"No," said I, "thanks to Jocko!"
The next day Tom Finch had his commission made out by the admiral"s secretary as commander of the _Blanche_, while I was promoted to his place in the _Porpoise_, owing to the good word he put in for me when he breakfasted with the jolly old chief; and we both of us were busy enough the next few months on the station, protecting British interests and stopping would-be privateers from having such a festive time as they expected during the period that hostilities lasted between the two rival South American republics at the time of which I speak; then wars between Chili and Peru, and the rest of these very independent states, being of as periodic occurrence of the yellow fever in the Gulf of Mexico!
Poor Jocko, as I hinted at before, came finally to grief in a very sad way.
We were chasing a suspicious looking blockade-runner, a short time after he had his remarkable invitation to dine with the admiral; our engines were moving a little more rapidly than usual; and, Jocko, who was perched on the skylight above, was looking at them with the most intense interest.
All at once, the platform on which he was resting slipped, and the talented monkey fell into the engine-room, in the midst of the machinery--there was one sharp agonised squeak, and the last page of poor Jocko"s history was marked with the word _Finis_.
CHAPTER TWO.
ESCAPE OF THE "CRANKY JANE."
A STORY ABOUT AN ICEBERG.
One day, some three years ago or so, I chanced to be down at Sheerness dockyard, and, while there, utilised my time by inspecting the various vessels scattered about this naval repository. Some of the specimens exhibited all the latest "improvements" in marine architecture, being built to develop every destructive property--huge floating citadels and infernal machines; while others were old, and now useless, types of the past "wooden walls of old England," ships that once had braved the perils of the main in all the panoply of their spreading canvas, and whose broadsides had thundered at Trafalgar, making music in the ears of the immortal Nelson and his compeers.
Amongst the different craft that caught my eye--old hulks, placidly resting their weary timbers on the muddy bosom of the Medway, dismantled, dismasted, and having pent-houses like the roofs of barns over their upper decks in lieu of awnings; armour-plated cruisers, in the First Cla.s.s Steam Reserve, ready to be commissioned at a moment"s notice; and ships in various degrees of construction, on the building slips and in dry dock--was a vessel which seemed to be undergoing the operation of "padding her hull," if the phrase be admissible as explaining what I noticed about her, the planking, from which the copper sheathing had been previously stripped, being doubled, apparently, and protected in weak places by additional beams and braces being fixed to the sides. Of course, I may be all wrong in this, but it was what seemed to me to be the case.
On inquiry I learnt that the vessel was the _Alert_, which it may be recollected was one of the two ships in the Arctic expedition commanded by Sir George Nares. I wondered why so many workmen were busy about her, hammering, sawing, planing, riveting, fitting and boring holes with giant gimlets, so I asked the reason for this unwonted activity, when it might have been reasonably supposed that the vessel had played her part in the service, and might have been allowed to pa.s.s the remainder of her days afloat, in an honourable retreat up the estuary on which the dockyard stands.
But, no.
I was informed that the _Alert_ had yet many more days of Arctic experience in store for her, our government having placed her at the disposal of the United States authorities to take part in the relief of Lieutenant Greeley"s Polar expedition.--I may here mention in parenthesis that the vessel subsequently successfully performed the task committed to her substantial frame; and it was mainly by means of the stores deposited by her in a _cache_ in Smith Sound that the survivors of the expedition were enabled to be transported home again in safety.-- I, really, only mention the vessel"s name on account of the man who told me about her--a gentleman who entered into conversation with me about the cold regions of the north generally, and of the escapes of ships from icebergs in particular.
He was a seafaring man. I could see that at a glance, although he was not one I should have thought who had donned her majesty"s uniform, for he lacked that dapper look that the blue-jackets of the service are usually distinguished by; but he was a veritable old salt, or "sh.e.l.l- back," none the less, sniffing of the ocean all over, and having his face seamed with those little venous streaks of pink (as if he indulged in a dab of rouge on the sly occasionally) which variegate the tanned countenances of men exposed to all the rigours of the elements, and who encounter with an equal mind the freezing blast of the frozen sea or the blazing sun of Africa.
I told this worthy that once, when on a voyage in one of the Inman line of steamers from Halifax to Liverpool, I had gone--or rather the vessel had, to be more correct--perilously near an iceberg, when my nautical friend proceeded to give vent to his own exposition of the "glacial theory," saying that a lot of nonsense was written about the ice in the Arctic regions by people who never went beyond their own firesides at home and had never seen an iceberg. It made him mad, he said, to read it!
"I daresay you"ve read a lot of rubbish on the subject?" said the old gentleman, getting excited about the matter, as if he only wanted a good start to be off and away on his hobby.
"I daresay I have," I replied.
"Well, what with all the fiction that has been written and the fabulous stories told of the Arctic and its belongings, the "green hand" who makes the voyage for the first time is full of expectations concerning all the wonderful sights he"s going to see in "the perennial realms of ice and snow"--that"s the phrase the newspaper chaps always use-- expectations which are bound to be disappointed,--and why?"
"I"m sure I can"t tell!" said I.
"Because the things that he fancies he"s going to see don"t really exist, nor never yet did in spite of what book-learned people may say!
The voyager who goes north for the first time is bound, let us say for ill.u.s.tration, for Baffin"s Bay; and, from what he has learnt beforehand, bears and walruses, seals and sea-lions, whale blubber and the Esquimaux who eat it, all occupy some considerable share of his imagination. But, above all these, the first thing that he looks forward to see are the icebergs, or floating mountains of ice, which are so especially the creation of the cold regions, to which he is sailing. These icebergs, sir, form the staple background of every Arctic view, without which none would be deemed for a moment complete. Their gigantic peaks and jagged precipices are familiar to most, in a score of pictures and engravings drawn by artists who were never beyond the Lizard Lights; and really, I believe that if one was sketched that wasn"t at least a thousand feet high or more, and didn"t have a polar bear perched on top and a full rigged ship sailing right underneath it, why, the generality of people would think it wasn"t a bit like the real thing!"
"And what is the "real thing" like?" I asked with some curiosity.
"There you have me," said the old sailor, who had from his speech evidently received a good education; and if once "before the mast" had now certainly risen to something much higher. "To men whose minds have been wrought up to such a pitch of fancy and expectation, the first sight of a real iceberg is a complete take-down to their imagination.
Your ship is pitching about, say, in the cross seas near the mouth of Davis Strait, preparatory to entering within the smooth water of the Arctic circle, when in the far distance your eye catches sight of a lump of ice, looking, as it rises and falls sluggishly in the trough of the sea, not unlike a hencoop covered with snow, after it had been pitched overboard by some pa.s.sing ship, or like a gigantic lump of foam tossed on the crest of a wave. If the day is sunless, the reflection of light which gives it that glistening appearance, so remarkable as the midnight sun glances among an array of these objects, is wanting to add dignity to the contour of what it is a rude dissipation of life"s young dream to learn is an iceberg--though on a very small scale. It is simply a wave- worn straggler from the fleet which will soon be met sailing southward out of the Greenland fjords. The warm waters of the Atlantic will in the course of a few days be too much for it. The sun will be at work on it; it will get undermined by the wash of the breakers, until, being top-heavy, it will speedily capsize. Then the war between the ice and the elements will begin afresh, until the once stately ice-mountain will become the "bergy bit," as whalers call the slowly-lessening ma.s.s of crumbling, spongy ice, until it finally disappears in the waters; but only to rise again in the form of vapour, which the cold of the north will convert into snow, the parent of that inland ice about the polar regions which forms the source of subsequent icebergs afresh--the process being always going on, never ending!"
"Why, you are quite a philosopher," I observed.
"A bit of a one, sir," said the old gentleman with a smile. "Those who go down to the sea in ships, you know, see wonders in the deep! But, to continue what I was telling you about the icebergs. As your ship proceeds further north they become more numerous and of larger dimensions, until, as you pa.s.s the entrance of some of those great fjords, or inlets, which intersect the Greenland coast-line, they pour out in such numbers that the wary mariner is thankful for the continuous daylight and summer seas that enable him so easily to avoid these floating rocks. Here are several broken-up ones floating about in the Waigat, a narrow strait between the island of Disco and the mainland of Greenland, and in close vicinity to several fjords noted for sending big bergs adrift in the channel way to float southward. These are the "ice- mountains" of the fancy artist. One ash.o.r.e close into the land, and yet not stranded or on account of its depth in the water getting into any very shallow soundings, you may see in your mind"s eye, as I"ve seen them scores of times in reality. It presents to your notice a dull white ma.s.s of untransparent ice--not transparent, with objects to be seen through it on the other side, as I have noticed in more than one picture of the North Pole taken by an artist on the spot! This ma.s.s is generally jagged at the top with saw-like edges, and it doesn"t so very much resemble those Gothic cathedral spires as Arctic writers try to make out. Still, on the whole, the shape of this monster floating ma.s.s of ice is very striking to those seeing it for the first time; and when you come to look at it more closely, its size and general character lose nothing by having the details ciphered down, as a Yankee skipper would say."
"Are the icebergs very big?" I inquired.
"Well," said the old gentleman, quite pleased at being asked for information on the subject, and evidently wishing to convert me to his own practical way of thinking in opposition to Arctic fiction-mongers, "they may sometimes be seen of a hundred and fifty feet high, occasionally reaching to a couple of hundred, while sometimes I"ve seen an iceberg that towered up more than double that height; but the majority of them do not exceed a hundred feet at most. The colour, as I"ve said, is not emerald green, as most folks think--that is, not unless it is seen under what science-folks call the prismatic action of light--but a dull white that is almost opaque. The sides are, generally, dripping with the little streams of water formed by the melting of the ice, and glistening in the rays of the sun; but a dull white is the princ.i.p.al colour of the ma.s.s. Its base is broader than its summit, and is here and there hollowed into little caverns by the action of the waves. The pinnacles seen in the pictures of the ill.u.s.trated papers I"ve spoken of are not very plain. Indeed, both the one we are supposing and the other bergs, that are always, like the "birds of a feather" of the proverb, to be seen close together, are flattened on the top; and if here and there worn into fantastic shapes by the weather, they mostly go back to a shape which may be roughly described as broader at the base than the top; otherwise the berg would speedily capsize.
When this happens, they go over with a tremendous splash, rocking and churning up the sea for miles round, and sending wave circles spreading and widening out as from the whirlpool in the centre, in the same way as when a child pitches a stone into a pond.
"On some of the bergs are ma.s.ses of earth, gravel and stone, proving that they must lately have been connected with the land; for owing to the old bergs becoming undermined by the waves, they soon turn over, and so of course send _their_ load to the bottom. An examination of the sides of the ice-ma.s.s also shows to the eye some other peculiarities.
The greater part of the ice is white and thoroughly full of air-bubbles, which lie in very thin lines parallel to each other; but throughout the white ice there are numerous slight cracks or streaks, of an intensely blue and transparent ice, which, on being exposed to heat, before melting, I"ve been told by the surgeon of the ship I was in, dissolve into large angular grains. These blue cracks cross and cross over again in the ma.s.s of the berg, and may possibly be water which has melted and been frozen again either on the surface of the berg, or in its creva.s.ses or cracks, when it was a part of the glacier from which it first came.
But, besides the blue ice, in some icebergs may be seen a kind of conglomerate of ice-blocks of various sizes, the s.p.a.ces between them being filled up with snow or crumbled ice. This conglomerate exists usually in cracks, though it is found also in layers, and even forms large ma.s.ses of the larger bergs, mixed up with stones and earthy lumps."
"Did you ever have any adventure amongst the icebergs?" I asked the old gentleman at this juncture, thinking I had quite enough of the scientific aspect of the subject, and dreading lest he might dive further into the original composition of ice.
"Not in the Arctic Ocean," he replied; "but once, when I was only a common sailor before the mast and aboard a vessel in the Australian trade, I came across icebergs in the southern lat.i.tudes which were mighty perilous; and one of these bergs was, by the way, bigger than any I ever saw in northern seas."
"Tell me all about it," I said, glad to get him on to a regular sea yarn.
The old gentleman was nothing loth; and I noticed that the moment he began to speak of his old experiences as a merchant seaman, he dropped the somewhat affected phraseology in which he had previously been expounding his theories for my information concerning the polar regions and the formation of icebergs--thenceforth speaking much more naturally in the ordinary vernacular of Jack tars.
"I suppose it"s forty years ago, more or less," he began, "since I shipped in the brig _Jane_, John Jiggins master, bound from London to Melbourne with an a.s.sorted cargo.
"She was a decent-sized brig enough, and handy to manage when she had plenty of sea-room, and a wind right aft; but on a bowline, or when the wind was on the quarter, and there was a bit of a sea on, she kept such a stiff weather-helm, and was such a downright cranky vessel, never bending down to a breeze or lifting to the swell, that it was no wonder that as soon as the hands got used to her ways, and tumbled to her contrary points--and she was that contrary sometimes as to remind you of a woman"s temper on washing days, most ladies then being not particularly pleasant, and feeling more inclined to drive a man mad, rather than to coax and wheedle him--as soon as we all got used to her ways, I say, we christened her the "_Cranky Jane_," and that she was more or less, barring when she had a fair wind, with an easy sea and everything agreeable for her, as I said before.
"Old Cap"en Jiggins, however, wasn"t of our way of thinking.
"He was the part owner as well as master of the vessel; and loved the old brig--the "Janey" he called her, the old fool!--like the very apple of his eye, always praising her up to the nines and not allowing anybody to say a word against her sea-going qualities.
"Sometimes, when the man at the wheel would be swearing at the lubberly craft in a silent way, so that you could see he was suffocating himself with pa.s.sion and ready to burst himself, for the way in which she would fall off, or bowse up into the wind"s eye, and try to go her own way, like a horse that gets the bit between his teeth and sets his ears back, then you"d hear old Jiggins a-talking to himself about the blessed old tub.
""That"s it, my beauty! Look how she rides, the darling, like a duck!
What a clipper she is, to be sure; so easy to handle! a child could steer her with a piece of thread!"
"When, p"raps it took all one man"s strength, and perhaps two, to bring up the beast a single point to the wind!
"In spite of Cap"en Jiggins" praise, I never sailed in such an out-and- out obstinate craft as that identical _Cranky Jane_. She seemed to have been laid down on the lines and constructed, plank by plank, especially to spile a man"s temper! Somehow or other, with the very lightest of breezes--except, as I"ve said before, we had the wind right dead aft--we could never get her to lay to her course and keep it. She was always falling off and breaking away in every way but the right one, and wanting to go just in the very opposite direction, to what we did; exactly like Paddy"s pig when he"s taking it to market, and he has to whisper in its ear that he"s going to Cork, when he really wants to meet the dealer at Bandon!
"This peculiarity of the brig, of course, very naturally set the men against her; as, although what is usually called a "dry ship"--that is, the hands could sleep comfortably in the forecastle, instead of being drenched through day and night, by the seas she took in over the bows, as is the case in some clippers I"ve sailed in--she was so dreadfully hard to steer that a man"s trick at the wheel was like going on the treadmill! And yet, that very peculiarity and contrariness that made us cuss and swear too, only induced Captain Jiggins to say occasionally when she was most outrageous wide in her yawing, "Pretty dear!" or some such trash--this very peculiarity, I say, saved all our lives from the most dreadful fate, and brought us home safe to England after encountering one of the most deadly perils of the deep. Curious, isn"t it? But I"ll tell you all about it. Here goes for the yarn.
"We had done the voyage out in pretty fair time from London to Port Philip; for, most of the way, the wind was fair and almost dead aft from the meridian of the Cape of Good Hope, down in the "roaring forties,"
till we got to the Heads. Consequently, the brig couldn"t help herself but go straight onward, when the trades were shoving her along and while n.o.body wanted her to tack, or beat up, or otherwise perform any of those delicate little points of seamanship which a true sailor likes to see his ship go through, almost against his own interest, sometimes, as far as hard work is concerned in reefing and furling and taking in sail, or piling on the canvas and "letting her rip." So long as nothing of this sort was wanted from her the brig was as easy-going as you could wish and all probably that Cap"en Jiggins thought her; but, you had only just to try to get her to sail up in the wind"s eye or run with the breeze a bit ahead of the beam, and you"d soon have seen for yourself how cantankerous she could be!
"No, it was all plain sailing to Port Philip Heads; and even after we had unloaded our home cargo, and went round, first to Sydney, and afterwards to the Fiji Islands--I shan"t forget Suva Suva Bay in a hurry, I can tell you. So far, everything went serene; for, no matter where we wanted to go--and you see, the skipper wasn"t tied to any especial port to seek a cargo, but being part owner, could please himself by going to the best market; which, being a shrewd man, with his head screwed on straight, you can bet he did!--no matter where we wanted to go, as I say, the wind seemed to favour us, for it was always right astern, and everything set below and aloft, and the wind blowing us there beautifully right before it all the way--just as the old _Jane_ liked it, sweet and not too strong!
"So far, going out to Australia, and looking in at Sydney and Fiji and the islands for cargo, and loading up choke-full with just everything that our skipper counted at the highest freight, with no dead weight to break the brig"s back--so far, everything went "high-falutin"" as the Yanks say; but when we came to leave Polynesia--it ought to be christened Magnesia, I consider, for it contains a bigger continent, with a larger number of islands than Europe--and shape a course homewards to the white cliffs of Old Albion, that we longed to see again after our long absence, for we were away good two years in all, the cap"en thinking nothing of time, being his own charterer, so long as he got a good cargo from port to port, and we were engaged on a trading voyage, and not merely out and home again directly--then it was that the _Cranky Jane_ came out in her true colours, and made us love her--oh yes! just as the skipper did--over the left!
"Why, sir, she was that aggravating, that, as Bill the boatswain and I agreed, we should have liked to run her ash.o.r.e on the very first land we came to, beach her and chop her up there and then for firewood; and we wouldn"t have been content till we had burned up the very last fragment of her obstinate old hull!
"After leaving Suva Suva Bay, Fiji, where we filled up the last remaining s.p.a.ce in the _Cranky Jane"s_ hold with copra--which is a lot of cocoa-nuts smashed up so as to stow easy, out of which they make oil at home for moderator lamps--we went south further than I ever went before in any ship. Captain Jiggins, as I heard him explaining to the first officer when I was taking my trick at the wheel, and blessing the brig as usual for her stiff helm, intended making the quickest pa.s.sage that ever was made, he said, by striking down into them outlandish lat.i.tudes before he steered east and made the Horn; and I suppose he knew what he was about, as he was as good a navigator as ever handled a s.e.xtant. _He_ called it great circle sailing; but _I_ called it queer- sailing; and so did most of the hands, barring Bill the boatswain, who said the captain was right; but anyways, right or wrong, it led us into an ugly corner, as you shall hear.
"Well, we went down the lat.i.tudes like one o"clock, the brig, running free before the north-east monsoon as if she were sailing for a wager in a barge-race on the Thames; and the weather as fine as you please, warm and sunny--too much so, sometimes--so that a man hadn"t to do a stroke of work on board, save to take his turn at the wheel. Watch on deck, and watch below, we had nothing to do but loll about, with a stray pull at a brace here and a sheet there, or else walk into our grub and then turn into our bunks; for Cap"en Jiggins was the proper sort of skipper.