and ashore. and so i have read them as they cannot read the sea or themselves. to the majority of sailors to have been to sea, say for twenty years, simply means to them, “i’ve been to sea for twenty years,” and means nothing more. to have been able to go to sea mentally, as well as physically, and to have been thrilled by the wild poetry of the wind’s songs and the romance of the sea, is to be in a strong sense a sailor of sailors. while the average sailor can still chew tobacco and tell you the names of ropes, women and grog shanties in distant seaports, i cannot even chew tobacco; but i can sit in my little room and watch the thundering seas tossing by my bedside, ablaze with the true light of sea romance, while sailing ships, with their crews aloft singing chanteys full of joy, pass and repass through my bedroom door, outbound for the seaports of the world.
about a week later the albatross that sailed the winds with restless eyes behind us night and day wheeled round and put out for the open sea, for we were nearing the coast of australia. i went ashore in adelaide and got two shillings’ worth of tomatoes for a treat. the man on the wharf helped my chum carry them. they gave me half-a-hundredweight for two shillings!
adelaide is a real old colonial seaboard town. i bought a good violin there and a lot of strings. we left next day for melbourne, and i played the violin the whole way. in melbourne the stowaway bolted, and the donkeyman swore all the way to sydney, for the careful london arab started life in the new land with his “go-ashore boots” and shirts, as well as taking, in case of emergency, about forty plugs of the crew’s allowance tobacco. we did not feel sorry for the stowaway in his venture in a new life; he had the annexing instincts of the old british stock, and we all felt he would do well in australia.
i very seldom made a round trip and so, bidding the old boatswain good-bye, after taking him ashore to hear him mutter for the last time “shiver my timbers,” i left the ship.