"Well, but the orders were not to have lights kicking about the deck at night, either naked or in a lantern; so some of our fellows--not that I at all approve of what they did--utilised a wild cat the doctor kept in a cage. When they came on deck to keep the middle watch--we were on a voyage from Seych.e.l.les to the Straits of Malacca--they would swing him, cage and all, over the stern. His eyes would be gleaming like bottled wildfire. "Twasn"t long, I can tell you, before the flying-fish sprang up at the cage. Old Tom put out his claws and hooked some of them in; but lots flew on board, and they were being fried five minutes afterwards."
"I quite believe you, Roberts," I said; "though some would call that a traveller"s tale. But just look at that lovely pair of Persian cats in the corner there, Ben; it seems almost impossible to believe they can belong to the same family as the wild cat you"ve been speaking about."
"Yes, Nie, civilisation is a wonderful thing when it can extend even to the lower animals. You were once a savage yourself too, Nie. Think of that."
"I shan"t think about it," I replied. "None of your sauce, my worthy friend. What were you doing at Seych.e.l.les, and what were you doing with a wild cat on board?"
"We had queerer things than wild cats on board, Nie; the fact is, we were what they call cruising on special service. We had a fine time of it, I can tell you. We seemed to go everywhere, and do nothing in particular. At the time we had that wild cat on board, Nie, we had already been three years in commission, and had sailed about and over almost every ocean and sea in the world."
"What a lot of fun and adventure you must have had, Ben! Wish I had been with you."
"You were in the Rocky Mountains then, I believe?"
"Yes, and in Australia, and the Cape. You see, I had a turn after gold and diamonds wherever I thought I could find them. But help yourself and me to some more of those glorious trout, and spin your yarn."
"Let us get away out of doors first, Nie. On this lovely summer"s day we should be on the lake."
So we were, reader, one hour afterwards; but the sun was too bright; there were neither clouds nor wind, and the fish wouldn"t bite; so we pulled on sh.o.r.e, drew up our boat, and seated ourselves at the shady side of a great rock on a charming bit of greensward, and there we stayed for hours, Ben lazily talking and smoking, I listening in a dreamy kind of way, but enjoying my friend"s yarn all the same.
"Yes," said Ben, "we were on special service. One day we would be dredging the bottom of the sea, the next day taking soundings. One day we would be shivering under polar skies, the next roasting under a tropical sun."
"Come, come, be easy, Ben; be easy," I cried, half-rising from the gra.s.s. "If you were under polar skies one day, how, in the name of mystery, could you be in the tropics next, Captain Roberts? I shall imagine you are going to draw the long bow, as the Yankees call it."
"Well, well, Nie; the fact is, we pa.s.sed so pleasant an existence in the _Sans Pareil_, that time really glided away as if we had been in dreamland all the while. We sailed away to the far north in the early spring of the year. We didn"t go after either seals or whales; but we did have the sport for all that. Our captain was one of those real gentlemen that you do find now and then commanding ships in the Royal Navy. Easy-going and complacent, but a stickler for duty and service for all that. There wasn"t a man or officer in the ship who wouldn"t have risked his life at any moment to please him--ay, or laid it down in duty"s cause. Indeed, the men would any day do more for Captain Mann"s nod and smile, than they would do for any one else"s shouted word of command.
"We dredged our way up north to Greenland. It was a stormy spring. We often had to lie-to for a whole week together; but we were a jolly crew, and well-officered, and we had on board two civilians--Professor kind of chaps I think they were--and they were the life and soul of the whole ship. Whenever we could we took soundings, and hauled up mud and shingle and stuff from the bottom of the dark ocean, even when it was a mile deep and more. But when that mud was washed away, and the living specimens spread out and arranged on bits of jet-black paper, what wonders we did see, to be sure! Our Scotch doctor called them "ferlies": he called everything wonderful a "ferlie." But these particular ferlies, Nie, took the shape of tiny wee sh.e.l.ls of all the colours in the rainbow, and funny wee fishes, some not bigger than a pin-point. But, oh! the beauty, the more than loveliness of them! The roughest old son of a gun on board of us held up his hands in admiration when he saw them. We cruised all round Spitzbergen, and all down the edge of the eastern pack ice. We shot bears and foxes innumerable; walruses, narwhals, seals, and even whales fell to our guns; while the number of strange birds we bagged and set up would have filled a museum.
"Some of those walruses gave us fun, though. I remember once we fell amidst ice positively crowded with them. They seemed but little inclined to budge, either. Again and again we fought our way through them; but the number seemed to increase rather than diminish, till at last our fellows--we were two boats" crews--were thoroughly exhausted, and fain to take to the boats. Was the battle ended then? I thought it was only just beginning, when I saw around us the water alive with fierce tusked heads evidently bent on avenging the slaughter of their comrades.
"Our good surgeon was as fond of sport as anyone ever I met, but he confessed that day he had quite enough of it. At one time the peril we were in was very great indeed. Several times the brutes had all but fastened their terrible tusks on the gunwale of our boat. Had they succeeded, we should have been capsized, and entirely at their mercy.
"The surgeon, with his great bone-crushing gun, loaded and fired as fast as ever fingers could; but still they kept coming.
""Ferlies"ll never cease," cried the worthy medico, blowing the brains clean out of one who had almost swamped the boat from the stern.
Meanwhile it fared but badly with the other boat. The men were fighting with clubs and axes, their ammunition being entirely spent. One poor fellow was pierced through the arm by the tusk of a walrus and fairly dragged into the water, where he sank before he could be rescued.
"The ship herself bore down to our a.s.sistance at last, and such a rain of bullets was poured upon the devoted heads of those walruses that they were fain to dive below. The noise of this battle was something terrible; the shrieks of the cow walruses, and the grunting, groaning, and bellowing of the bulls, defy all attempts at description.
"What do you think," continued Captain Roberts, "I have here in my pocket-book? Look; a sketch of a strangely fantastic little iceberg the doctor made half an hour after the battle. He was a strange man--partly sportsman, partly naturalist, poet, painter, all combined."
"Is he dead?"
"No, not he; I"ll warrant he is busy sketching somewhere in the interior of Africa at this very moment. But I loved Greenland so, Nie, that old as I am I wouldn"t mind going back again. The beauty of some of the aurora scenes, and the moonlight scenes, can never be imagined by your stay-at-home folk. We went into winter quarters. Well, yes, it was a bit dreary at times; but what with fun and jollity, and games of every kind on board, and sledging parties and bear and fox hunts on sh.o.r.e on the ice around us, the time really didn"t seem so very long after all."
"What say you to lunch, Ben, my boy?" I remarked.
"The very thing," replied my friend; "but first and foremost, just shake that ferocious-looking stag-beetle off your shoulder; he"ll have you by the ear before you know where you are."
"Ugh!" I cried, knocking the beast a yard away. The creature turned and shook his horrid mandibles threateningly at me, for a stag-beetle never runs away. Although admiring his pluck, I could not stand his impudence, so I flicked him away, and he fell into the lake.
"Ah! Nie," Captain Roberts said, "if the wild beasts of the African jungle were only half as courageous and fierce as that beetle, not so many of our gay sportsmen would go after them. Only fancy that creature as big as an elephant!
"Well, Nie, in that cruise of ours, we had no sooner got back to England and been surveyed than off we were down south, across the Bay of Biscay.
No storms then; we could have crossed it in the dinghy boat. Visited Madeira. You know, Nie, how grand the scenery is in that beautiful island."
"And how delicious the turtle!" I said.
"True, O king!" said Ben; "the bigwigs in London think they know what turtle tastes like, but they"re mistaken; there is as much difference between the flavour of a turtle newly caught, and one that has been starved to death as your London turtles are, as there is between a bit of cork and a well-boiled cauliflower."
"Bravo! Ben, you speak the truth."
"Then we visited romantic Saint Helena. It used to be called "a rock in the middle of the ocean." How different now! A more fertile and luxuriant place there isn"t in all the wide, wide world. We called at Ascension next; well, that is a rock if you like, not a green thing except at the top o" the hill [it has since been cultivated]. But the birds" eggs, Nie, and the turtle. It makes me hungry to think of them even now.
"We had whole months of sport at the Cape and in South Africa, and all up the coast as far as Zambesi. We visited Madagascar; more sport there, and a bit of honest fighting; then on to the Comoro islands--more romantic scenery, and more fighting; then to Zanzibar. Captured prizes, took soundings, dredged, and went on again. On, to Seych.e.l.les, then to Java, Sumatra, Penang, then back to India, and thence to Africa, the Red Sea, Mocha; why, it would be easier far to mention the places we did not visit. But the best of it was that we stayed for months at every new place where we cast anchor."
"Visited Ceylon, I dare say?"
"Yes, hid, and had some rare sport elephant-shooting. I tell you what, Nie, there was some clanger attached to that sort of thing in those days, but now it is little better than shooting cows, unless you get away into the little-known regions of equatorial Africa; there you still find the elephant has his foot--and a big one it is--upon his native soil. But I remember once--I and my man Friday--being charged by two gigantic tuskers, and the whole herd rushing wildly down to their a.s.sistance. It was a supreme moment, Nie. I thought my time was come; I would have given anything and everything I possessed to get up into the top of the palm-tree close beside me.
""Now, Friday," I cried, "be steady if you value your own life and mine."
"I fired, and my tusker dropped. But the terrible noise and trumpeting must have shaken Friday"s nerves a bit. He was usually a good shot, but on this occasion he missed. I loaded at once again, and as the great brute came down on us, let him have it point-blank. He reeled, but still came on. I felt rooted to the spot. My life in a moment more, I thought, would be crushed out of me. Ah! but there must have been a mist of blood before the tusker"s eyes; it was a tree he charged; his tusk snapped like a pipe-stalk, and the great elephant at once fell dead."
"It was a narrow escape."
"Well, it was, but for the matter of that, Nie, who knows but that our lives may be ever in danger, no matter where we are. A hundred times a day, perhaps, we are upheld by the kind hands of an unseen Providence, "our eyes are kept from tears, and our feet from falling."
"Should we be grateful when our lives are spared? I think so, Nie, lad; only the reckless, and the braggart, and too often the coward, boast of the dangers they have come through, just as if their own strength alone had saved them."
CHAPTER ELEVEN.
"They are all, the meanest things that be.
As free to live, and to enjoy that life, As G.o.d was free to form them at the first, Who in His sovereign wisdom made them all."
Cowper.
We had just finished lunch by the lake-side at Bala, my friend Ben Roberts and I, and were thinking of trying the fishing once more, for the clouds had banked up from the west and obscured the sun"s glare, a little breeze had rippled the water, and everything looked promising, when the Captain burst out laughing.
"Shiver my timbers! as sailors say on the stage, Nie," cried he, "if there isn"t that same old stag-beetle making his way up your jacket again, intent on revenge."
"Plague take it!" I exclaimed, shaking the brute off again; "I have flicked him away once; I shall have to kill him now."
"No you won"t," said Ben Roberts; "the world happens to be wide enough for the lot of us. Let him live. I"m a kind of Brahmin, Nie; I never take life unless there is dire necessity.
"We in England," continued Captain Roberts, "have little to complain about in the matter of insects; our summer flies annoy us a little, the mountain midges tickle, and the gnats bite, and hornets sting. But think of what some of the natives of other countries suffer. I remember as if it were this moment a plague of locusts that fell upon a beautiful and fertile patch of country on the seaboard of South Africa. It extended only for some two hundred miles, but the destruction was complete.
"The scenes of grief and misery I witnessed in some of the villages I rode through, I shall remember till my dying day.