The Golden Ocean

  Yet as the lovely, gentle weeks dropped by the entries began to be peppered with such notes as—‘Bailey and I shot two sea-lions, which makes five.’ ‘Eight crayfish today. Preston dared me to send the biggest to the Commodore, with the compliments of the berth: which I did, by Sean.’ ‘A chimney-sweeper off Monkey’s Key, 53 lb. and it took Ransome and me half an hour to land him. Drowned baby, in honour of Keppel’s getting to the top of Admiralty Hill for the first time.’ ‘Ransome made a joke before dinner: Preston said we could have catched the turtle if it had been attempted to be turned—Ransome said it could not turn turtle, because it was a turtle already. Unable to eat, although he tried. Sent to the surgeon. Pumped. Mr Woodfall let me hold the tube. Better now, though weak.’ ‘The Anna came in. We had given her up long ago. Frightfully battered, but the crew in good shape. They sheltered up a creek they found on the main and were fed by savages. Her master makes low jokes about King’s officers not to be allowed out without a master-mariner to guide their motions. He is a coarse fellow, though a capital seaman.’ ‘Sean commended by Mr Saumarez for his long splice on the best bower’s cable, but in the evening he was rebuked for dragging one of Gloucester’s carpenter’s mates up and down the Sugar-loaf by his pigtail—a man called O’Toole. The O’Tooles ran in King Murtagh’s battle with the Danes, and are all thieves.’ ‘Anna’s stores found to be much damaged, but the tobacco is safe: the men are wonderfully gratified. Sean gave me a quid to try: but I am sensibly better now.’ ‘Anna surveyed. I went through her with the carpenters: very shocking indeed—14 knees broke, breast hooks gone, she is iron-sick, and I wish I may never see anything like her spirketting again. She cannot possibly go home, and is to be bought by the Commodore, broke up, and her timbers used. Her men go into Gloucester. Mr Gerard, her master, thought to argue with Gloucester’s Number One, but caught a Tartar. Lord, how we laughed.’

  In the little boat there was a beautiful silence, warm, contemplative and easy: a soft breeze came off the land, green-scented, and above them a frigate-bird lay on the wind. There was the distant sound of the smiths and carpenters working on the Gloucester, but not furiously hard—a steady, even rhythm of normal work. The Centurion and the Tryal lay almost ready for the sea, with their yards across, tall, trim, gleaming with cleanliness, their ’tween-decks wholesome and fresh at last. Here and there, dotting the bright grass of Juan Fernandez and showing in the clearings, were the rude huts and bothies that the crews had been allowed to build and inhabit; and from many of them rose blue fingers of smoke that mounted straight before the breeze from over the high land drifted them out to sea.

  ‘This is a wonderful place,’ murmured Peter, with his eyes closed. ‘I wish we could stay here for ever. Sean, this is the Tir na ’nOg, no doubt,’

  ‘It is that, your honour, honey,’ said Sean. ‘And a large piece of it I shall take home for Pegeen Ban, if the island does not get there before us.’

  ‘How will you know which gets there first? How will you know at all?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ asked Keppel, ‘with your Tir Mc Thing?’

  ‘Why, it is an island, you know,’ said Peter, ‘that comes floating off the coast of our country every few years or so, and if you can reach it you stay young for ever: but it is always a great way off, and difficult to be reached. We call it the Tir na ’nOg in our language.’

  ‘The Tir na ’nHo

  The Tir na ’nHee,’

  sang Keppel, quietly, with an endless repetition of three notes, as he stared down through the clear water to the sun-dappled weed below.

  ‘Proinsias Burke went there,’ said Peter.

  ‘And Conn Riordan the cithogue.’

  ‘Ah, but he was a seal-woman’s son, and therefore is not to be counted.’

  ‘And so was Proinsias, only the other way about; for was not the seal of the stack Proinsias’ own da, with a grey muzzle on him and one ear, no more?’

  ‘It is the truth you say, Sean, and Proinsias came back after three hundred years and found his wicked old shrew of a wife lying quiet, which made him laugh, and his wolf-hound hanged by the Queen, which made him weep, and his heart broke so it did and he grew old in a day.’

  ‘Sure I knew him myself, the old, old, the very old man, and gave him a penny as he sat in the rain with no dog for a comfort to sustain him.’

  Then the silence dropped on them again, until quite suddenly Sean said, ‘And how will I call the King when I see him? Will I say my lord, or your honour? For I will speak in English, for glory.’

  ‘Sure I cannot tell,’ said Peter. ‘Perhaps you say Majesty. Do you know, Keppel?’

  ‘I always call him “sir”,’ said Keppel, carefully dropping a crumb of bait to a vermilion fish to eat. ‘Some people use the third person, but it’s liable to get their tiller-lines crossed.’

  ‘Do you often talk to him?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Keppel indifferently. ‘He’s my godfather,’ he added.

  ‘Oh,’ said Peter: and after a pause, ‘I suppose you are pretty important—important, I mean, by land?’

  ‘No. Not a bit,’ said Keppel cheerfully. ‘Not unless someone knocks my brother on the head. Then it would be enter Mr Midshipman Keppel, the Queen of the May, in an ermine tippet and crimson breeches, attended at a respectful distance, by Admiral Palafox and Captain O’Mara. But why are you going to visit him?’

  ‘And does he not owe me a gold pound for my fingers, and three for my toes?’ asked Sean, who, like most of the sailors, had been cruelly bitten by the ice of the Horn. ‘And will he not wish to see before ever he pays—for it is a sum to set a man up in cows for his life. The Dear knows I wish I had twice the number, like the monster at the fair, to have them froze off at the price.’

  ‘But—’ began Keppel. The flat boom of the warning gun cut off the word. ‘Buoy your line. Quick. Give way,’ he cried, and before the echo came back from the hill the boat was moving fast for Cumberland Bay.

  There was a scene of intense, ordered activity at the anchorage, the squadron’s boats hurrying from ship to shore as the men swarmed on to the beach. Already sails were being bent aboard the Centurion; what was wanting in her rigging and cordage was being prepared at full speed, and men were running with the capstan bars.

  The look-out on the top of the island had seen a sail: she had come hull-up and then had tacked away: she was surely a Spaniard, and had perhaps seen the tents on the shore. This was the information that Peter snatched up in fragments: though some still maintained that she was the Severn or the Pearl, and some that she was the fore-runner of a squadron of force.

  ‘Very well, Mr Saumarez,’ said the Commodore, eyeing the boats that were to tow the Centurion out into the wind, and speaking above the scream of the fiddle on the capstan and the roar of the shanty as the anchor came home. ‘It is very well indeed.’

  But Peter, standing on the shore and watching the masts come into line and the white cloud break out from the yards, felt that it was all very ill. He had known that he was deep in the first lieutenant’s disfavour, that sundry misdemeanours had yet to be purged; he had known that somebody had to be left with the boiling-party, but the news, coldly and sharply delivered in the midst of his glee, the news that this somebody was to be Mr Palafox and none other, had been like the sky falling in.

  ‘Rot Mr Saumarez,’ he thought, passionately stamping the sand. ‘—Mr Saumarez, the—lieutenant. How I hate this loathsome island.’

  ‘Never take on, sir,’ said Hairy Amos, to soothe him. ‘They’ll never find nothing, but sweat there and back like—’

  ‘You hold your tongue,’ cried Peter, with monstrous injustice. ‘And new-reeve that tackle at once. Green, what are you gaping at? Is this a—picnic? I’ll have the next man flogged who looks up from his work. Gibbering like a lot of French monkeys. Who tied this lubberly knot? Don’t you know a parbuckle?’

  Quite demurely the men hoisted the blubber. Since those far-off days in the Channel, Peter’s voice had taken
on an entirely different ring; un-selfconsciously it could make the menacing noises to which the men were accustomed—noises that were personally directed and were yet essentially impersonal: rank talking to rating, not a boy to a man. He was not much older in years, and he looked much like an ordinary boy: yet on occasion out of that boy’s face could look a man old in hard experience—a disconcerting sight, but not a rare one in the Navy, where a midshipman might have been in action ten times by the age of fourteen, and have seen violent death looking straight at him in a hundred different shapes. But what was more important was that the men really liked him: they knew he understood his work: they knew how he had behaved when the wind blew strong: and he had not spent so many of his watches below bearing a hand in the indescribable squalor of the ’tween-decks—twenty or thirty fit men cannot look after two hundred sick and dying as well as work a ship through those dreadful seas—he had not done that for nothing, and they let him fulminate without resentment.

  He cooled off quite soon: for it is the custom in the Navy for the officers to share in all the very nasty work—the Commodore had carried stretchers with Peter at the other end when they first unloaded the fetid sick-bay—and by the time the Centurion’s topgallants had disappeared, Peter, greasy from head to foot, was seen to smile.

  ‘I sailed along of a cove once, sir,’ said Hairy Amos, throwing a handful of tried-out blubber under the cauldron, ‘as what lived on this here for seven months on end.’

  ‘Did he, though?’ said Peter, looking at the frittered blubber attentively.

  ‘Yes, sir, he did, withouten lie, strike me—’

  ‘You are not to swear, Amos,’ said Peter.

  ‘No, sir. Beg pardon, sir. Which he was one of these Hull whalers, and by mistake he got left with three or four mates, a hunting reindeer—a sort of flat-footed wild cow, sir—in Greenland: and they had been trying-out whale blubber, same as like we are trying-out sea-lion blubber. So when they had ate up their reindeers, and they see as how the master had abandoned them for the winter, which the winter is precious long in those parts—’

  ‘No it ain’t,’ said Burrows.

  ‘Yes it is,’ said Amos.

  ‘No it ain’t,’ said Burrows. ‘Not alongside of the Horn, it ain’t.’

  ‘Who are you?’ asked Green, who had nothing whatever to do with the discussion, and who knew perfectly well who Burrows was, having slept within eighteen inches of him throughout the commission.

  ‘Pipe down,’ cried Peter. ‘Strike me—Hairy Amos, go on.’

  ‘Which the winter in those parts is very, very long,’ said Hairy Amos slowly, fixing Burrows with his eye. ‘So they said, “Strike us—, we shall have to eat the fritters, what we have tried-out blubber of, these four months past.” And so they did; and so they was all rescued come the summer,’ concluded Amos.

  ‘What happened next?’ asked Smith.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Well, that’s a rotten yarn,’ said Burrows, and the boiling-party appeared to agree.

  ‘Hur,’ cried Amos, vexed by this reception, ‘which I had the honour of addressing my remarks to Mr Palafox, not to a lot of crawling longshoremen. I mean to say, my old shipmate said as how these fritters, the whale fritters, I mean, not these here fritters, what we are trying-out now—’

  ‘How did your shipmate know about our fritters?’ asked Burrows suspiciously. ‘What call had he to go on about our fritters? They are very good fritters.’

  ‘Not these fritters,’ cried Amos, lost in the complexity, and now convicted in the eyes of the party of disloyalty to the ship, whose fritters were far better than the Gloucester’s fritters or the Tryal’s, let alone the distant fritters of some unknown Hull whaler.

  ‘What did he say about the Greenland fritters?’ asked Peter.

  ‘He said, sir,’ replied Hairy Amos impressively, ‘which these was his very words, “Whale fritters,” sir, “is the loathlyest meat in the world.”’

  This was greeted by a stony silence: the men refused to be impressed by Amos’s friend, or to pay him any credit; and after a while Burrows said, ‘You and your fritters.’

  ‘I only passed the remark,’ mumbled Amos.

  ‘You and your remarks,’ said Burrows. ‘I never heard such a tale.’

  ‘If you know a better, Burrows,’ said Peter, stirring the fire, ‘you tell it.’

  ‘Hor, hor,’ cried Hairy Amos, ‘that’s right, sir. Fair enough, hor, hor.’

  They were waiting for the sea-lion blubber to yield its oil—it was wanted to give the Centurion boot-hose tops—and there was nothing to do but wait, now that the casks were all neatly arranged and the next boiling of seal-lions were flayed.

  Burrows scratched his head. ‘Well, sir,’ he said at last, ‘I don’t set up for to be a literary gent’—glaring at Amos—‘but at least I can tell a true tale of what happened to me, and not to some lubber in God-knows-where, with so-called fritters or wild cows with stuns’l booms rigged fore and aft. It was in the year twenty-one—or was it twenty-two? No, it was twenty-one, without a word of lie, for it was the same year that I married Sue, a laundress then as she is now, God bless her, second door past the Lion in Thursday Street, Deptford: you can’t miss it, and if you do the Lion will always send a potboy to show you the way—shirts got up directly and sailors’ tarpaulins mended as well as officers’ linen, by S. Burrows: and she can show you her lines, not like some people’s so-called females—’ another glare at Amos, who blushed and hung his wicked old hairy head. ‘In the year twenty-one I shipped aboard of the Rose, P. Rogers master, of two hundred and forty ton, from the Pool for the Coast with a mixed cargo; and we was four days south and west of St Vincent when a Sallee rover laid us along. Well, we fought as long as we could, but they grappled us tight and come over the side yelling blue murder—a lot of nasty black men with swords, two hundred of ’em and more. So they sorts us out and puts us in rows, a-peering into our hands. And those as had horny hands they put to one side, and the rest—a few gentlemen passengers and the merchants, they drops overboard, seeing a gentleman’s no sort of use—begging your pardon, sir.’

  ‘Never mind,’ said Peter, laughing as loud as the rest of the party and looking at his hands, which would certainly have kept him aboard the rover.

  ‘Which I mean, no use in the slave-market of Sallee,’ explained Burrows anxiously, ‘for I am sure they are very useful for—for—’

  ‘Navigation?’ suggested Green.

  ‘No,’ said Burrows. ‘Any shell-back mate can do that. For—’

  ‘Parsons?’ said Smith.

  ‘No,’ said Burrows. ‘The apostles were all from the lower-deck. Not parsons.’

  ‘Scholards?’ said Amos.

  ‘Scholards, maybe,’ said Burrows, doubtfully. ‘Anyhow, very useful and valuable, I am sure, for something. But not in the market of Sallee, where they carried us. And I was sold to a Jew-man named Isaac, which he was a very good master to me, and gave me my liberty when the fleet lay off Tangiers, where he lived then, having removed; which would have been handsome in a Christian or a renegado, and he was only a Jew, poor man. But he said according to his religion when you had served seven year—’

  ‘Mr Palafox, sir?’ This was a stranger, a man from the Tryal, and the Centurions stared at him in wooden silence, jerking their thumbs or their heads towards Peter.

  ‘Mr Palafox, sir? Compliments of Tryal’s midshipmen and would be honoured to see Mr Palafox to dinner.’

  ‘My best compliments to the Tryal’s midshipmen,’ said Peter graciously, from amidst the oil and blubber, ‘and I shall esteem myself most happy.’

  ‘Aye-aye, sir,’ said the seaman, and padded away, muttering ‘… shall esteem hisself happy, shall esteem hisself—best compliments and shall esteem….’

  It was difficult in fact to esteem himself very happy while the Centurion was at sea. Quite apart from his bitter initial disappointment, he found that he was lost without her: he had for so long identified himself wit
h the ship. But he was not strongly miserable, either: in addition to a naturally sanguine temperament he had plenty of work (nauseating, but important), and he prided himself on the tier of casks that awaited the Centurion’s pleasure—a full tier placed ostentatiously near the Gloucester’s and Tryal’s and out-topping them both. The surviving midshipmen of the Tryal—Balthaser, Todd and Bentley—were cheerful, hospitable souls, and they invited him often. The Gloucester’s berth was not nearly so much to his liking, although they were perfectly civil to a guest and did more than their duty: he did not come to know them at all well, however. Captain Saunders also asked him to dine: but Captain Saunders had too recently been his first lieutenant, with the power of the high justice, the middle and the low, for Peter to rid himself of a feeling of guilt in his presence, although Captain Saunders was the most amiable of hosts—a totally different being from the Number One who had so often and so insistently mentioned Peter’s shortcomings from the other side of the disciplinary table. Peter mentioned this feeling to Bentley, who laughed, and said, ‘It’s always like that. Did you hear about Mr Anson at Portsmouth? He went to Sir Charles with an Admiralty order for three hundred hands—flat order, no nonsense. But he had been a snotty—sounds funny, don’t it, the Commodore a midshipman, ha, ha—under Sir Charles, and the Admiral (who knew about the order, you see, and wanted every man-jack for the fleet) sang out, “Mr Anson, take your hands out of your pockets this minute.” Which cooked his goose without another word said.’

  ‘It’s the Centurion,’ said Peter, positively.

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Todd.

  ‘I tell you it is,’ cried Peter. ‘Look at that sprits’l tops’l—do you see the damned awkward great patch in the starboard leach? I put it there myself. There, as she rises. And t’other is a prize she has taken.’