The Pirate Island Page 6
“Oh, what a monster of a ship!” exclaimed little Blanche Lascelles as the ironclad approached near enough to the Galatea to enable those on board to realise her vast proportions.
“Yes,” said Brook, who was standing close by, evidently anxious for an opportunity to ingratiate himself with the ladies. “Yes, that’s the Black Prince; I know her well. Fine ship, ain’t she?”
“I think you are mistaken, sir, as to the name of that ironclad,” remarked Captain Staunton, who was on the poop within ear-shot. “The Black Prince has only three masts, and she has a raking stem, not a ram.”
“Oh, no; I’m not mistaken,” said the individual addressed. “Wait ’til we see her name; you’ll find I’m right.”
Another minute or so and the great ship swept close past them, her white ensign drooping from the peak and her pennant streaming out from her main-royal mast-head like a fiery gleam in the sunset glow, the look-out men on her forecastle and the officers on her bridge dwarfed to pigmies by comparison with the huge structure which bore them. As soon as she was fairly past the word Agincourt flashed from her stern in golden letters so large that they could be easily read without the aid of a telescope.
Captain Staunton glanced, with an amused twinkle in his eye, at his over-confident passenger, as much as to say, “What do you think of that?”
Brook looked just a trifle confused for a moment; then his brow cleared, and he replied to the captain’s look by remarking in his usual easy confident tone—
“Oh, ah, yes; it’s all right. She’s been altered, and had her name changed; I remember reading about it somewhere.”
“Good heavens!” exclaimed the skipper sotto voce to the chief mate who was standing next him; “why, before the voyage is over the man will be telling us that the Galatea is her own longboat lengthened and raised upon.”
At 7:30 p.m. the hands were mustered, when the chief and second officers proceeded to pick the watches. Bob, to his great satisfaction, found himself included in the chief officer’s watch, with Ralph Neville for a companion. They were told off, with two able and two ordinary seamen, for duty on the mizzen-mast; the two lads being also required to keep the time and strike the bell, in spells of two hours each.
By seven bells in the first watch (11:30 p.m.) the Galatea was off the North Foreland, with a nice little breeze blowing from E.N.E.
All hands were then called, the canvas was loosed and set, the tow-rope cast off by the tug and hauled inboard, and the voyage, which was to prove of so eventful a character to those entering upon it, may be said to have fairly commenced. The ship was soon under every stitch of sail that would draw, gliding down through the Downs at the rate of about seven knots, and the passengers, most of whom had remained on deck to witness the operation of making sail, then retired to their several berths, where, the night being fine and the water smooth, it is reasonable to suppose they enjoyed a good night’s rest.
* * *
* * *
Chapter Four.
The outward voyage.
By eight o’clock next morning—at which hour the passengers sat down to breakfast—the Galatea was off Dungeness, which she rounded with a somewhat freshening breeze, and noon saw her fairly abreast of Beachy Head. The weather was magnificent; the breeze, whilst fresh enough to waft the good ship through the water at the rate of an honest ten knots in the hour, was not sufficiently strong to raise much sea; the only result, therefore, was a slight leisurely roll, which the passengers found agreeable rather than the reverse, and everybody was consequently in the most exuberant spirits, congratulating themselves and each other on so auspicious a commencement to their voyage.
As for Bob, he was in the seventh heaven of delight. The noble proportions of the beautiful craft which bore him so gallantly over the summer sea, her spotless cleanliness, the perfect order and method with which the various duties were performed, and the consideration with which he was treated by his superiors, constituted for him a novel experience, in strong contrast to the wet and dirt, the often severe toil, and the rough-and-ready habits of the collier seamen on board the Betsy Jane. From the moment that Bob had assumed duty on board the Galatea Captain Staunton had taken pains to make matters pleasant for him; he had spoken freely of the heavy obligation under which he considered that Bob had laid him, and had extolled in the most laudatory terms the lad’s behaviour during that terrible winter night upon the Gunfleet; Bob, therefore, found himself the possessor of a reputation which commanded universal admiration and respect in the little community of which he was a member, with the result that he was quite unconsciously accorded a distinction which under other circumstances it would have been vain for him to hope. Thus, when our hero found himself, as he frequently did, a guest at the saloon dinner-table (Captain Staunton following the example of the commanders in the navy by occasionally inviting his officers to dine with him), the passengers almost unanimously received him into their midst with a friendly warmth which they accorded to none of the other subordinates on board, agreeing to regard in him as pleasant eccentricities those frequent lapses in grammar and pronunciation which they would have resented in others as the evidences of a decided inferiority, to be kept at a distance by the coldest and most studied disdain.
Captain Staunton took an early opportunity to speak to Bob respecting his unfortunate lack of education and culture. They were alone together in the chart-room at the moment, whither the skipper had called Bob, in order that their conversation might be strictly private.
“Robert,” said he—he always addressed Bob as “Robert” when what he had to say was unconnected with duty—“Robert, my boy, I wish to say a word or two to you respecting your education, which, I fear, has been somewhat neglected—as, indeed, might reasonably be expected, seeing how few educational advantages usually fall in the way of a fisher-lad. Now, this must be remedied as speedily as possible. I am anxious that you should become not only a first-rate seaman and thorough navigator, but also a polished gentleman, in order that you may be fitted to fill the highest posts attainable in the profession which you have chosen. When I was your age if a man knew enough to enable him to safely navigate his ship from place to place that was about all that was required of him. But times have changed since then; the English have become a nation of travellers; passenger-ships have enormously increased in number, and the man who now commands one is expected, in addition to his other duties, to play the part of a courteous and intelligent host to those who take passage with him. To enable him to perform this portion of his duties satisfactorily a liberal education and polished manners are necessary, and both of these you must acquire, my boy. There is only one way of attaining the possession of these requisites, and that is—study. The intelligent study of books will give you the education; and the study of your fellow-creatures, their speech, habits, and demeanour, will give you polish, by showing you what things to imitate and what to avoid. Now, you have an excellent opportunity to commence both these branches of study at once. Mr Eastlake, the missionary, takes the greatest interest in you, and has offered not only to lend you the necessary books, but also to give you two hours’ tuition daily, an offer which I have ventured to thankfully accept on your behalf. And in addition to this you have sixteen passengers to study. Some of them are perfect gentlemen, others, I am sorry to say, are anything but that. Your own good sense will point out to you what is worthy of imitation and what should be avoided in the manners of those around you, and I think you are sharp and intelligent enough to quickly profit by your observations. Keep your eyes and ears open, and your mouth as much as possible shut, just for the present, and I have no doubt you will soon make headway. In addition to the two hours’ tuition which Mr Eastlake has promised you I intend to give you two more; Mr Eastlake’s tuition will be in various branches of useful knowledge, and mine will be in navigation. Your studies will be conducted here in the chart-room, and I have very little doubt but that, if you are only half as willing to learn as we are to teach, you will have ma
de a considerable amount of progress by the time that we arrive at Sydney; indeed, as far as navigation is concerned, it is by no means an intricate science, and there is no reason why you should not be a skilled navigator by the time that we reach Australia.”
Bob had the good sense to fully appreciate the immense value of the advantages thus proffered to him. He was intelligent enough to at once recognise the vast intellectual distance which intervened between himself, a poor, ignorant fisher-lad, and the highly-educated men and women who were to be found among the saloon passengers, as well as the wide difference between his own awkward, embarrassed manner and the quiet, easy, graceful demeanour which distinguished some of the individuals to be seen daily on the poop of the Galatea. The sense of his inferiority already weighed heavily upon him; the opportunity now offered him of throwing it off was therefore eagerly and gratefully accepted, and he at once plunged con amore into the studies which were marked out for him.
Mr Eastlake—the gentleman who had undertaken to remedy, as far as time permitted, the serious defects in Bob’s education—was exceptionally well qualified for the task. Educated at Cambridge, where he had won a double first; naturally studious, a great traveller, endowed with a singularly happy knack of investing the driest subject with quite an absorbing interest, and a perfect master in the art of instructing, he superintended Bob’s studies so effectively that the lad’s progress was little short of marvellous. Not content with the two hours of daily tuition which had originally been proposed, Mr Eastlake frequently joined the lad on the poop or in the waist for the first two or three hours of the first night-watch, when the weather happened to be fine and Bob’s services were not particularly required, and, promenading fore and aft with his pupil by his side, he was wont to launch into long and interesting disquisitions upon such topics as were best calculated to widen Bob’s sphere of knowledge and cultivate his intellect.
Nor was Captain Staunton any less successful in that portion of Bob’s studies which he had undertaken to direct. Fortunately for our hero his skipper was not one of those men whose acquaintance with navigation consists solely in the blind knowledge that certain calculations if correctly performed will afford certain information; Captain Staunton had studied nautical astronomy intelligently and thoroughly, he knew the raison d’être of every calculation in the various astronomical problems connected with the science of navigation, and was therefore in a position to explain clearly and intelligently to his pupil every step which was necessary, as well in the simple as in the more abstruse and difficult calculations.
Thus admirably circumstanced in the matter of instructors, and aided by his own anxiety to improve, Bob made such steady and rapid progress that by the time the ship rounded the Cape he could “work a lunar,” solve a quadratic equation or any problem in the first two books of Euclid, and write an intelligently expressed, correctly spelt, and grammatical letter, in addition to possessing a large store of knowledge on everyday subjects. Nor was this all. The majority of the passengers, moved by Captain Staunton’s frequent references to Bob’s exploit on the Gunfleet, had taken quite a fancy to the lad, and conversed so frequently and so freely with him that his mauvais honte gradually disappeared, and he found himself able to mingle with them with an ease and absence of self-consciousness which was as pleasing as it was novel to him.
Meanwhile the Galatea sped rapidly and prosperously on her way. The breeze with which she had started lasted long enough to run her fairly into the north-east trades, and once in them the journey to the Line was a short and pleasant one. Here a delay of three days occurred, during which the ship had to contend with light baffling winds and calms, interspersed with violent thunder and rain squalls, the latter of which were taken advantage of to fill up the water-tanks. Then on again to the southward, braced sharp up on the larboard tack, with the south-east trade-wind blowing fresh enough to keep the royals stowed for the greater part of the time; and then, light easterly breezes, just at the time when they fully expected to fall in with strong westerly winds before which to run down their easting.
Here occurred their first check, and instead of being thankful that they had been so greatly favoured thus far, everybody of course began forthwith to grumble. The passengers, perhaps, chafed under the delay quite as much as Captain Staunton, but their outward manifestations of impatience were confined for the most part to dissatisfied glances at the hard cloudless blue sky to windward, as it met their gaze morning after morning when they came on deck, to shrugs of the shoulders whenever the subject happened to be mentioned, and to scornful, sarcastic, or despondent allusions to the proverbial longevity and obstinacy of easterly winds in general. Except Mr Forester Dale, and he, I regret to say, made himself a perfect nuisance to everybody on board by his snappishness and irascibility. The weather was “beastly,” the ship was “beastly,” and his demeanour was such as to suggest to the other passengers the idea that he considered them also to be “beastly,” a suggestion which they very promptly resented by sending him to Coventry. That his metaphorical seclusion in that ancient city was not of the very strictest kind was entirely due to the fact that his partner, Rex Fortescue, and the inimitable Brook wore on board. Rex bore the childish irritability of his senior partner with unparalleled good-humour; his strongest protest being a mere, “Shut up, there’s a good fellow, and let a man enjoy his book and his weed in peace for once in a while.” Factotum Brook attempted quite a different mode of soothing his superior. He demonstrated—to his own complete satisfaction if not to that of anybody else—that it was a physical impossibility for them to have anything but easterly winds where they were. But, he asserted, there was a good time coming; they had had easterly winds ever since they had started; this, by an unalterable law of nature, had been gradually creating a vacuum away there in the easterly quarter, which vacuum must now necessarily soon become so perfect that, by another unalterable law of nature, the wind would come careering back from the westward with a force sufficient to more than enable them to make up for all lost time.
To do Captain Staunton justice he left no means untried whereby to wile away the time and render less oppressive the monotony of the voyage. He suggested the weekly publication of a newspaper in the saloon, and energetically promoted and encouraged such sports and pastimes as are practicable on board ship; al fresco concerts on the poop, impromptu dances, tableaux-vivants, charades, recitations, etcetera, for the evening; and deck-quoits, follow-my-leader, shooting at bottles, fishing, etcetera, during the day. By these means the murmurings and dissatisfaction were nipped in the bud, harmony and good-humour returning and triumphantly maintaining their position for the remainder of the voyage. The newspaper was a great success, every incident in the least out of the common being duly recorded therein. The editor was one O’Reilly, an Irishman, who enjoyed the reputation of being one of the most successful barristers in New South Wales, to which colony he was returning after a short holiday trip “home.” The paper was published in manuscript, and consisted of twenty foolscap pages, which O’Reilly prided himself upon completely filling at every issue. Interesting facts being for the most part very scarce commodities, fiction was freely indulged in, the contributors vieing with each other in the effort to produce humorous advertisements, letters to the editor upon real or imaginary grievances, and startling accounts of purely fictitious occurrences.
In the meantime two of the passengers had discovered a species of amusement quite out of the line of the captain’s programme, and which caused that worthy seaman no small amount of anxiety and embarrassment. In a word, Rex Fortescue and Violet Dudley found in each other’s society a solace from the ennui of the voyage which onlookers had every reason to believe was of the most perfect kind. Such a condition of things was almost inevitable under the circumstances. There were four ladies on board, and thirteen gentlemen passengers, of whom no less than nine were bachelors. Of the four ladies one, Mrs Staunton, was married and therefore unapproachable. Miss Butler was an old maid, with a subdued
expression and manner ill calculated to arouse any feeling warmer than respectful esteem, so that there remained only Blanche and Violet, both young, pretty, and agreeable, to act as recipients of all the ardent emotions of the bachelor mind. Although the art, science, or pastime—whichever you will—of love-making has many difficulties to contend with on board ship, in consequence of the lamentable lack of privacy which prevails there, it is doubtful whether it ever flourishes so vigorously anywhere else. Even so was it on board the Galatea; Violet and Blanche being waited upon hand and foot and followed about the decks from early morn to dewy eve, each by her own phalanx of devoted admirers. These attentions had at first been productive of nothing more serious than amusement to their recipients; but gradually, very gradually, Violet Dudley had manifested a partiality for the quiet unobtrusive courtesies and attentions of Rex Fortescue, which partiality at length became so clearly marked that, one after the other, the rest of her admirers retired discomfited, and sought solace for their disappointment in the exciting sport of rifle shooting at empty bottles dropped overboard and allowed to drift astern, or in such other amusements as their tastes led them to favour. Blanche, however, still kept her division of admirers in a state of feverish suspense, manifesting no partiality whatever for any one of them above another. Indeed she seemed to take greater pleasure in questioning Bob about his former career, and in listening to his quaint but graphic descriptions of the curious incidents of fisher-life, than she did in the compliments or conversation of any of her admirers, a circumstance which caused Bob to be greatly envied.