A BOOK FOR THE HAMMOCK

WORKS BY W. CLARK RUSSELL.

Crown 8vo, cloth extra, 6s. each; post 8vo, illustrated boards, 2s. each.

ROUND THE GALLEY FIRE.

ON THE FO’K’SLE HEAD: A Collection of Yarns and Sea Descriptions.

IN THE MIDDLE WATCH.

Crown 8vo, cloth extra, 6s. each.

A VOYAGE TO THE CAPE.

A BOOK FOR THE HAMMOCK.

THE FROZEN PIRATE, the New Serial Novel by W. Clark Russell, Author of “The Wreck of the Grosvenor,” began in “Belgravia” for July, 1887, and will be continued till January, 1888. One Shilling, Monthly. Illustrated by P. Macnab.

LONDON: CHATTO AND WINDUS, PICCADILLY.

A BOOK FOR THE HAMMOCK

BY

W. CLARK RUSSELL

AUTHOR OF “A VOYAGE TO THE CAPE,” “ROUND THE GALLEY FIRE,”

“IN THE MIDDLE WATCH,” ETC.

London

CHATTO AND WINDUS, PICCADILLY

1887

[The right of translation is reserved]

PREFACE.

The reader will please regard these papers as the mere whiskings of a petrel’s pinions skimming the blue surge of deep waters. The utmost hope of the author goes no further than that here and there something may be found to pleasantly lighten the tedium of a sleepless half-hour in the bunk or hammock, or relieve the dulness of a spell of quarter-deck lounging. The articles are reprinted from The Daily Telegraph, The Gentleman’s Magazine, The Contemporary Review, and Longman’s Magazine. It would have been troublesome to disturb the original text, and some new matter, therefore, has been included in the form of notes.

CONTENTS.

A BOOK FOR THE HAMMOCK.

A NAUTICAL LAMENT.

I asked myself the question one day whilst standing on the bridge of one of the handsomest and stoutest of the Union Company’s steamboats, outward bound to the Cape of Good Hope, What has become of the old romance of the sea?

“Whither is fled the visionary gleam?

Where is it now, the glory and the dream?”

It was a brilliant afternoon. The sunshine in the water seemed to hover there like some flashful veil of silver, paling the azure so that it showed through it in a most delicate dye of cerulean faintness. The light breeze was abeam; yet the ship made a gale of her own that stormed past my ears in a continuous shrill hooting, and the wake roared away astern like the huddle of foaming waters at the foot of a high cataract. On the confines of the airy cincture that marked the junction of sea and sky gleamed the white pinions of a little barque. The fabric, made fairy-like by distance, shone with a most exquisite dainty distinctness in the lenses of the telescope I levelled at it. The vessel showed every cloth she had spars and booms for, and leaned very lightly from the wind, and hung like a star in the sky. But our tempestuous passage of thirteen knots an hour speedily slided that effulgent elfin structure on to our quarter, where she glanced a minute or two like a wreath of mist, a shred of light vapour, and then dissolved. What has become, thought I, of the old romance of the sea? The vanished barque and the resistless power underneath my feet, shaking to the heart the vast metal mass that it was impelling, symbolized one of the most startling realities of modern progress. In sober truth, the propeller has sent the poetry of the deep swirling astern. It is out of sight. Nay, the demon of steam has possessed with its spirit the iron interior of the sailing ship, and from the eyes of the nautical occupants of that combination of ore and wire “the glory and the dream,” that ocean visionary life which was the substance and the soul of the sea-calling of other days, has faded as utterly as it has from the confined gaze of the sudorific fiends of the engine-room.

To know the sea you must lie long upon its bosom; your ear must be at its heart; you must catch and interpret its inarticulate speech; you must make its moods your own, rise to the majesty of its wrath, taste to the very inmost reaches of your vitality the sweetness of its reposeful humour, bring to its astonishments the wonder of a child, and to its power and might the love and reverence of a man. “Enough!” cries Rasselas to Imlac, “thou hast convinced me that no human being can ever be a poet.” And I have convinced myself that the conditions of the sea-life in these times prohibit the most ardent of imaginative sailors from the exercise of that sort of divination which is to be found in perfection in the old narratives. The vocation is too tedious, the stress of it too harassing, the despatch insisted upon too exacting, to furnish opportunity for more than the most mechanical motions of the mind. A man is hurried from port to port with railway punctuality. He is swept headlong through calms and storms, and if there come a pause it will be found perilous; and consternation takes the place of observation. Nothing new is left. The monsters of the deep have sunk into the ooze and blackness of time and lie foundered, waiting for the resurrection that will not come until civilization has run its course and man begins afresh. All seaboards are known; nothing less than an earthquake can submit the unfamiliar in island or coast scenery. The mermaid hugging her merman has shrunk, affrighted by the wild, fierce light of science, and by the pitiless dredging of the deep-water inquirer, into the dark vaults beneath her coral pavilions. Her songs are heard no more, and her comb lies broken upon the sands. Old ocean itself, soured by man’s triumphant domination of its forces, by his more than Duke of Marlborough-like capacity of riding the whirlwind and directing the storm, has silenced its teachings, sleeps or roars blindly, an eyeless lion, and avenges its neglect and submission by forcing the nautical mind to associate with the noblest, the most romantic vocation in the world no higher ideas than tonnage, freeboard, scantlings, well-decks, length of stroke, number of revolutions, the managing owner, and the Board of Trade!

The early mariner was like the growing Boy whom Wordsworth sings of in that divine ode from which I have already quoted—

“But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,

He sees it in his joy;

The Youth, who daily farther from the East

Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,

And by the vision splendid

Is on his way attended.”

Were I asked to deliver my sense of the highest poetical interpretation of the deep, I should point into distant times, to some new and silent ocean on whose surface, furrowed for the first time by a fabric of man’s handiwork, floats some little bark with a deck-load of pensive, wondering, reverential men. Yes! you would find the noblest and most glorious divination of the true spirit of the deep in the thoughts which fill the breasts of that company of quaintly apparelled souls. The very ship herself fits the revelation of the sea to those simple hearts who have hardily sailed down the gleaming slope behind the familiar horizon, and penetrated the liquid fastnesses of the marine gods and demons. Mark the singular structure swinging pendulum-like to the respirations of the blue and foamless swell. Her yellow sides throw a golden lustre under her. Little ordnance of brass and black iron sparkle on her bulwarks and grin along her sides. Her poop and top-lanthorns flash and fade with the swaying of her masts. Her pennons enrich the white sails with their dyes, and how long those banners may be let us conceive from that ancient account of the Armada in which it is written: “For the memory of this exploit, the foresayd Captain Banderdness caused the banner of one of these shippes to be set up in the great Church of Leiden in Holland, which is of so great a length, that being fastened to the very roofe, it reached down to the grounde.” Her men are children, albeit bearded, and not yet upon them have the shades of the prison-house begun to close. Are we not to be pitied that all the glories which enraptured them, the wonders which held them marvelling, the terrors which sent them to their devotions, should have disappeared for ever from our sight? We have still indeed the magnificence of the sunset, the splendour of the heavens by night, the Andean seas of the tempest, the tenderness of the moonlighted calm; but these things are not to us as they were to them; for a magic was in them that is gone; the mystery and fear and awe begotten of intrusion into the obscure and unknown principalities of the sea-king have vanished; our interpretation gathers nothing of those qualities which rendered theirs as romantic and lovely as a Shakesperean dream; and though we have the sunset and the stars and the towering surge—what have we not? what is our loss? what our perceptions (staled and pointed to commonplace issues by familiarity) compared with their costly endowment of marine disclosure? You see, the world of old ocean was before them; they had everything to enjoy. It was a virgin realm, also, for them to furnish with the creations of their imagination. The flying-fish! what object so familiar now? The house-sparrow wins as much attention, to the full, in the street as does this fish from the sailor or the passenger as it sparks out from the seething yeast of the blue wave and vanishes like a little shaft of mother-o’-pearl. But in those old times they found a wonder here; and prettily declared that they quitted the sea in summer and became birds. Hear how an old voyager discourses of these be-scaled fowls:

“There is another kind of fish as bigge almost as a herring, which hath wings and flieth, and they are together in great number. These have two enemies, the one in the sea, the other in the aire. In the sea the fish which is called Albocore, as big as a salmon, followeth them with great swiftnesse to take them. This poore fish not being able to swimme fast, for he hath no finnes, but swimmeth with mooving of his taile, shutting his wings, lifteth himselfe above the water, and flieth not very hie; the Albocore seeing that, although he have no wings, yet he giveth a great leape out of the water and sometimes catcheth the fish being weary of the aire.”

It is wonderland to this man. He writes as of a thing never before beheld and with a curious ambition of accuracy, clearly making little doubt that in any case his story will not be credited, and that therefore since the truth is astonishing enough, he may as well carefully stick to it. And the barnacle? Does the barnacle hold any poetry to us? One would as soon seek for the seed of romance in the periwinkle or the crab. Taking up the first dictionary at hand, I find barnacle described as a “shell-fish, commonly found on the bottom of ships, rocks, and timber.” But those wonderful ancient mariners made a goose of it; as may be observed in Mr. John Lok’s account of his ship which arrived home “marvellously overgrowne with certaine shells” in which he solemnly affirms “there groweth a certain slimie substance, which at the length slipping out of the shell and falling in the sea, becometh those foules which we call Barnacles.” Were not those high times for Jack? A barnacle, whether by the sea-side brim or anywhere else, is to us, alas! in this exhaustive age, a barnacle, and nothing more. Or take the maelstrom—a gyration not quite so formidable as the imagination of Edgar Allan Poe would have us believe, but by report exactly one of those features of the ocean to alarm the primitive fancy with frightful ideas: “Note,” says Mr. Anthonie Jenkinson in his voyage to Russia, 1557, “that there is between the said Rost islands and Lofoot a whirlepoole called Malestrand which ... maketh such a terrible noise, that it shaketh the rings in the doores of the inhabitants’ houses of the sayd islands tenne miles off. Also if there cometh any whale within the current of the same, they make a pitiful crie.” And so on. How fine as an artistic touch should we deem this introduction of the whale by the hand of an imaginative writer! The detail to the contemporary readers of Mr. Jenkinson’s yarn would make an enormous horror of that “whirlepoole,” for what should be able to swallow leviathan short of some such stupendous commotion as would be caused by the breaking up of the fountains of the waters of the earth? Let it be remembered that whales were fine specimens in that age of poetry. They were then big enough to gorge a squadron of men-of-war, ay, and to digest the vessels. We have had nothing like them since—the nearest approach to such monsters being the shark in which, on its being ripped open, there was found one full-rigged ship only, with the captain and the mate quarrelling in the cabin over the reckoning.

The age of marine romance supplied the mariner with many extraordinary privileges. We cannot control the winds as those old people did. There are no longer gale-makers from whom Jack can buy a favourable blast. The very saints have deserted us, since it is certain that—at sea—we now pray to them in vain. Observe that in fifty directions, despite our propellers, donkey-engines, steam-windlasses, and the like, the ancient mariner was out and away better off than we are. Did he want wind? Then he had nothing to do but apply to a Finn, who, for a few shillings, would sell to him in the shape of a knotted handkerchief three sorts of gale, all prosperous, but one harder than another, by which he could be blown to his port without anxiety or delay. Did a whirlwind threaten him? Then read in the Voyage of Pirard in Harris’ Collection how he managed: “We frequently saw great Whirl-winds rising at a Distance, called by the Seamen Dragons, which shatter and overturn any Ship that falls in their way. When these appear the Sailors have a Custom of repairing to the Prow or the Side that lies next the storm, and beating naked swords against one another crosswise.” Purchas, in his “Pilgrims,” repeats this, and adds that this easy remedy of the sword hinders the storm from coming over their ship, “and turneth it aside.” Did human skill and judgment fail him? There were the Saints. “Before the days of insurance offices and political economy,” writes the author of “Lusitanian Sketches,” “merchants frequently insured their ships at the highly esteemed shrine of Mantozimbo, by presenting a sum equal to the pay of captain or mate, and that, too, without stipulating for any equivalent should the vessel be wrecked.” Was it not his custom to carry the image of his patron saint to sea with him, to pray to it, to make it responsible for the winds, and, if it proved obstinate, to force it into an obliging posture of mind by flogging it? Consider what a powerful marine battery of these saints he could bring to bear upon the vexed, refractory ocean and the capricious storming of winds. St. Anthony, St. Nicholas, whose consecrated loaves of bread quelled many a furious gale, St. Roland, St. Cyric, St. Mark, St. George, St. Michael, St. Benedict, St. Clement—the list is as long as my arm, the number great enough to swell out a big ship’s company. Did pirates threaten him? There was no occasion to see all clear for action. He had but to invoke St. Hilarion—who once on a time by prayer arrested the progress of a picaroon whilst chasing—and away would scuttle the black flag. Was smooth water required for safely making a port? Then no matter how high the sea ran, all that was needful was first to find a pious man on board, light tapers (where they would burn), bring up the incense, erect a crucifix, read prayers (this being done by the pious man), sprinkle the decks with holy water, and straightway the sea under the vessel’s forefoot would flatten into a level lane, smooth as oil, albeit the surges on either hand continued to leap to the height of the maintop. Who now regards, save with mild curiosity, the corposant—the St. Elmo’s fire—the dimly burning meteoric exhalation at the yard-arm? It is no more to modern and current imagination than the phosphoric flashes in black intertropic waters. But the ancient mariner made an omen of it—a saint—a joy to be blessed; he wrought it into a beneficent symbol, and endowed it with such powers of salvation as comforted him exceedingly whilst he kneeled on quivering knees in the pale illumination of that mystic marine corpse-candle. Who now scratches the mast for a breeze? Who fears the dead body as a storm-maker? What has become of the damnatory qualities of the cat, and who now hears the dimmest echo of comminatory power in her loudest mew? And most galling of all reflections, into what ocean unknown to man has sailed the Flying Dutchman?

Let it not be supposed, however, that the elimination of poetry from the sea-life by the pounding steam engine and the swift voyage is deplorable on no further grounds than these which I have named. The utilitarian aspect is not the only one. There was romance and lustre outside those mere conditions of poetic seamanship which enabled the mariner to direct the wind by a knot, to control the tempest by a candle, to put the pirate to flight by an invocation. Emerge with me from the darkness of remote times into the light of the last—yes, and of the beginning of the present—century. Ladies were then going to sea, as they had in remoter times, dressed as men. They do so no longer. Who ever hears now of some youthful mariner with blooming cheeks and long eyelashes exciting the suspicions of his mahogany-cheeked mates by the shortness of his steps, or the smallness of his hands and feet, or a certain unboyish luxuriance of cropped hair? No, the blushing Pollies and Susans of the East End, resolved by love, by betrayal, or by the press-gang, into the shipping of breeks have had their day. No longer do we read of pretty ship-boys standing confessed as girls. I mourn this departed romantic forecastle feature. Even in fiction how the imagination is captivated by the clever insinuations of the author in his treatment of the youth whose sex he springs upon us presently to our glad surprise! The Edwins whom the Angelinas followed were not indeed very engaging people; but even attentive consideration of their rascalities will not neutralize the pleasant poetic bouquet that haunts the old tales of fine-eyed women going to sea for love or vengeance, living among the sailors, eating the bitter bad provisions of the forecastle, fighting the guns, doing the seamen’s work, and remaining for months undetected.

Again, whither has vanished a feature of the old sea-life even yet more romantically interesting than the nautical masquerading of black-eyed Susans and yellow-haired Molls—the flirtation of the long ocean passage? What we call flirtation now at sea is a mere shadow of a shadow as compared with the robust and solid reality of a period when it took a ship four months to sail to Bombay or Calcutta. There is no time allowed in this age for love-making. Before you can fairly consider yourself acquainted with a girl some wretch on the forecastle is singing out “land-ho!” I took particular notice of this matter on board the Union steamer in which I made the passage home from Cape Town. It must certainly have ended in a proposal in the case of one couple had the propeller dropped off or a boiler burst and the ship been delayed. They only wanted another week. But the steamer was impertinently punctual, about eight hours before her time: the people went ashore at Plymouth, and, for all I can tell, the young man, in the excitement of landing and meeting his friends and seeing plenty of pretty women about, may have abandoned his intention and ended for the girl a chance that would have been a certainty in the old romantic poetical sea-days. Why, we all know how the British matron used to ship her darlings off in the East Indiamen for husbands in the country with which those vessels trafficked, and how scores and scores of these unsophisticated young ladies would land engaged, having affianced themselves to gentlemen on board in calms on the Equator or in the tail of the south-east Trades, or in a small swell with a moderate breeze off Agulhas, some possibly hesitating as far as the Madagascar parallels. How many marriages originate at sea in these times of thirteen knots an hour, I wonder? Out of the several millions of passengers who are annually sea-borne, how many pledge their vows on board ship, how many fall in love there, how many become husband and wife in consequence of meeting on ship board? But a few, I’ll warrant. But only think of the old East Indiaman; four months for Captain Thunder and Miss Spooner to be together to start with; four months, and perhaps longer, with possibly Lieutenant Griffin to give a swift maturity to emotion by importing a neat and useful element of jealousy. Oh, if moonlight and music and feeling are one ashore, what are they at sea, on the deck of a sleeping fabric lifting visionary wings to the lovely stars, when the sea-fire flashes like sheet lightning to the soft surge of the ship’s bows or counter upon the light fold of the invisible swell, when the westering moon, crimsoning as she sinks, wastes her heart’s blood in the deep for love of what she is painfully and ruefully leaving, when the dew upon the bulwarks sparkles like some diamond encrustations to the starlight, when the peace of the richly clad night presses like a sensible benediction upon the breathless, enchanted, listening ship, subduing all sounds of gear-creaking in blocks, of chains clanking to the stirring of the rudder, to a tender music in sweetest harmony with the fountain-like murmur at the bows as the vessel quietly lifts to the long-drawn heave there—think of it! was there ever a bower by Bendemeer’s stream comparable as a corner for the delicate whispers of passion, for the coy reception of kisses, with some quiet nook on the white quarter-deck, shadowed from the stars and protected from the dew by the awning? If you thrill now it is because the whole ship shakes with the whirling and thrashing of those mighty beams of steel below. Emotion must be blatant or it cannot be heard. Not yet has a generation that knows I am speaking the truth in all this passed away. Confirm me, ye scores of elderly master-mariners enjoying your well-earned repose in spots hard by that ocean ye loved and sailed for years! Confirm me too, ye many survivors of a sea-going time, when the most blissful hours of your long and respectable lives were passed under the shadow of the cross-jack-yard!

I lament the decay of the old nautical costumes. There was a poetry in the dress of the people who had the handling of the big Indian ships which you will not get out of the brass buttons and twopenny cuff-rings of the contemporary skipper and mate. Nowadays it is almost impossible to tell the difference between the rigs of the mercantile captain, the dock master, the Customs man, and the harbour master. But what do you say to a blue coat, black velvet lappels, cuffs and collar with a bright gold embroidery, waistcoat and breeches of deep buff, the buttons of yellow gilt, cocked hats, side arms, and so forth? What dress has done for romance ashore we know. Pull off the feathered hats and high boots, the magnificent doublets and diamond buckles of many of those gentlemen of olden times, who show very stately in history, and button them up in the plain frock-coat of to-day, and who knows but that you might not be diverted with a procession of rather insignificant objects? In the poetical days of the sea-profession the ships very honestly deserved the dignity they got from the gilded and velveted figures that sparkled on their quarter-decks. Over no nobler fabrics of wood did the red ensign ever fly. They went manned like a line-of-battle ship. Observe this resolution arrived at by the Court of Directors (Hon. E.I.C.) held the 19th of October, 1791:—“That a ship of 900 tons do carry 110 men; 1000 ditto, 120; 1100 ditto, 125; 1200 ditto, 130.”

Were not those fine times for Jack? How many of a crew goes to the manning of a 1200-ton ship nowadays? And it is proper to note that of these 130 men there were only ten servants, i.e. a captain’s steward, ship’s steward, and men to attend to the mate, surgeon, boatswain, gunner, and carpenter. Contrast these with the number of waiters who swell the ship’s company of our 5000-ton mail boats. Those vessels went armed too, as befitted the majesty of the bunting under which old Dance had gloriously licked Johnny Crapeau.[^[1]] The bigger among them carried thirty-eight eighteen pounders; they were all furnished with boarding-nettings half-mast high and close round the quarters. The chaps in the tops were armed with swivels, musquetoons, and pole-axes. In those romantic times the merchantman saw to himself. There were no laminated plates formed of iron one remove only from the ore betwixt him and the bottom of the ocean; he sailed in hearts-of-oak, and the naval page of his day resounds with his thunder. The spirit of that romantic period penetrated the ladies who were passengers. Relations of this kind in the contemporary annals are common enough:

[1]. It is interesting to know that Sir John Franklin was in that particular fight, and worked the signals for the Commodore.

“Mrs. Macdowall and Miss Mary Harley, who lately distinguished themselves so much in the gallant defence of the ship Planter, of Liverpool, against an enemy of very superior force off Dover, are now at Whitehaven. These ladies were remarkable, not only for their solicitude and tenderness for the wounded, but also for their contempt of personal danger, serving the seamen with ammunition, and encouraging them by their presence.”

Again: “I cannot omit mentioning that a lady (a sister of Captain Skinner), who, with her maid, were the only female passengers, were both employed in the bread-room during the action making up papers for cartridges; for we had not a single four-pound cartridge remaining when the action ceased.”[^[2]]

[2]. Many similar notices may be found in the Annual Register, the Naval Chronicle, and other publications of the kind.

The glory and the dream are gone. No doubt there are plenty of ladies living who would manufacture cartridges during a sea-fight with pleasure, and animate the crew by their example and presence. But the heroine’s chance in this direction is dead and over. As dead and over as the armed passenger ship, the privateer, the pirate, and the plate-galleon. Would it interest anybody to know that the Acapulco ship was once more on her way from Manila with a full hold? Dampier and Shelvocke are dead, Anson’s tome is rarely looked into, the cutlass is sheathed, the last of the slugs was fired out of yonder crazy old blunderbuss ages ago; how should it concern us then to hear that the castellated galleon, loaded with precious ore minted and in ingots, with silk, tea, and gems of prodigious value, is under weigh again? Candish took her in 1587, Rogers in 1709, Anson in 1742. Supposing her something more substantial than a phantom, where lives the corsair that should take her now? The extinction of that ship dealt a heavy wound to marine romance. She was a vessel of about two thousand tons burden, and was despatched every year from the port of Manila. She sailed in July and the voyage lasted six months—six months of golden opportunity to the gentlemen who styled themselves buccaneers! The long passage, says the Abbé Raynal, “was due to the vessel being overstocked with men and merchandise, and to all those on board being a set of timid navigators, who never make but little way during the night time, and often, though without necessity, make none at all.” Anson took 1,313,843 pieces of eight and 35,682 oz. of virgin silver out of his galleon, raising the value of his cruise to about £400,000 independent of the ships and merchandise. They knew how to fillibuster in those days. How is it now? It has been attempted of late and found a glorious termination in a police court.

The buccaneer has made his exit and so has his fierce brother, the pirate. That dreadful flag has long been hauled down and stowed away by Davy Jones in one of his lockers. “The pirates,” says Commodore Roggewein in 1721, “observing this disposition, immediately put themselves in a fighting posture; and began by striking their red, and hoisting a black flag, with a Death’s Head in the centre, a powder-horn over it, and two bones across underneath.” Alas! even the sentiment of Execution Deck has vanished with the disappearance of this romantic flag, and there are no more skeletons of pirates slowly revolving in the midnight breeze and emitting a dismal clanking sound to the stirring of the damp black gusts from which to borrow a highly moving and fascinating sort of marine poetry.

Again, though to be sure it is not a little comforting when in the middle of a thousand leagues of ocean to feel that your ship is navigated by men furnished with the exquisite sextant, the costly chronometer, the wonderful appliances for an exact determination of position, yet there is surely less poetry and romance in the nautical scientific precision of the age, reconciling as it undoubtedly is—particularly when you are afloat—than in the old shrewd half-blind sniffing and smelling out of the right liquid path by those ancient mariners who stumbled into unknown waters, and floundered against unconjecturable continents with nothing better to ogle the sun with than a kind of small gallows called a fore-staff.

“If,” writes Sir Thomas Browne to his sailor son in 1664, “you have a globe, you may easily learne the starres as also by bookes. Waggoner[^[3]] you will not be without, which will teach the particular coasts, depths of roades, and how the land riseth upon several poynts of the compasse.... If they have quadrants, crosse-staffes, and other instruments, learn the practicall use thereof; the names of all parts and roupes about the shippe, what proportion the masts must hold to the length and depth of a shippe, and also the sayles.”

[3]. Wagenar’s “Speculum Nauticum,” Englished in 1588.

Here we have pretty well the extent of a naval officer’s education in navigation and seamanship in those rosy times. The longitude was as good as an unknown quantity to them. How quaint and picturesque was the old Dutch method of navigating a ship! They steered by the true compass, or endeavoured to do so by means of a small central movable card, which they adjusted to the meridian, and whenever they discovered that the variation had altered to the extent of 22 degrees, they again corrected the central card. In this manner they contrived to steer within a quarter of a point, and were perfectly satisfied with this kind of accuracy. They never used the log, though it was known to them. The officer of the watch corrected the leeway by his own judgment before marking it down. J. S. Stavorinus, writing so late as 1768–78, says, “Their manner of computing their run is by means of a measured distance of forty feet along the ship’s side. They take notice of any remarkable patch of froth when it is abreast of the foremost end of the measured distance, and count half seconds till the mark of froth is abreast of the after end. With the number of half seconds thus obtained they divide the number forty-eight, taking the product for the rate of sailing in geographical miles in one hour, or the number of Dutch miles in four hours. It is not difficult,” he adds, “to conceive the reason why the Dutch are frequently above ten degrees out in their reckoning.” Here we have such a form of Arcadian simplicity, if anything maritime can borrow that pastoral word, as cannot fail to excite the enthusiasm of the romancist. A like delightful and fascinating primitiveness of sea-procedure you find in Mr. Thomas Stevens’ black-letter account of his voyage; wherein he so clearly sets forth the manner of the navigation of the ancient mariner, that I hope this further extract from other people’s writings will be forgiven on the score of its curiousness, and the information it supplies:—

You know that it is hard to saile from East to West or contrary, because there is no fixed point in all the skie, whereby they may direct their course, wherefore I shall tell you what helps God provided for these men.[^[4]] There is not a fowle that appereth, or signe in the aire, or in the sea, which they have not written, which have made the voyages heretofore. Wherefore, partly by their own experience, and pondering withal what space the ship was able to make with such a winde, and such direction, and partly by the experience of others, whose books and navigations they have, they gesse whereabouts they be, touching degrees of longitude, for of latitude they be alwaies sure.

[4]. That is, for the mariners with whom he sailed.

“Gesse whereabouts they be!” The true signification of this sentence is the revelation of the fairy world of the deep. It was this “gessing,” this groping, this staring, the wondering expectation, that filled the liquid realm with the amazements you read of in the early chronicles. It would not be delightful to have to “gess” now. It could hardly mean much more than an unromantic job of stranding, a bald prosaic shipwreck, with some marine court of inquiry at the end of it, to depress the whole business deeper yet in the quagmire of the commonplace. But attached to the guesswork of old times was the delightful condition of the happening of the unexpected. The fairy island inhabited by faultless shapes of women; fish as terrible as Milton’s Satan; volcanic lands crimsoning a hundred leagues of sky with the glare of the central fires of the earth, against whose hellish effulgent background moved Titanic figures dark as the storm-cloud—of such were the diversions which attended the one-eyed navigation of the romantic days. Who envies not the Jack of that period? Why should the poetic glories of the ocean have died out with those long-bearded, hawk-eyed men? I can go now to the Cape of Good Hope—in a peculiar degree the haunt of the right kind of marvels, and the headland abhorred by Vanderdecken—I can steam there in twenty days, and not find so much as the ghost of a poetical idea in about six thousand miles of ocean. Everything is too comfortable, too safe, too smooth. There is the same difference between my mail-boat and the jolly old carrack as there is between a brand-new hotel making up eight hundred beds and an ancient castle with a moated grange. What fine sights used to be witnessed through the windows of that ancient castle! Ghosts in armour on coal-black steeds, lunatic Scalds bursting into dirges, an ogre who came out of the adjacent wood, dwarfs after the manner of George Cruikshank’s fancies—in short, Enchantment that was substantial enough too. But the brand-new hotel! Why, yes, certainly, I would rather dine there, and most assuredly would rather sleep there, than in the moated-grange arrangement. What I mean is: I wish all the wonders were not gone, so that old ocean should not bare such a very naked breast.

Observe again how elegant and splendid those ancients were in their sea notions. When they built a ship they embellished her with a more than oriental splendour of gold and fancy work. Read old Stowe’s description of the Prince Royal: how she was sumptuously adorned, within and without, with all manner of curious carving, painting, and rich gilding. They had great minds; when they lighted a candle it was a tall one. How nobly they brought home the body of Sir Philip Sydney, “slaine with a musket-shot in his thigh, and deceased at Arnim, beyond seas!” The sails, masts, and yards of his “barke” were black, with black ancient streamers of black silk, and the ship “was hanged all with black bayes, and scorchions thereon on pastboard (with his and his wyfes in pale, helm and crest); in the cabin where he lay was the corpse covered with a pall of black velvet, escochions thereon, his helmet, armes, sword, and gauntlette on the corpse.” In the regality of the names they gave their ships there is a fine aroma of poetry: Henri-Grace-a-Dieu, the Soverayne-of-the-Seas, the Elizabeth-Jonah, the Jesus-of-Lubeck, the Constant-Warwick! The genius of Shakespeare might be thought to have presided over these christenings if it were not for the circumstance of numberless squadrons of sweetly or royally named ships having been launched before the birth of the immortal bard; and a list of them harmonised into blank verse would have the organ-sounds delivered by his own great muse.

The visionary gleam has fled; the glory and the dream are over. Yes, and the prosaics of the sea have entered into the sailor’s nature and made a somewhat dull and steady fellow of him, though he will shovel you on coals as well as another, and pull and haul as heartily as his forefathers. For where be his old caper-cutting qualities? Where be the old high jinks, the Saturday night’s carouse, the pretty forecastle figment of wives and sweethearts, the grinning salts of the theatre-gallery, the sky-larking of liberty days, the masquerading humours, such, for example, as Anson’s men indulged themselves in after the sacking of Paita, when the sailors took the clothes which the Spaniards in their flight had left behind them, and put them on—a motley crew!—wearing the glittering habits, covered with yellow embroidery and silver lace, over their own dirty trousers and jackets, clapping tie and bagwigs and laced hats on their heads; going to the length, indeed, of equipping themselves in women’s gowns and petticoats; so that, we read, when a party of them thus metamorphosed first appeared before their lieutenant, “he was extremely surprised at the grotesque sight, and could not immediately be satisfied they were his own people.” They were a jolly, fearless, humorous, hearty lot, those old mariners, and their like is not amongst us to-day. The sentiment that prevailed amongst them was in the highest degree respectable.

“Yes, seamen, we know, are inured to hard gales;

Determined to stand by each other;

And the boast of the tar, wheresoever he sails,

Is the heart that can feel for another!”

And has not the passenger degenerated too? Is he as fine and enduring a man as his grandfather? is she as stout-hearted as her grandmother? The life of a voyager in the old days of the sailing-ship—I do not include John Company’s Indiamen—was almost as hard as that of the mariner. He had very often to fight, to lend a hand aloft, at the pumps, at the running rigging. His fare was an unpleasant kind of preserved fresh meat—I am speaking of fifty years ago—and such salt pork and beef as the sailors ate. His pudding was a dark and heavy compound of coarse flour and briny fat, and in the diary of a passenger at sea in 1820 it is told how the puddings were cooked: “July 16. As a particular favour obtained a piece of old canvas to make a pudding-bag, for all the nightcaps had disappeared. The pudding being finished, away it went to the coppers, and at two bells came to table smoking-hot. But a small difficulty presented itself; for then, and not till then, did we discover that the bag was smaller at top than at bottom, so that, in spite of our various attempts to dislodge it, there it stuck like a cork in a bottle, till every one in the mess had burnt his fingers, and then we thought of cutting away the canvas and liberating the pudding.” Such experiences as this made a hardy man of the passenger. There was no coddling. Everything was rough and rude; yet read the typical passenger’s writings and you will see he found such poetry and romance in the ocean and the voyage as must be utterly undiscoverable by the spoilt and languid traveller of to-day, sulkily perspiring over nap or whist in the luxurious smoking-room, or reading the magazine—that outruns its currency by a week only in a voyage to New Zealand—propped up by soft cushions in a ladies’ saloon radiant with sunshine and full of flowers. Like the early Jack, the early passenger came comparatively new to the sea and enjoyed its wonders and revelled in its freedom and drank in its inspirations. He was not to be daunted by food, by wet, by delay, by sea-sickness, by coarse rough captains. Why, here before me, in the same passenger’s diary in which the above extract occurs, I find the writer distinctly noting the picturesque in that most hideous of maritime calamities, want of water! “July 2. All hands employed catching rain water, the fresh water having given out. ’Twas interesting and romantic to see them running fore and aft with buckets, pitchers, jars, bottles, pots, pans, and kegs, or anything that would hold water. I was quietly enjoying the scene, when the clew of the mainsail above me gave way from the weight of water that had collected there, and I received the whole contents on my devoted head.” Quietly enjoying the scene! Is not this a very sublimation of the heroic capacity of extracting the Beautiful—not in the Bulwerian sense—out of the Dreadful!

But enough! Just as you seek for the romance and poetry of the ocean in the old books, so must you look there for the jovial tar, the jigging fellow, with his hat on nine hairs and a nose like a carbuncle; for the resolved and manly passenger, for the unaffected heroine, for the pretty masquerading lass, and for a hundred lovely gilded dreams of a delighted imagination roving wild in mid-ocean. The volume is closed; we now carry our helm amidships; it is no longer the captain but the head engineer that we think of and address ourselves to when, disordered by some inward perturbation, we sing:—

“O, pilot, ’tis a fearful night,

There’s danger on the deep.”

But Philosophia stemma non inspicit; and we must take it that in these days she knows what she is about.

SUPERSTITIONS OF THE SEA.

There is a story told of some English sailors who, passing by the French Ambassador’s house, that was illuminated in celebration of a treaty of peace between France and Great Britain, observed the word “Concord” flaming in the midst of several devices. The men read it “Conquer’d,” and one of them exclaiming, “They conquer us! they be,” etc., they knocked at the door and demanded to know why such a word was put up. The reason was explained, but to no purpose, and the French Ambassador, in order to get rid of these jolly tars, ordered “Concord” to be taken down and replaced by the word “Amity.”

It is to illiteracy of this kind that we are indebted for much of the romantic superstitions of the sea. In olden days the forecastle was certainly very unlettered, and the wonderful imaginings of the early navigators, whose imperfect gaze and enormous credulity coined marvels and miracles out of things we now deem in the highest degree prosaic and commonplace, descended without obstruction of learning or scepticism through the marine generations. It is easily seen on reading the old sea-chronicles how most of the superstitions had their birth, and it needs but a very superficial acquaintance with the nautical character to understand why they should have been perpetuated into comparatively enlightened times. Two capital instances occur to me, and they are both to be found in the narrative of Cowley’s voyage round the world in the years 1683, ’84, ’85, and ’86. The first relates to the old practice of choosing valentines.

“We came abreast with Cape Horn,” says the author, “on Feb. 14, 1684, where we chusing of valentines, and discoursing of the intrigues of women, there arose a prodigious storm, which did continue to the last day of the month, driving us into the latitude of 60 deg. and 30 min. south, which is further than any ship hath sailed before south; so that we concluded the discoursing of women at sea very unlucky, and occasioned the storm.” That such a superstition as this ever obtained a footing among mariners I will not declare. Yet it is easily seen that the conclusion the author arrived at, that the “discoursing of women at sea” is very unlucky, might engender a superstition strong enough to live through centuries. In the same book is recounted another strange matter, of a true hair-stirring pattern. On June 29, 1686, there had been great feasting on board Cowley’s ship, and when the commanders of the other vessels departed they were saluted with some guns, which, on arriving on board their ships, they returned. “But,” says the author, “it is strangely observable that whilst they were loading their guns they heard a voice in the sea crying out, ‘Come, help! come, help! A man overboard!’ which made them forthwith bring their ships to, thinking to take him up; but heard no more of him.” The captains were so puzzled that they returned to Cowley’s ship to see if he had lost a man; but “we nor the other ship had not a man wanting, for upon strict examination we found that in all the three ships we had our complement of men, which made them all to conjecture that it was the spirit of some man that had been drowned in that latitude by accident.” Thus they resolved their perplexity, braced up their yards, and pursued their course in a composed posture of mind; and in this easy way I think was a large number of the superstitions, which fluttered the forecastle and perturbed the lonely look-out man, generated.

So of the corposant, that ghostly meteoric exhalation, which in gales of wind or in dead calms blazes at the end of yards, or hovers in bulbous shinings upon the mastheads. One readily sympathizes with the old superstitions here. To the ancient mariner it could be nothing else than some spirit hand issuing out of the dusk that kindled those magic lamps. What should they portend to the startled hearts of the Columbian and Magellanic sailors lost in the deepest solitudes of oceans whose wastes their keels were the first to furrow? Happily they were found propitious, and superstition devised a saintly origin for them. “On Saturday,” we read in the second voyage of Columbus, “at night, the body of St. Elmo was seen, with seven lighted candles in the round top, and there followed mighty rain and frightful thunder. I mean the lights were seen which the seamen affirm to be the body of St. Elmo, and they sang litanies and prayers to him, looking upon it as most certain that in these storms, when he appears, there can be no danger.”[^[5]] The sign that admits of an auspicious interpretation is always useful. The most literal-minded of men even in these days of hard facts is pleased when something befalls him which people say is a sign of good luck. There is a famous instance of a ship having been saved by allowing a Lascar to discharge a superstitious obligation by securing a bag of rice and a few rupees in the rigging as a votive offering to some hobgoblin. His black companions, worn out with pumping, had tumbled down into the scuppers, saying that the ship was doomed, and heaven must have its way; but when the Lascar descended the rigging and pointed to the bag swinging up there, they cried out for joy, fell to the pumps till they sucked, and enabled the master to carry his ship home. That stout old buccaneer, Dampier, tells of a tempest in the midst of which a corposant flamed out from the masthead. “The sight rejoiced our men exceedingly,” says he; “for the height of the storm is commonly over when the Corpos Sant is seen aloft, but when they are seen lying on the deck, it is generally accounted a bad sign.” Anything that heartens men in extremity is good; and in olden times there were superstitions aboard ship which did more for the salvation and deliverance of mariners than all the rum punch that was ever swallowed out of capacious jacks.

[5]. Erasmus in his Dialogues, tells of a certain Englishman who, in a storm, promised mountains of gold to our Lady of Walsingham if he touched land again! Another fellow promised St. Christopher a wax candle as big as himself. When he had bawled out this offer, a man standing near said, “Have a care what you promise, though you make an auction of all your goods you’ll not be able to pay.” “Hold your tongue,” whispered the other, “you fool! do you think I speak from my heart? If once I touch land I’ll not give him a tallow candle!” Cardinal de Retz in describing a storm says, “A Sicilian Observantine monk was preaching at the foot of the great mast, that St. Francis had appeared to him and had assured him that we should not perish.”

One might go even further, and commit an apparent indiscretion by declaring that—so far as the sea goes—there may even be a virtue in lies. A vast amount of early marine enthusiasm is due to fibbing. The amazing yarns the old voyagers spun on their return sent others off in hot haste; and they took care not to come back without a plentiful stock of more exciting tales yet. Distinct impulse was given to Arctic exploration by an old Dutchman’s grave, schnapps-smelling twister. The story is told by Mr. Joseph Moxon,[^[6]] who, in the seventeenth century, was member of the Royal Society. “Being about twenty-two years ago in Amsterdam,” says he, “I went into a public house to drink a cup of beer for my thirst, and sitting by the public fire among several people, there happened a seaman to come in, who, seeing a friend of his there who he knew went in the Greenland voyage, wondered to see him, for it was not yet time for the Greenland fleet to come home; and asked him what accident brought him home so soon.” This question the other answered by saying “the ship went not out to fish as usual, but only to take in the lading of the whole fleet,” and that “before the fleet had caught fish enough to lade us, we, by order of the Greenland Company, sailed unto the North Pole and came back again.” This greatly amazed Mr. Joseph Moxon, of the Royal Society, and he earnestly questioned the man, who declared that he had sailed two degrees beyond the pole, and could produce the whole body of sailors belonging to the ship to prove it. “I believe this story,” says the Royal Society man, and he delivers it to the world as a fact, disproving all that has been recorded by the Frobishers, the Willoughbys, the Davises, and the rest of those who had steered north. One Dutchman may give rise to many superstitions—does not the world owe the legend of the Phantom Ship to the Batavian genius?—and who shall tell the extent of the impulse contained in the fable of an old Dutch whaleman yarning over a cup of beer in an Amsterdam ale-house?

[6]. In Harris’s Collection.

It is not clear, however, that any possible good can result from such marine credulity as that to which that notable prodigy, for instance, called the sea-serpent owes what life it has. It is interesting indeed to find one of the most amazing of the ancient myths vital in forecastles some thousands of years younger than the legend; but it is not evident that the Kraken, the Leviathan, the Titanic worm that dieth not, the monstrous snake of the deep, ever led the way into a wholesome and worthy issue, such as the discovery of lands or of fishermen’s hunting-fields.[^[7]] How often the sea-serpent has been seen it would be hard to say. If there be weight in human testimony there are surely witnesses enough to its existence. Dr. Samuel Johnson could not have pointed to a larger cloud of testifiers in favour of those shadowy beings which he believed in. “All seamen,” says Olaus Magnus in his “History of the Goths,” “say there is a sea-serpent two hundred feet long and twenty feet thick, who comes out at night to devour cattle. It has long black hair hanging down from its head, and flaming eyes, with sharp scales on its body.” Other early writers describe its body as resembling a string of hogsheads, and affirm it to be at least six hundred feet long. Sir Walter Scott, who found the tradition he speaks of among the Shetland and Orkney fishermen, speaks of the sea-snake as a monster that rises out of the depth of the ocean, stretches to the skies his enormous neck covered with a mane like that of a war-horse, and “with his broad glittering eyes raised mast high, looks out as it seems for plunder or for victims.”

[7]. “The steward relates,” I find in a book of travels, “that in a vessel he once sailed in, a hand aloft asserted that he saw land ahead. The captain knew this to be a mistake; and on nearing it the land turned out to be the carcase of a huge whale left by the fishery, with a number of albatrosses preying on it.”

A writer in the British Merchant Service Journal in 1879 seems to have satisfactorily solved this perplexing ocean enigma. He saw the sea-serpent three times. First in 1851, during a voyage to Tasmania. The terrifying wonder lay right in the ship’s path, but the captain would not shift his helm, with the result that he sailed close past a long log of wood covered with barnacles of great length—“so long that, being attached to the logs, they necessarily took all the undulations of the waves, which gave it the appearance of a sinuous motion.” Again, in 1853, bound for the Cape of Good Hope; the monster lay on the weather bow with his capacious jaws open; but for the second time the creature proved no more than the trunk of an old tree, a branch of which nicely expressed the beast’s jaw. Once again in 1869, this time in seven degrees north of the equator; on this occasion the serpent exhibited long, sleek, variegated sides as the sun shone upon him. “He turned out the veriest old buck of a sea-serpent I have met with in my long career at sea. There he lay alongside from eleven a.m. until nine p.m., unable to leave such good company (we had many passengers from New Zealand); but he left with us, in token of his great regard, 186 fine large rock cod, averaging at least five pounds each. We hoped to meet him again, although he was only an old log of timber.”

Many curious sea superstitions can be traced to noises which, when heard by the old navigators, were found unusual and terrifying. There is a curious passage bearing on this in the voyage of J. S. Stavorinus to the East Indies in 1768. He heard a sound just like the groaning of a man out of the sea, near the ship’s side. It was repeated a dozen times over, but seemed to recede proportionally as the ship advanced until it died away at the stern. An hour afterwards the gunner came to the author and said that on one of his Indian voyages he had met with the same occurrence, and that a dreadful storm had succeeded, which forced them to hand all their sails and drive at the mercy of the wind for twenty-four hours. The author adds that when the gunner told him this there was no sign of bad weather, yet before four o’clock in the afternoon they were scudding under bare poles before a violent tempest. Upon so singular an experience the sufferers might claim a right to base a superstition; and from that time any sound resembling that of a man bawling in the water over a ship’s side must take a barometrical character, and prove an exhortation to the mariner to see all snug.

The nervous system need be suffering from no debilitation of superstition to find in the approaching and bursting of the cyclone much that is too terrific to leave room for the display of the qualities of sublimity, though than these revolving tempests few passionate outbreaks of nature yield more. First there is the alarming indication of the barometer, with the slow and sullen glooming over of the heavens, the wan and beamless aspect of the sun or moon, the light of all the stars—even to the most piercing of the planets—being shrouded, along with the sulky heaving of the sea, whose oppressed breathing, as it comes in clogged and thickish draughts of air from the slope of each sullen fold will often be charged with a weedy, fish-like, and decaying odour. Then there is the noise of the approaching storm, that has been described as a rising and falling sound, of a moaning and complaining nature, as though the nearer deep were something sentient and crying to be hidden from the coming furious tormentor. Some have it that this melancholy and malignant echo may be heard as far off as two hundred miles, that it is caused by the actual raging of the hurricane at that distance, and that it is not directly borne to the ear by the wind, but obliquely reverberated by the clouds. A single sentence written by a sailor taking his notes from nature will have in it a suggestion of the ominousness of storm-imports beyond the reach of the finest imaginative description, as, for instance, when the captain of the ship Ida, quoted by Reid, in his interesting work, says: “Fresh gales and squally weather; at four, handed the foretopsail and foresail; at intervals the wind came in gusts, then suddenly dying away, and continued so for four hours.” Here, in a sentence, is fully described the advent of the cyclone, leaving to the fancy to make out for itself all that is comprised of expectation, watchfulness, and even fear in the dull and sudden dying away of the gusts and the silence of the four hours following. Then enter, very often, other formidable conditions, features of livid magnificence, and oppressive because of the confusion they import into aspects of nature familiar to the eye. Of such are the red skies, not the strong westerly glowings following the sinking of the sun, but spaces of blood red witnessed in the midnight zenith, sheets of purple splendour in the east and the like. One testimony speaks of a crimson sky beheld late at night both east and west, for three days before the gale came down; another of the sky catching a red light at sunset, and continuing to glow all over, as though incandescent till past midnight, the smooth breast of the sea reflecting the frightful and wondrous irradiation, so that the ship seemed to rest upon a floor of fire with a red-hot dome above. When finally the storm bursts, it comes in the manner faithfully described in “Purchas,” in the passage referring to the tempest that wrecked one hundred Spanish ships at Tercera: “This storme continued not onely a day or two with one winde, but seven or eight days continually, the winde turninge round about in all places of the compasse at the least twice or thrice during that time, and all alike with a continuall storme and tempest most terrible to beholde, even to us that were on shore much more then to such as were at sea.” In weather-aspects of the cyclonic kind we may safely seek for the origin of many a wild superstition of the ship and the sailor.

Amongst the most enduring of salt superstitions are those connected with the wind. In a dead calm to whistle for a breeze is but one illustration of an ever-abiding faith. “Scratch the foremast with a nail: you will get a good breeze,” is among forecastle saws and instances. You may raise the wind, too, by sticking a knife into the mizzen-mast, taking care that the haft points to the quarter whence you desire the breeze to blow. The cat, as we all know, is a sort of wind-broker. It is believed that pussy carries a gale in her tail. To throw a cat overboard is a storm-prescription never known to fail. In some parts of the north of England it is said it was a custom for sailors’ wives to keep a black cat in the house as a guarantee of their husband’s safety whilst away. At the same time it is a cherished article of Jack’s creed that if you have a cat on board and a heavy storm arises you may appease the wrath of the Fiend of the Weather by throwing the cat into the sea.

Wonderful stories are related of people who sold winds. Baxter, in his “World of Spirits,” gravely tells of an old parson, who, before being hanged, confessed that he had two imps, one of which “was always putting him on doing mischief, and (being near the sea) as he saw a ship under sail it moved him to send him to sink the ship, and he consented and saw the ship sink before him.” This imp would have done better had he advised the parson to sell the winds. The mariner was a credulous creature then, and a prosperous gale to the Spice Islands was surely worth more ducats than a cure of souls was likely to yield. Of all the wind-brokers mentioned in history the Russian Finn has ever been accounted the most famous. In a narrative of a voyage to the north, included in Harris’s voluminous collection, it is excellently told how the master of the ship in which the author of the narrative sailed, finding himself beset with calms and baffling airs on the coast of Finland, agreed to buy a prosperous wind from a wizard. The price was ten Kronen, about one pound sixteen shillings, and a pound of tobacco. The wizard presented the skipper with a woollen rag containing three knots, the rag to be attached to the foremast. Each knot held a gale of wind, the third rising to a tempest “so furious that we thought the heavens would fall down upon us; and that God would justly punish us with destruction for dealing with infernal wizards, and not trusting to his providence.” So recently as 1857 a sailor was tried for the murder of a mulatto, the man’s defence being that he thought the coloured fellow a Finn, and so put him out of the way of doing harm. In “Two Years Before the Mast” Dana has stated the case of the Finn delightfully, by representing a sea-cook and an old ignorant sailor talking of a wizard they knew; how he raised an unfavourable wind until the captain starved him into shifting the breeze by locking him up in the forepeak; how he got drunk every night on a bottle of rum, which, nevertheless, remained full throughout the voyage; and so forth. The capriciousness of the wind renders it a very suitable agency for diabolic influence. The causes which stagnate or fix it in an unfavourable quarter are wonderfully numerous. Holcroft, the comedian, tells us in his memoirs that during a trip to Sunderland the sailors, knowing him to be an actor, concluded that he must therefore be a Jonah. Happening on an Easter Sunday to be walking the deck with a book in his hand, he was approached by some seamen, who advised him to read a prayer-book, instead of a book of plays. “By the Holy Father!” cried one of them; “I know you are the Jonas; and by Jasus the ship will never see land till you are tossed overboard—you and your plays wid ye.” The origin of Jack’s notorious objection to sailing with a parson on board probably lies in the old superstition that the devil, who is the greatest of storm raisers, hates priests, and whenever he can catch one at sea will send a storm to destroy him.

It is not very long ago (1886) that the people on board a ship which was then off the Horn, running before a small westerly gale, noticed an immense albatross following in the vessel’s wake. This bird clung so obstinately to the skirts of the running ship that its identity became, in a day or two, a distinguishable thing amongst the other sea-fowl of a like kind that pursued the vessel. One day, as this huge bird was hovering at a short elevation above the taffrail, it was noticed that an object about the size of a dollar was suspended from its neck. Glasses were brought to bear, but nothing could be made of the great bird’s embellishment. Thereupon everybody grew eager to catch the creature, and a hook was forthwith baited with a piece of pork and towed astern. Some of the other albatrosses were caught, but the desired one was not to be entrapped. It would sail with a sweep to over the bait that hissed through the water, poise itself on a magnificent length of tremulous pinion, whilst its eyes, glowing like Cairngorm stones, inspected the greasy dainty, and then, with a scream that might have passed very well for an expression of scorn, slide away athwart the path of the wind, and fall to its old gyrations, narrowing down at last into steady pursuit.

But on the third day the noble fowl took the hook, and was triumphantly dragged on board, straining and flapping like a huge Chinese kite in a squall. It was then found that the object hanging at its neck was a brass pocket-compass case, secured to the bird by three stout strands of copper wire. Two of these wires had been severed by wear, and the box itself was thickly coated with verdigris. On opening it a piece of paper was discovered on which was written in faded ink, “Caught May 3, 1848, in lat. 38 deg. S. 40 deg. 14 min. W., by Ambrose Cocharn, of American ship Columbus.” A fresh label, with the old and new dates of capture, was fastened round the bird’s neck, and the great seagull was then released. Before the men let the bird fly they measured its wings, and found them to be 12 ft. 2 in. between the tips. It is perfectly reasonable to assume, with the captors, that this albatross, when taken and labelled by the people of the American ship Columbus, was four or five years old, and the story, therefore conclusively proves that the natural life of these birds is at least fifty years, though how much longer they may go on living after that period is attained has yet to be determined. For thirty-eight years this bird had been flying about with a brass pocket-compass case dangling at its throat! A writer once calculated the distance traversed by a little pilot-fish that accompanied the vessel he was in. It joined the ship off the Cape de Verd Islands, and it followed her right away round Cape Horn to as far as Callao; the whole distance accomplished having been about 14,000 miles, the time 122 days, showing a daily average of 115 miles.[^[8]] But what should be thought of the leagues covered by that winged postman of the old Yankee ship Columbus in a flight extending over a period of thirty-eight years?

[8]. Davis, in the “Nimrod of the Seas,” a finely-told whaling story.

It is somewhat strange that Cornelius Vanderdecken, the well-known if not popular commander of the Flying Dutchman, should never have used the seabird as a messenger to his wife and children in old Amsterdam. It is part and parcel of his unhappy destiny that he shall not be able to persuade sailors to carry a letter home for him, Jack very well knowing that, airy as may be one of these phantom missives, it has weight enough of fatality in it to sink his ship. It was an old custom among seamen on catching an albatross to secure a bundle of letters for wives and sweethearts under his wing and despatch him with a loud hurrah. Not impossibly his usefulness in this direction may have suggested that his presence signified good luck.

“At length did cross an albatross.

Through the fog it came,

As if it had been a Christian soul

We hailed it in God’s name.”

So sings the Ancient Mariner, with this result:

“And a good south wind sprung up behind.

The albatross did follow.”

The famous old buccaneering skipper Shelvocke writes, in his voyages, “We had not the sight of one fish of any kind since we were come to the south-west of the Straits of Le Maire, nor one sea-bird, except a disconsolate black albatross who accompanied us several days, hovering about us as if he had lost himself, until Sam Huntley, my second officer, observed in one of his melancholy fits that the bird was always hovering near us, and imagined from its colour that it might be an ill-omen, and, being encouraged in his impression by the continued season of contrary weather which had opposed us ever since we had got into these seas, he, after some fruitless attempts, shot the albatross.”

Who will question that in those olden times of marine superstitions the mariners of Shelvocke attributed the failure of their expedition to the shooting of that disconsolate fowl? But these birds do not appear to have inspired maritime fancy to any marked degree. The belief of old sailors that if an albatross be slaughtered it at once becomes necessary to keep one’s “weather eye lifting” for squalls, but that no harm follows if the bird be caught with a piece of fat pork, and is allowed to die a “natural” death on deck, about sums up the traditionary apprehensions in respect of the bird. Yet this meagreness of forecastle imagination is strange, for assuredly the albatross is the pinioned monarch of the deep, the majestic and beautiful eagle of the liquid, foam-capped crags and steeps of the ocean, and will for days so haunt the wakes of ships as to impart just that element of the familiar into the wild and desolate freedom of the cold grey skies and snow-swept billows of dominion which especially fertilizes the fancy of the mariner, who needs something of the prosaic to hold on by just in the same way that he swings by a rope high aloft in the middle air.

Nevertheless it is true that there are scores of comparatively insignificant sea and land birds whose feathers are supposed to cover larger powers for good or evil than even the spacious-winged albatross.

The common house-sparrow: here surely is a strange little fowl of the air to parallel, nay to surpass the wizard powers of the shrieking monarch of the Horn and the Southern Ocean; and yet it is gravely asserted that should sparrows be blown away to sea and alight upon a ship they are not to be taken or even chased, for in proportion as the birds are molested must sail be shortened to provide against the storm that will certainly come. In the interests of humanity nothing could be better than such superstitions. The harmless and beautiful gull, whose lovely sweepings and curvings through the air, whose exquisite self-balancing capacity in the teeth of a living gale, whose bright eyes, salt, shrewd voice, and webbed feet folded in bosom of ermine, it is impossible to sufficiently admire, though there be unhappily no lack of sea-side Nathaniel Winkles who regard this pretty creature as a mark set up by Nature for cockneys to shoot at, has a commercial virtue that sets it high in the long shoreman’s catalogue of things to be approved; for when this bird appears in great numbers then is its presence accepted as an infallible sign of the neighbourhood of herring shoals.

Herman Melville has somewhere said that in his time it was reckoned a bad omen for ravens to perch on the mast of a ship, at the Cape of Good Hope. We know that the raven himself was hoarse that croaked the fatal entrance of Duncan, and there is no reason, no forecastle reason at least, why the Storm-Fiend should not have ravens harnessed to his chariot after the manner of the doves of Venus, though why these plumed steeds are peculiarly obnoxious to mariners at or off the Cape of Good Hope is not certainly known.

It was an old superstition that the rotten timbers of foundered ships generated birds.[^[9]] “When,” says a very Early English naturalist, “this old wrack of ships falls in the sea, it is rotted and corrupted by the sea, and from this decay breeds birds, hanging by the beaks to the wood; and when they are all covered with plumage and are large and fat, then they fall into the sea; and then God, in his grace, restores them to their natural life.” It will thus be seen how intimate is the association between sailors and birds, particularly the kind of bird produced by rotten and sunken timber, and styled by the above very Early English naturalist “crabans,” or “cravans,” though “barnacles,” perhaps, is the term to best fit the prodigy. Even a dead bird may prove a soothsayer, according to Jack, for, says he, if a kingfisher be suspended to the mast by its beak it will swing its breast in the direction of the coming wind. Easier even than whistling for a breeze, and as a weathercock worth the lordliest and more flashing of ecclesiastical vanes, which will only tell how the wind is actually blowing. This is a vulgar error in Sir Thomas Browne’s list, but not exploded by that eloquent worthy. Nay, he rather explains it by remarking “that a kingfisher hanged by the bill showeth what quarter the wind is by an occult and secret property converting the breast to that part of the horizon from whence the wind doth blow. This is a received opinion, and very strange, introducing natural weathercocks and extending magnetical positions as far as animal natures—a conceit supported chiefly by present practice, yet not made out by reason nor experience.” But neither reason nor experience is desirable in superstition—that is to say if superstition is to flourish. It was long believed that gulls were never to be seen bleeding, and that the shooting stars were the half-digested food of these birds.[^[10]] Why fancy should ever trouble itself with the blood of gulls is not clear; as to shooting stars it was reasonable that the method by which they were produced should be accurately stated and settled once for all. Some of the superstitions in connection with birds and their influence over things maritime are very curious and romantic. Anciently, swallows were deemed unlucky at sea, and we read that Cleopatra abandoned a voyage on observing a swallow at the masthead of the ship.

[9]. I advert to this singular article of marine superstition in another chapter.

“Swallows have built

In Cleopatra’s sails their nests; the augurers

Say they know not, they cannot tell, look grimly,

And dare not speak their knowledge.”

[10]. Both the Rev. John Ray and Dr. Edward Browne (son of the famous Norwich Knight) speak of this queer belief in their “Travels.”

On the other hand, it was agreed that if a kite perched on a mast the omen was a favourable one. A crow lighting on a ship is accepted by the Chinese as a sure sign of prosperous gales, and they feed the bird with crumbs of bread by way of coaxing it to remain. The magpie is another evil bird. A sailor said to Sir Walter Scott, “All the world agrees that one magpie bodes ill-luck, two are not bad, but three are the very devil itself. I never saw three magpies but twice, and once I nearly lost my vessel, and afterwards I fell off my horse and was hurt.”

It is said that fishermen in the English Channel attribute the east wind to the flight of curlew on dark nights. It is possible that such a superstition may exist, nor could a far wilder fancy be held ill-founded by one who, in midnight darkness upon the sea-shore, has heard the dismal wailings and cryings of invisible birds speeding through the blackness in detachments, and making their weird noises sound as though they were uttered by one set of fowl wheeling round and round again. But, spite of Coleridge’s marvellous poem, the stately albatross, taking all the sea birds round, stands lowest in the catalogue of the feathered tribe, accredited with special necromancy in good or bad directions.[^[11]] The little Mother Carey’s chicken, the stormy petrel, the tiny swallow of the deep, is distinctly ahead of the huge creature with its span of thirteen feet, and a score of superstitions crowd about it, such as its power of evoking storms, its being the soul of a dead sailor, and so forth. The albatross is beaten out of the field, too, by the common seagull, whose familiar presence is no doubt the cause of its rich legendary and traditional endowment. But for all that the albatross remains the sovereign of the seas, and unless the average duration of its life is already positively known, the discovery made in 1886 of the bird with the compass at its neck having been alive so long ago as 1848, will be received with interest by all admirers of the lovely and noble creature.[^[12]]

[11]. “About this time a beautiful white bird, web-footed, and not unlike a dove in size and plumage, hovered over the masthead of the cutter, and, notwithstanding the pitching of the boat, frequently attempted to perch on it, and continued to flutter there till dark. Trifling as this circumstance may appear, it was considered by us all as a propitious omen.” This passage occurs in the account of the loss of the Lady Hobart in the Mariner’s Chronicle. What sort of bird this was, unless a gull, I cannot imagine.

[12]. An old legend states these birds to be the disembodied spirits of captains who have been wrecked off the Cape, and who are condemned to wear the feathers for seven years by order of the demon of the deep. An author writes fifty years ago: “Caught a splendid albatross; measured nineteen feet from the tip of each wing. He had been following the ship for many hours; but I was surprised to see what an insignificant figure he cut when dissected. He turned out all feathers.” He was no doubt a captain!

A boatman told me that once whilst fishing off the coast in forty feet of water, the tide a quarter ebb, and the sea a dark clear green, he and his mate were hanging over the boat’s side with lines in their hands when they saw a mermaid floating past under the surface by about the depth a man’s arm would penetrate. I asked him what the mermaid was like, and he replied that she was of a chocolate colour, with short black hair and very large intensely black eyes. Her figure to the waist was that of a woman; the rest of her was fish-shaped. Altogether he reckoned her to have been of the size of a thirty-pound salmon, only that she was longer than a fish of that weight would be. Her face and figure—as much of it as was human—were as small as those of a child two years old. She was an unmistakable mermaid—he’d warrant that. Might he never airn another shilling in this world if he wor telling a lie. She floated by at an oar’s length; had the sight of her left him and his mate their wits they would have secured her; but some minutes passed before they recovered from their amazement, and though they got their anchor and pulled in the direction of the creature they saw no more of her. I was glad to hear that there was, at all events, one mermaid still in existence, for I had been given to understand that the last of these ocean Mohicans had been gorged by the sea-serpent a little before the date on which her Majesty’s ship Bacchante sighted the Flying Dutchman.

It is customary to look into antiquity for the origin of mermaids, to trace these daughters of the deep to the Nereids and Naiads, with some reference to the Syrens and to Circe and to Hylas and the Argonautic voyages. Would it not be easier to take Jack’s word for it? There is the sea-serpent; nobody would care to say positively that the mighty snake is a myth. It is like a ghost; one would rather reserve one’s opinion on the matter. So, in spite of the Barnumisms of the aquarium, who has courage enough in the face of the testimonies of many scores of mahogany-cheeked eye-witnesses to assert with all cocksureness that there is not and never was such a thing as a mermaid?

At all events, Simon Wilkin, F.L.S., who edited an edition of the works of Sir Thomas Browne, has stated such a case for the mermaid as merits something better than a smile. It is the business of the learned Norwich Knight to explode the sea-nymph as a vulgar error, and he certainly bears hard upon popular faith by denying the syren to be the mermaid’s original, as “containing no fishy composure,” and, by tracing her to Dagon, of whose stump “the fishy part only remained when the hands and upper part fell before the ark.” But what writes Mr. Simon Wilkin in a note to this passage? He takes the same view that Johnson took of disembodied spirits, and says that he cannot admit the probability of a belief in mermaids having lasted from remote antiquity without some foundation in truth. He examines Sir Humphry Davy’s arguments against the likelihood of the existence of such an object as a mermaid, and agrees with that distinguished philosopher’s view that a human head, human hands, and human mammæ are wholly inconsistent with a fish’s tail, because—and the logic is good—the head, hands, and mammæ of any creature furnished also with a tail could not be human; and so, conversely, adds he, “the tail of such a creature could not be a fish’s tail.” The philosopher was personally interested in the subject, for if Mr. Simon Wilkin is to be credited, Sir Humphry, whilst swimming, was himself mistaken by some ladies of Caithness for a mermaid. Surely no scientific gentleman ever received a higher compliment. Mr. Wilkin quotes from the Evangelical Magazine of September, 1822. In that publication was printed a letter from the Rev. Dr. Philip, dated at Cape Town. The doctor said he had just seen a mermaid that was then being exhibited. The head was the size of a baboon’s, thinly covered with black hair, and there were a few hairs on the upper lip. The ears, nose, lips, chin, breasts, fingers, and nails resembled the human subject. Of the teeth there were eight incisors, four canine, and eight molars. This creature was about three feet long, and covered with scales. It was caught by a Chinese fisherman, and sold to one Captain Eades, at Batavia. Sir Humphry pronounced this mermaid to be the head and bust from two apes, fastened to the tail of the kipper salmon; but this Mr. Simon Wilkin would not hear of. Sir Thomas Browne’s editor is well backed. Has not Alexandre Dumas described the mermaid of the Royal Museum at the Hague? It was not a thing to be disputed about. “If after all this,” says the author of Monte Cristo, “there shall be found those who disbelieve the existence of such creatures as mermaids, let them please themselves. I shall give myself no more trouble about them.”

If Sir Humphry Davy were the mermaid that was seen at Caithness in January, 1809, it would be interesting to know what he thought of the description of him that was sent to the public journals of that date by two witnesses, one of whom was Miss Mackay, daughter of the Rev. David Mackay, minister of Reay. That Sir Humphry should have been bathing in the sea in the month of January will seem strange to persons whose blood flows languidly. But there is more to wonder at in the following particulars: Whilst Miss Mackay and another lady were walking by the shore they perceived three people who were on a rock at some distance showing signs of astonishment and terror. On approaching the ladies saw that the object of their wonder was a face resembling the human countenance, floating on the waves. The sea ran high, and as the waves advanced the mermaid gently sank under them, and afterwards reappeared. The face was plump and round, the nose small, the eyes a light grey, the head long, the hair thick, the throat slender, smooth and white. The hands and fingers were not webbed. “It sometimes laid its right hand under its cheek, and in this position floated for some time.” Other witnesses declared that it disappeared on a boy crying out. It reappeared at a distance: the spectators followed it by walking along the shore, until it vanished for good.[^[13]] Could this have been Sir Humphry Davy? The narrative was supplemented by a tale copied from an old History of the Netherlands. There was an inundation in 1403, and when the water retired a mermaid was found in the Dermet Mere, near Campear. A number of boats surrounded her; she tried to dive under them, and finding her way stopped, made a hideous deafening noise, and with her hands and tail sunk a boat or two. On being cleaned of the sea-moss and shells which covered her she was found a somewhat comely being, hair long and black, face human, figure—so far as it went—very good indeed. The rest was “a strong fish tail.” She was sent to the Haerlem magistrates, who ordered her to be taught to pray and to spin, but she never could be brought to speak; possibly she did not like the Dutch tongue. She also declined to wear any kind of clothing in summer. Part of her hair was plaited in the Dutch style, and the remainder hung down her. “She would leave her tail in the water, and accordingly had a tub of water under her chair, made on purpose for her; she eat milk, water, bread, butter, and fish. She lived thus out of her element (except her tail) fifteen or sixteen years.” That posterity might not doubt this prodigy ever flourished, her picture was painted and hung in the Town House of Haerlem, and her story written under it in letters of gold.

[13]. Annual Register, 1809.

But we must accept the existence of the mermaid on the mariner’s assurance. A fig for the dugong, and manatee, and sea-horse! Let them in certain postures look as human as they will, the ape is not more the brother of man than are those fish the originals of the wild-eyed, sweet-voiced, silver-shining, golden-haired beauties of the azure main, rising out of their palaces of pearl to ravish Jack’s gaze with a picture of girlish loveliness.

“Though all the splendour of the sea,

Around thy faultless beauty shine,

The heart that riots wild and free

Can hold no sympathy with mine.”

So the love-sick Tarpaulin may sigh; but though the foam-white form slide into the glassy profound with virginal fear of his pursuing eyes, let us not vulgarly call the delicate shining shape dugong, or sea-horse! Does not John of Hesse, in his travels, tell us of a land where he saw a stony and smoking mountain, and heard mermaids singing—sirens who draw ships into danger by their songs? And how, if not by the witchery of their eyes and the clear melodies of their voices? And listen to the navigator, Hudson, “One of our men, looking overboard, saw a mermaid, and, calling up some of the company to see her, one more came up, and by that time she was come closely to the ship’s side, looking earnestly at the men. A little after, a sea came and overturned her. Her back and breasts were like a woman’s, as they said that saw her; her body as big as one of us, her skin very white, and long hair hanging down behind, of colour black. Seeing her go down, they saw her tail, which was like that of a porpoise, speckled like a mackerel.”

The mermaids must be left alone. They are Jack’s sweethearts, and no sacrilegious hand should be suffered to rob old ocean of those seductive spirits which sparkle in its depths or whiten with their forms and gild with their hair the weedy and shelley embroidery of the coast.

If an ill-word must be said of these creatures, let it be directed at the merman. He is no beauty, and I believe has no claim to be considered even respectable. They are said to be drunkards, and have green hair, red eyes, and noses distinguished for a peculiar kind of growth termed in ships’ forecastles “grog-blossoms.” Francis Pirard says, in the account he gives of his shipwreck, that he saw a merman, when at anchor in St. Augustine’s Bay, in the Island of Madagascar. He calls it a strange phenomenon, and describes it as a monstrous fish with a head of a man and a long beard. “It plunged into the water on our approach, and we could only see part of its back, which was scaly.” I can well understand the alarm confessedly felt by persons at the sight of a merman. The mermaid is an engaging and often adorable creature, and fills the mind with the softest emotions; but the merman is so disgracefully ugly, and so depravedly and ironically human-like withal, that no spectacle is more shocking. The old Bishop of Norway tells of three sailors who saw something floating off the Danish coast. It proved to be an old merman. He had broad shoulders, a small head, a thin face of an abandoned and malignant cast of expression, and the usual fish-like termination. The bishop does not positively say that this merman was drunk, but he describes his postures as very uneasy—his attitudes being such as perhaps might be expected in a fish that was in liquor and that tried to balance itself on its tail—so that there is reason to suppose the worst. The same bishop tells of a parson who found a dead merman in his parish. The corpse was six feet long. It had a man’s face and arms, not unlike a human being’s, only that they were connected to its body by membranes. It is not impossible but that this apparent corpse was a merman overtaken in liquor.

I do not gather—at least from my studies in this direction—that these mermen are related to the mermaids. A literal-minded Swede has indeed feigned that the merman is the mermaid’s husband, but on no better ground than the circumstance of having seen a male and a female amicably swimming about together. I do not mean to say that the merman, being always found alone, is a proof that he is a bachelor, but it is hard to reconcile the terrestrial and even marine customs of Nature with the pairing of such a divinity as the mermaid with such a horrid, drunken object as the merman. No; if the mermen wive at all they go for their spouses to the dugongs. The mermaids seek elsewhere for lovers than amid the ranks of fishes’ tails merging into drunken old men. The sailors know her as a dainty creature that floats upwards to the surface like a beam of golden light.

“Upstarted the mermaid by the ship,

Wi’ a glass and a kame in her hand,

Says, ‘Reek about, reek about, my merry men;

Ye are not very far from land.’”

If the mermen were the pretty creatures’ husbands they would be driven wild with jealousy; for it is certain that in olden times—it may yet be the artless charmers’ practice—to make love to human men, to princes as to peasants, very properly choosing the best-looking. Sometimes, it is true, their amorous emotions were inspired by motives extremely sinister. There are many stories told of these marine Becky Sharps ogling and leering at dashing and handsome and fragrant young men of quality ashore, whilst possibly some old Lord Steyne, in the shape of a hideous merman in the depths, watched the wicked comedy with sardonic sneers and laughter. A mermaid nearly drowned a certain young laird of Lorntie. The youthful nobleman saw the beautiful girl apparently struggling for life in the water; but his henchman, bawling out a hearty “God sauf us!” said that the lady was a mermaid; whereupon they galloped off whilst the marine Becky piped up—

“Lorntie, Lorntie, were it na for your man

I had gart your hairt’s blood, skirl in my pan!”

Some are also charged with embracing their sweethearts from no other motive than to suffocate them, as in the story of the Manx shepherd, who was so much hurt by being squeezed that he pushed the mermaid away, for which she wounded him to death by flinging a stone at him. Of this deceitful and dangerous kind are those Swedish sea-nymphs who pass their days upon the rocks combing their hair and viewing their perfections in hand-mirrors. They are also said to amuse themselves by spreading out linen to dry, but this fancy clearly springs from the mistakes of seamen who suppose the white foam crawling about the finny maidens to be the contents of the wash-tub. If a fisherman sees one of these mermaids, he is on no account to mention it to his mates, or bad luck will follow. But other kinds of these girls of the ocean are tender, and extremely affectionate and lovable. The melancholy, melodious sounds sometimes heard breathing amid the stillness upon the deep at night are the sighs of mermaids who have loved and lost, and who rise from their coral beds, their grottoes of pearl, their pavilions and palaces of shells, to make their moan to the stars. Mermaids are great lovers of music. They have been known to sacrifice their sweethearts for a tune. A fisherman was induced to give his handsome son to a mermaid on her offering in exchange a brave reward in the shape of luck. But the boy’s mother, who sang very sweetly, so charmed the mermaid’s heart, that she undertook to return her adored if his mamma would favour her with another air.

It is gratifying to find old Bailey in his “Dictionarium Britannicum” (1730), defining the word mermaid with a very sober and sturdy leaning in favour of the real existence of these ladies. “Whereas,” says he, “it has been thought they have been only the product of the painter’s invention, it is confidently reported that there is in the following lake fishes which differ in nothing from mankind but in the want of speech and reason. Father Francis de Pavia, a missionary, being in the kingdom of Congo in Africa, who would not believe that there were such creatures, affirms that the Queen of Singa did see in a river coming out of the lake Zaire many mermaids, something resembling a woman in the breasts, hands, and arms; but the lower part is perfect fish, the head round, the face like a calf, a large mouth, little ears, and round, full eyes. Which creatures Father Merula often saw and eat of them.” Which, I may add, does not say much for Father Merula’s manners and tastes, unless it is meant figuratively, as in the sense of the saying in the comedy, “Six weeks before I married her I could have eaten her, and six weeks after I was sorry I didn’t.” As to the face like the calf, the large mouth, and so forth, let it be remembered that the place Father de Pavia wrote of was the kingdom of Congo, where, to be sure, we should not expect to find even mermaids beautiful. But that these sea-nymphs, with their golden hair, their shining shapes, their teeth of pearl, their eyes of the liquid blue of their own glorious element, full of ocean mystery and the spirit of the unfathomable starless world in which they live—that they are as beautiful as dreams among shores from whose silent rocks neither the voice of a De Pavia nor a Merula has ever fetched an echo, who can doubt?

The mermaid is the sailor’s love. Let us leave her to him.

OLD SEA ORDNANCE.

Not very long since a French smack fished up an old cannon a league or so to the eastward of the North head of the Goodwin Sands. It was believed to be a gun of the time of De Ruyter and “Trump,” but so eaten, rusted, and defaced by time and the action of salt water that its paternity was scarcely a determinable thing.

There is no lack of reminders ashore of the sort of weapons with which our grandsires fought the battles of their country; but somehow an interest that no museum could impart attaches to an object dragged from the tomb of the deep, hauled out of the twilight of its oozy bed, and set up for all eyes to gaze at in the staring light of day. In marine collections there are still to be found tomahawks of the pattern which Nelson’s men handled; but figure one of these death-dealing contrivances fished up in Cadiz Bay! strangely hooked off a tract of the sand there, over which the keels of the flaming and thunderous ships of that Titanic struggle surged in their throes of conflict!

Of all the changes which the sea-vocation has witnessed none is so complete as the battle-ship’s armaments. The process has indeed been gradual; great sharpness of transition has only been visible within the last twenty-five years; yet it is not necessary to talk of hundred-ton guns to emphasize the growth of ordnance. There was a mighty difference betwixt the batteries of the old Duke of Wellington, for example, and those of the ships to which the cannon lately trawled up in the Channel belonged. But it is instructive, and certainly amusing, to go much further back still. In an ancient treatise, called “Speculum Regale,” a description is given of the method of attack and defence as practised in the navy in the twelfth century. Here the mariner is told to provide himself with two spears, which he must be careful not to lose in throwing. One of them is to be long enough to reach out of one vessel into another. In addition to these spears, the sailor was to be furnished with scythes fixed to long poles, axes, boat-hooks, slings fitted to staffs,[^[14]] barbed darts, stones for heaving, and bows for shooting. How terrible these primitive weapons were in the hands of the early mariners may be read in the old accounts of sea-fights. Describing the great naval battle between the English and French in Edward III.’s reign, Daniel in his “Collection,” p. 227, writes: “Most of the French, rather than endure the arrows and sharp swords of the English or be taken, desperately leap into the sea, whereupon the French king’s jester, set on to give him notice of this overthrow (which being so ill news, none else willingly would impart on the sudden) said, and oftentimes reiterated the same: Cowardly Englishmen, Dastardly Englishmen, Faint-hearted Englishmen. The king at length asked him Why? For that, said he, They durst not leap out of their ships into the sea, as our brave Frenchmen did. By which speech the King apprehended a notion of this overthrow.” There were also contrivances called galtraps, beaks for the vessels like boars’ heads armed with iron tusks, towers for the bowmen to let fly their arrows from, breastplates of linen very thick, and helmets of steel. The old Jacks fought stoutly with these barbarous weapons, but their real qualities had to lie in wait for gunpowder.

[14]. It was asserted that the bullet of a sling “in the course, hath continued a fiery heat in the air, yea, sometimes melted, that it killeth at one blow, that it pierceth helmet and shield, that it reacheth further, that it randoneth less” than gun shot! See Camden’s “Remaines.”

When it came, it brought with it some extraordinary engines. There is extant an account of a ship called the Great Michael, built by James IV. of Scotland, and her artillery was composed of the following: “She bare many cannons, six on every side, with three great bassils, two behind in her deck and one before; with 300 shot of small artillery, that is to say, myand and batterd falcon, and quarter falcon, slings, pestilent serpetens, and double dogs, with hagtor and culvering, corsbows and handbows.” Our ancestors, in their choosing of names for their guns, appear to have been influenced by a hope of terrifying the enemy by dreadful terms, as the Chinese try to affright their foes by painting monstrous pictures upon their shields. Batterd falcons, double dogs, hagtors, and pestilent serpetens! There is destruction in the mere names, and a stouter than Falstaff should easily run from such sounds. In Rymer’s “Fœdera” appear some queer appellations for sailor’s weapons. They occur in an order to the Keeper of the Private Wardrobe in the Tower to deliver to the Treasurer of Queen Philippa the following stores: Eleven guns, forty libras pulveris pro guns, forty petras pro guns, forty tampons, four touches, one mallet, two firepans, forty pavys, twenty-four bows, forty sheaves of arrows, and other matters.

They did well who in their generation used the word gun or cannon generically, and confined their definitions to calibres as we do to bores and tons. One needs a close acquaintance with old books to understand the writers when they come to talk of ships and how they went armed. Even to the learned the uses of certain old pieces are quite unintelligible. James, the historian, for instance, could not understand what was signified by “murdering pieces.” These were cannon mounted upon the after-part of the forecastle, and the muzzles of them raised so as to point to the main topmast head. It is certainly difficult to gather the purpose to be served by such guns, unless, indeed, they were designed as a remedy against the invasion of the foe by the yards and rigging. But why were their muzzles pointed at one mast only? and was it possible that those ancient mariners fully understood what must follow if with their own powder and ball they succeeded in clearing their spars of the enemy by dismasting themselves?

The calibre and character of other old guns are fully understood. There was the “whole cannon,” which carried a 60 lb. ball; there was the demi-cannon, with a 31 lb. ball; also the cannon petro, 31 lb.; whole culverine, 11 lb.; and demi-culverine, 9 lb. The cannon royal rose sometimes to a 63 lb. ball. Then there was a gun called the French cannon, 43 lb.; the Saker, 5 lb.; the Minion, 4 lb.; and the Faulcon, or Falcon, 2 lb.[^[15]]

[15]. Some of these terms seem to have been supplied by the language of the falconer. Among the names mentioned by Strutt as given to different species of hawks, I find, the faulcon, the bastard, the sacre, and the musket. To this may be added the following from Camden’s “Remaines,” p. 208: “This being begun by him” (i.e. Berthold Swarte, whom he considers the inventor of gunpowder and cannons) “by skill and time is now come to that perfection, not onely in great yron and brass pieces, but also in small, that all admire it; having names given them, some from serpents or ravenous birds, as Culverines, or Colubrines, Serpentines, Basiliques, Faulcons, Sacres; others in other respects, as Canons, Demicanons, Chambers, Slinges, Arquebuze, Caliver, Handgun, Muskets, Petronils, Pistoll, Dagge, etc., and Petarras of the same brood lately invented.” From the edition of 1657.

These pieces were in use in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but by degrees other names were given, so that the titles applied to cannon from, let me say, the days of Henry VIII. down to the close of the last century, should furnish out an inventory long enough to fill many pages.

To the above list, given by Ralph Willett in a paper on British naval architecture, other examples may be added from the researches of James. He speaks of the cannon-serpentine and bastard-cannon as corresponding with the 42-pounder. The carronade dates as late as 1779, and takes its name from the Scotch town where it was invented. Another comparatively recent gun he speaks of as Gover’s, or Congreve’s, the Americans naming a similar weapon a Columbiad. Other guns are not mentioned by the historian, though of all our marine artillery they played, as small weapons, the largest part in our wars last century. The swivel cannon carried a shot of half a pound; it was fixed in a socket on the ship’s side, or stern, or bow, and in her tops. The socket that supported it was bored in a piece of oak, hooped with iron, to enable it to sustain the recoil. It was, indeed, a modernized form of the old pettararoe, and was turned about at will by an iron handle affixed to its cascabel; when worked in the tops it was charged with musket-balls, and fired down at the enemy’s decks. The coehorn was a small mortar, also fixed on a swivel, and chiefly used for firing grenadoes, as they were called, or bullets from merchantmen’s close quarters when they were boarded. For yard-arm fighting there was the “powder-flask”—a flask charged with gunpowder, and fitted with a fuse; it was hurled into the enemy’s deck immediately before the assault. Another device was the “stink-pot,” still in vogue with John Chinaman, an earthen shell suspended from the yard-arm or end of the bowsprit. This machine was charged with powder mixed with materials which threw up a disgusting, suffocating smoke and smell. The notion of these apparatuses was to create confusion, in the midst of which and under cover of the thick vapour the detachment rushed aboard, cutlass, and sword, and pistol in hand. Another contrivance was the “organ,” the grandfather of the Mitrailleuse—a machine formed of six or seven musket-barrels fixed upon one stock so as to be fired at once. There was also the fire-arrow, a small iron dart, furnished with springs and bars, and a match saturated with powder and sulphur, wound round the shaft. It was usually fired from a swivel, at the enemy’s sails. The match was ignited by the explosion, and the dart, penetrating the sail, set the cloths on fire. The springs and bars prevented the arrow from passing through the canvas. The musquetoon was a sort of carbine, with a barrel spirally rifled from the breech; the explosion lengthened the ball to about the breadth of a finger. The old fire-pike possessed something of the character of the fire-arrow. Another weapon of the fusil pattern is indicated in Sir William Monson’s “Building of Ships:” “As I have said, such a ship that has neither forecastle, copperidge head, nor any other manner of defence, but with her men only; that hath no fowlers, which are pieces of great importance, after a ship is boarded and entred, or lieth board and board; for the ordnance stands her in little stead, and is as apt to endanger themselves as their enemy; for in giving fire, it may take hold of pitch, tar, oakum, or powder, and burn them both for company; but a murderer or fowler, being shot out of their own ship, laden with dice shot, will scour the deck of the enemy, and not suffer the head of a man to appear.” It is evident that the “murderer” or “fowler” was a sort of fusil.[^[16]]

[16]. I find this word “murderer” frequently occurring in Hakluyt.

There are some curious features of sixteenth and seventeenth century maritime warfare preserved in this fine old captain’s Naval Tracts. He tells us that the French used to conceal half their soldiers in the hold and to call them up as they were required, the others who had been fighting going below. The Dunkirkers, like the Spanish whom Anson fought,[^[17]] flung themselves flat on the deck before the enemy, so that the shot, great and small, should fly over them. The Hollanders he charges with Dutch courage. “Instead of cables, planks, and other devices to preserve their men, the Hollanders, wanting natural valour of themselves, used to line their company in the head, by giving them gunpowder to drink, and other kind of liquor to make them sooner drunk; which, besides it is a barbarous and unchristianlike act, when they are in danger of death to make them ready for the devil, it often proves more perilous than prosperous to them by firing their own ships or making a confusedness in the fight, their wits being taken from them.” It will be supposed that the seamen of Blake had a higher notion of Dutch courage than Monson.

[17]. See the description of the fight with the galleon in Anson’s “Voyage Round the World.” This book, that bears the name of Walters, Chaplain to the Centurion, was in reality written by Benjamin Robins. Naval Chronicle, vol. viii. 267.

It is two centuries ago since the Sovereign was launched, a vessel of 1657 tons. There is a curious account of her in Heywood.[^[18]] She was a big ship for those times, and is about as good an example as I know to illustrate the mighty change that has been worked in two hundred years. Her dimensions were—Length of keel, 128 ft.; beam, 48 ft.; length over all (that is, from the fore-end of her “beak” to the stern), 232 ft., making a difference of 104 ft. as between the length of her keel and that of her upper deck and head! She was 76 ft. high from the bottom of her keel to the top of her lantern, of which kind of furniture she carried five, in the biggest of which ten persons could comfortably stand upright. Her decorations were extraordinarily gorgeous. “All sides,” we read, “were carved with trophies of artillery and types of honour, as well belonging to sea as land, with symbols appertaining to navigation; also their two sacred Majesties’ badges of honour; arms with several angels holding their letters in compartiments, all which works are guilded over, and no other colour but gold and black.” Her figure-head was a Cupid, or a child bridling a lion; her bows were also apparently ornamented with six figures; on the stern was carved Victory “in the midst of a frontispiece; upon the beak-head sitteth King Edgar on horseback, trampling on seven kings.”[^[19]] It would have seemed like a violation of the choicest canons of old romance to furnish such a pageant as this with the plain guns grimly generalized with which the vessels of succeeding days fought for king, commonwealth, home and beauty. We look in the description of her for culverin and cannon royal, for the chace ordnance and small artillery of those gilt, plumed, and glowing times, and find them sure enough. It must have been heartrending to the curled and booted captain of those days to have offered so gay and brilliant a fabric to the iron bullets and fiery arrows of the foe. Think of the Cupid being knocked on the head, and King Edgar violently hammered off his horse!

[18]. Quoted by Ralph Willett in his “Disquisition on Shipbuilding,” 1800.

[19]. “The prime workman,” says Heywood, “is Captain Phineas Pett, overseer of the work, whose ancestors—father, grandfather, and great grandfather—for the space of two hundred years, have continued in the same name, officers and architects in the Royal Navy.” This, as Willett points out, indicates a regular establishment as far back as 1437, the reign of Henry VI.

It is interesting to observe how such a ship entered into action. First, the vessel’s company were divided into three parts—one to tack the ship, the second to ply the small shot, the third to attend the great guns. Sail was to be shortened to foresail, main and fore-top sail. A “valiant and sufficient man” was sent to the helm. Of course every officer was expected to do his duty; the boatswain to sling the yards, to “put forth” the flag, ancient and streamers, to arm the top and waist cloths, to spread the netting, provide tubs for water, and the like. Then the gunner was to see that his mates had care of their “files, budge barrels, and cartridges, to have his shot in a locker for every piece, and the yeoman of the powder to keep his room and to be watchful of it.” A hundred years later found some enlargement of these plain prescriptions.[^[20]] The boatswain and his mates see to the rigging and sails; the carpenter and his crew prepare shot-plugs and mauls and provide against injury to the pumps; the master and his mates attend the braces; the lieutenants visit the different decks; crows, “handspecs,” rammers, sponges, powder-horns, matches, and train tackles are placed by the side of every cannon; the hatches are closed to prevent the men from deserting their posts by skulking below. The marines are drawn up in rank and file; the gun-lashings are cast adrift and the tompions withdrawn; after which the enemy is to be beaten! This is the routine of a hundred years ago. What is it now? Not less widely different from the discipline of the times of forty-two pounders, of round, grape, and canister, of chain, bar, star, and other dismantling missiles, than was the routine of the epoch of double dogs and pestilent serpetens from the days of the spears of the Picts and the coracle of the nude Briton. Yet what did those little minions and sakers do for us? We shall have reason to be well satisfied if the hundred-ton gun of to-day obtain for us one-half the triumphs which were achieved for our country by those little cannon-royal and brass swivels of the times of Raleigh, Blake, and Shovel.

[20]. See Falconer’s “Dictionary.”

THE HONOUR OF THE FLAG.

Whatever may have been the other causes of our wars with the Hollanders, one was unquestionably the herring. No doubt the insinuations of Richelieu greatly perturbed the phlegmatic Batavian, and helped him into a fighting posture; but the bloater was at the bottom of it. We took that fish for a text whereon to discourse concerning our title to dominion over the sea; and though in these days it is as much the mackerel as the herring, as much the cod as the mackerel, as much the turbot as the cod over which the dispute continues, the old battles in the heart of which Blake curled his whiskers and Tromp flourished his broomstick are still fought, though, to be sure, without Ruyter’s fire-ships or the eloquent thunder of Monk’s cannon-royal.

The conflict now is shorn of its old glory. It is waged, indeed, close into the Thames, though not so high as the Hope; nor, in the direction of the Medway, does it approach Sheerness; and upon the eastern coast the struggle is often within view of Scarborough and the Norfolk cliffs. But there is no more smoke of battle. It is the Dutchman sneaking across the Englishman’s trawling gear with “the devil”; it is the Frenchman shearing under cover of the blackness through the league long drift-nets of the Shoreham or Penzance smack. Years have brought to this nation the philosophic mind. Instead of declaring war we station a gunboat, put on a concerned face when we hear of the Dover and Brixham men assaulting the crews of the Boulogne and Calais craft, and read without emotion of the capture of a bellicose Hans Butter-box by a small steamer with a whip at her masthead. Yet the honour of our flag is so inextricably woven with the literature and traditions of these fishing squabbles that, spite of the insignificance to which the easy indifference of “my lords” would reduce them in our day, the reflection of a great and piercing light in our history is upon them, from the lustre of which they gather a complexion that is not wholly sentimental.

In 1609 Hugo Grotius wrote a book, which he called “Mare Liberum.” It is heavy reading in these times of Wilkie Collins and Miss Braddon, and the heavier, perhaps, for being in Latin. But it was deemed a treatise of very great eloquence, especially by the Dutch, to whose ocean-rights it specially referred. In short, the object of Grotius was to prove the weakness of our title to the sovereignty of the seas, the deep, in his opinion, being a gift from God and common to all nations. This was answered by John Selden, the most amazing scholar that any age or country ever produced, of so candid and great-hearted a nature, as is particularly exhibited in his Table-Talk, that it is difficult to read his astonishing answer to Grotius without wishing that his patriotism had dealt with a subject more answerable to his convictions than this question of sea rights. But his “Mare Clausum” is a volume that one would think must be of abounding and enduring interest to Englishmen. It was translated into English by special command by Marchmont Nedham (as he spells his name), and published in that form in 1652. It probably has few readers now. Yet such was the opinion of its potency as a sustained argument that it was believed, to use the language of Nedham, “had he (i.e. Selden) persisted with the same firm resolution in this honourable business of the sea, as he did in other things that were destructive to the nation’s interest, the Netherlanders had been prevented from spinning out their long opportunitie to an imaginarie claim of prescription; so that they would have had less pretence to act those insolencies now which in former times never durst enter the thoughts of their predecessors.”

The book pre-eminently concerns the honour of our flag, of our dominion over the seas, more particularly in regard to the right of our kings and queens to grant licences to foreigners to fish in the sea, and of the obligation on all ships of what denomination soever to strike their topsails to our flag, or in other words to salute the symbol of Britannia’s sovereignty wherever they shall encounter it. For how many centuries this act of courtesy has been exacted as a right by the monarchs of England you must read Selden’s book to discover. Writing in James I.’s reign, he shows how he traces it back for above four hundred years by this: That at Hastings it was decreed by King John, in the second year of his reign, with the assent of the peers, “if the governor or commander of the King’s navie, in his naval expeditions (which were all in that age upon the Southern Sea) shall meet any ship whatsoever by sea, either laden or empty, that shall refuse to strike their sails at the command of the King’s Governor or admiral or his lieutenant, but make resistance against them which belong to his fleet; That then they are to bee reputed enemies if they may bee taken, yea, and their ships and goods be confiscated as the goods of enemies.” He points out that it was accounted treason in any man who omitted to acknowledge the King of England in his own sea by striking sail; nor would the circumstance of his country being friendly with that of the transgressor protect him. Another illustration of the antiquity of this custom, or exaction rather, Selden finds in a gold rose-noble,[^[21]] that was coined in the reign of Edward III. The stamp on one side of it represented a ship floating on the sea, and a king, armed with sword and shield, sitting on the ship as on a throne, the device being obviously intended to represent the maritime dominion of the ocean. All that Selden has to say about fishing in the sea is full of interest. He points out that Henry VI. gave leave to the French, and other foreigners, to fish, sometimes for six months, sometimes for a year; but this leave “was granted under the name even of a passport or safe conduct; yea, and a size or proportion was prescribed to their fishing boats or busses that they should not be above thirty tons.” The French had to obtain leave from the English admiral to fish for soles for the table of their own king (Henri Quatre), and such boats as were caught fishing without a licence were seized as trespassers. In the Eastern waters the Hollanders and Zealanders were forced to seek permission to fish from the Governor of Scarborough Castle, and Selden quotes Camden’s expression of wonder at the vast sum of money the Hollanders made by this fishing upon our coast and at the apathy of the English, “who have ever granted them leave to fish, reserving alwaies the honour and privilege to themselves, but through a kindle of negligence resigning the profit to strangers.” It is on the mass of evidence as to the antiquity of the British claim to the sovereignty of the seas that Dr. Campbell, the historian, bases his opinion respecting the naval power of the Early Britons, who are generally considered as a race of painted wild men, who speared fish or crossed their rivers and creeks in wicker boats covered with hides.

[21]. The value of this coin was 6s. 8d. as money then was. The Alchymists pretended that it was made by their arts; interpreting the inscription on the reverse, Jesus autem transiens per medium corum ibat, to signify that gold was made by secret art amid the ignorant. Four rose-nobles weighed an ounce.

The question of this dominion became a vital one to this country with the growth and the aggressions of Holland. Was she or England to be sovereign of the sea? And was an English ship, figuratively speaking, to bow to a Dutch one when she met her? Selden offered the world precedents enough on our behalf. That King John should have claimed a universal striking to the Royal flag was surely proof that what might impress the foreigner as an extraordinary pretension was founded on the unquestioned rights of our predecessors. Edward III., in his commissions to his admirals, repeatedly styled himself sovereign of the English seas, affirming, with perfect justice, that he derived the title from his progenitors. In Hakluyt there is preserved a curious metrical admonition, presumably written in or about the sixth year of the reign of Edward IV., entitled “De politia conservatira Maris,” with a heading to the general introduction that runs thus: “Here beginneth the prologue of the processe of the libel of the English policie, exhorting all England to keep the sea, and namely the narrow sea; shewing what profite commeth thereof, and also what worship and salvation to England, and to all Englishmen.” It will be owned that the anonymous author’s appeal was not addressed to deaf ears. An immortal proof of British resolution in this direction occurs in the reign of Queen Mary. Lord William Howard, created Baron of Effingham, was sent with a fleet of twenty-eight sail presumably to guard the coast, but in reality to escort Philip of Spain, whose own fleet, however, consisted of one hundred and sixty vessels. His admiral came sailing along with the Spanish flag flying at his masthead, which so offended Lord William Howard that he fired a shot at him and forced him to strike or haul down his colours before he would make his compliments to the prince.[^[22]] This was followed by another lively example of a like kind. When the Spanish fleet went to fetch Anne of Austria, who was in Flanders, Sir John Hawkins, with a small squadron of her Majesty’s ships, was riding in Cattewater. The Spanish admiral endeavoured to pass without saluting. Sir John sent a shot at the Admiral’s rigging, but no notice was taken of it. A second shot fired went clean through the Spaniard’s hull. On this the Don sent an officer of distinction with compliments and complaints to Sir John Hawkins, who refused to admit the officer or hear what he had to say; but simply required him to tell his admiral that, having neglected to pay the respect due to the Queen of England, in her seas and port, he must not expect to lie there but to be off within twelve hours. Sir John’s flag was flying on the Jesus of Lubeck; to this ship came the Spaniard full of remonstrance, declaring he knew not what to make of the treatment he had received, seeing that there was peace between the two Crowns. “Put the case, sir,” said Sir John, “that an English fleet came into any of the King, your master’s, ports, his Majesty’s ships being there, and those English ships should carry their flags in their tops, would not you shoot them down and beat the ships out of your port?” The Spaniard confessed himself in the wrong, and submitted to the penalty the English Admiral imposed.

[22]. To strike is to lower. The old salutation was the striking or lowering of the top-sail. The introduction of the topgallant-sail must have rendered this courtesy extremely inconvenient.

It was the Hollander, however, who gave the English most trouble in regard to the honour of the flag. In or about 1604 Sir William Monson was cruising with a fleet with instructions to assert the superiority in the British seas which came to James I. from his ancestors. Sir William has told the story himself in his “Naval Tracts.” On his return to Calais in July, 1605, he found an addition of six ships to the Dutch squadron he had left off Dover three days before. One of them was the Admiral’s. “Their object,” he says, “in coming in shew was to beleaguer the Spaniards who were then at Dover.” As Sir William approached, the Dutch Admiral struck his flag thrice, meaning that the Spaniards as well as others should conclude that, by continuing to “wear” his flag, he represented a sovereignty of the sea as complete as that of the English. Sir William requested him to take in his flag; he refused, alleging that he had struck it three times, which he held was acknowledgment enough. There was some discussion, after which he was told that if he did not salute, the British Admiral would weigh anchor and fall down to him, and then the force of the ships should determine the question; “for rather than I would suffer his flag to be worn in view of so many nations as were to behold it, I resolved to bury myself in the sea.” “The Admiral, it seems, on better advice,” adds Sir William, “took in his flag and stood immediately off to sea, firing a gun for the rest of the fleet to follow him. And thus I lost my guest the next day at dinner as he had promised.” Amongst others who witnessed this was Sciriago, the Spanish General, who told Sir William that if the Hollanders had worn their flag, times had strangely altered in England, for he remembered his old master King Philip the Second being shot at by the Lord Admiral of England for wearing his flag in the narrow seas when he came to marry Queen Mary.

In spite of treaties of peace between England and Holland, the trouble about the fishing continued. Disputes arose over the payment of the assize-herring in Scotland, and the Dutch sent ships of war to protect their herring-boats against the penalties which must attend the refusal to pay the licence money. In 1609 King James issued a proclamation concerning fishing, in which it was stated that commissioners had been authorized “at London for our realms of England and Ireland, and at Edinburgh for our realm of Scotland,” to issue licences to such foreign vessels as intend to fish for the whole or any part of the year, and that the licences were to be taken out “upon pain of such chastisements as shall be fit to be inflicted upon such as are wilful offenders.” The fishing quarrel rose to a height again in 1618, but it does not appear that the honour of the flag was involved in these trawling politics until 1652. In that year Commodore Young encountered a Dutch man-of-war whose captain refused to salute the English colours. The commodore sent a boat with a polite request that the Dutchman would strike; but mynheer answered very honestly that the States had threatened to take off his head if he struck; whereupon a fight began, with the result that the Dutchman had to haul down his colours. This was on May 14; on the 19th Van Tromp bore down upon Blake, who was lying off Dover. Blake sent three shots at the Dutch flag as a hint; which Tromp answered with a broadside, and then followed an action that lasted till nine at night, when, Blake being reinforced, the Dutch made off. Peace was made in 1654. In that treaty nothing was said as to our sovereignty in respect to the fisheries, but amongst other articles was the acknowledgment of the dominion of the English at sea and the agreement to strike to the meteor bunting. But the prowess of Admiral Blake may have provided for this without any obligation of specification; for in this year, coming to an anchor off Cadiz, a Dutch Admiral who was there would not hoist his flag whilst Blake was present. Indeed, such was the awe in which Blake was held, that the Algerines, merely with the idea of obtaining his favour, made a point of overhauling the Sallee rovers for English prisoners and sending all they found to him.

The honour of the flag seems a noticeable element in the origin of the war of 1665. Sir John Lawson, in command of a squadron of ships, was in the Mediterranean with De Ruyter. The Dutch admiral saluted the English flag, a compliment which Lawson refused to return, alleging that his orders did not allow him to strike to the subjects of any king or State whatever. It may be supposed that such treatment pretty liberally envenomed the soul of the fine old Dutchman, who, when he was shortly afterwards sent to commit hostilities against us, made sail on that adventure with a hot heart. In 1674 we find the Dutch in the treaty of peace professing to understand a point that in spite of previous treaties they had refused to admit. In the treaty with Cromwell they had agreed that their ships should salute the English, and in subsequent treaties the same undertaking appears. But their usual apology for failure was that striking was a mere matter of civility, and that if they declined to pull off their hat there was no obligation upon them to do so. But by 1674 the political atmosphere had been cleared by British cannons, and the Dutch were now able to distinguish. The treaty ended the doubt; what was before styled courtesy was here confessed a right. Not only was the extent of the British sovereignty clearly defined; the State undertook that whole fleets, as well as separate ships, “should strike their sails to any fleet or single ship carrying the King’s flag, as the custom was in the days of his ancestors.” It was said by Secretary Coke in a letter addressed by order of Charles I. to Sir William Boswell, Ambassador at the Hague, “This cannot be doubted, that whosoever will encroach upon him (the King) by sea, will do it by land also, when they see their time. To such presumption ‘Mare Liberum’ gave the first warning piece, which must be answered with a defence of ‘Mare Clausum,’ not so much by discourses, as by the louder language of a powerful navy, to be better understood when overstrained patience seeth no hope of preserving her right by other means.”

“The spirits of your fathers,

Shall start from every wave,”

sings Campbell, and in Coke’s words one finds a noble example of the sort of message those spirits knew how to deliver. What has been done for the honour of the flag by a language louder than discourses may be easily traced through the Rookes, the Shovels, the Mansels, the Howes, the Rodneys, Keppels, Nelsons.

How has that honour broadened since the days of striking topsails! Colonial men-of-war are now entitled to fly the flag of the British Navy. There was obviously much deliberation before the resolution was arrived at in respect of the Gayundah, a vessel that has the honour to signally advance that great scheme of federation which is occupying the minds of all English-speaking men. Indeed, it is perfectly obvious that no flag could be so fitly flown at the masthead or peak of our Colonial men-of-war as those same colours which the heroism of the grandsires of our distant kinsmen rendered emblematic of power, justice, and freedom.

The British national flag is the Union Jack. This consists of the blended crosses of St. George, red; of St. Andrew, white; of St. Patrick, red, marginating Scotland’s cross so as to admit of a portion of the white being shown. These several crosses combined upon a blue ground form that meteor flag of which the poet writes, though not certainly that noble piece of bunting which, we are reminded by the same poet in the same song—

“Has braved a thousand years,

The battle and the breeze.”

The wishes of the Colonials were eminently honourable and loyal, and the gratification of their desires in respect of a flag whose glory and traditions are certainly not less theirs than they are ours should prove a source of sincere satisfaction to the people of this country. For the honour of the flag! We know what that inspiration has done for us of old, and how it must influence in the future the world-wide English-speaking races whose artillery shall thunder under the shadow of Britain’s blood-red cross.[^[23]] Without his flag what would be fighting or even mercantile Jack? We all know how old Commodore Dance, at the head of his little squadron of tea ships, put to flight the formidable Frenchman bristling with tiers of cannon. Even under the red flag, symbol of peaceful trade, there have been performed many noble and valorous exploits, and it is no doubt the memory of scores of brilliant deeds performed by the British merchant sailor that excites the regret very widely felt that in these times, when the water is smooth, and the political barometer fairly high, the foreigners in their hundreds should be driving the English mariner out of his legitimate home—the British forecastle.

[23]. In the last century the Union flag, as it was called, bore these words:— “For the Protestant Religion and for the Liberty of England.” The flags of that time are thus described: The Jack.—Blue, charged with a saltire argent and a cross gules, bordered argent. Mercantile Flag: Red, with a franc-quarter argent, charged with a cross gules. There seems to have been two royal standards, the colour unsettled, some saying that it ought to be yellow, others white. One was charged with a quartered escutcheon of England, Scotland, France and Ireland.

The other royal flag is described as “quarterly, the first and fourth quarter counter-quartered, in which the first and fourth azure, three fleurs-de-lis or the royal arms of France, quartered with the imperial ensigns of England, which are in the second and third gules, eight lions passant; gardant in pale.” The rest of this description, so far as I can make out the heraldic jargon, seems to represent the Royal Standard of to-day.

Formerly, if a council of war was to be held at sea, the Admiral hung his flag in the main-shrouds, that is, in the lower rigging; the vice-admiral in the fore-shrouds; and the rear-admiral in the mizzen-shrouds.

But it is to naval story that we must turn for nearly all of what pertains to the honour of the flag. The contests have been tough and sharp touching the “doffing” question. Whether it was our duty to bow first to the haughty Spaniard at sea, as he maintained, or whether it was for him to “make a leg” at the sight of good Queen Bess’s flag, was a question for Drake and Raleigh, for Hawkins and that noble gentleman Charles Howard, Baron of Effingham, to settle, just as Blake and Monk and Ascue and Commodore Young, as has been shown, decided the same matter with reference to the broomstick of the brave and desperate Dutchman. It was the sailor of Queen Elizabeth’s day, however, that made the flag the emblem which the world has ever since recognized it to be. The story of Sir Robert Mansell, Admiral of the “narrow seas,” as the English Channel was then termed, is typical of our naval history from the first chapter of it. He went to Gravelines to receive the Spanish Ambassador, whilst Sir Jerome Turner, his Vice-Admiral, attended at Calais for the French Ambassador. “But,” says the quaint historian, “the Frenchman coming first and hearing the Vice-Admiral was to attend him, the Admiral the other, in a scorn put himself in a passage boat in Calais and came forth with flag in top. Instantly Sir Jerome Turner sent to know of the Admiral what he should do. Sir Robert Mansell sent him word to shoot and strike him if he would not take in the flag. This, as it made the flag be pulled in, caused a great complaint, and it was believed it would have undone Sir Robert Mansell, the French faction put it so home; but he maintained the act and was the better beloved of his Sovereign ever after to his death.”

Even the old pirates talked of the honour of their flag! a very dismal piece of bunting, indeed, consisting of a skull, cross-bones, and hour-glass on a black ground. Yet let such records as “Tom Cringle’s Log,” which are very true history, though disguised with the mask of fiction, bear witness to the furious heroism with which those murderous savages, in earrings and sashes, in ringlets and jack-boots, fought for the abhorred flag at their masthead, swaying in masses half-naked at their cannons, and occasionally blowing themselves to pieces in their efforts to sink the enemy, just as ancient mariners tell of mutilated sharks twisting round to get at their own wounds in their dreadfully gluttonous desire to eat themselves up. Nelson stormed in among the Frenchmen and the Spaniards with six flags flying in different parts of his rigging, because he could not endure to think of the possibility of a stray shot making him look, even for a breathless moment, to have struck. There is very little change between the flags of his time and those of ours. Of course this regards the colours as shown by men-of-war; in signalling Marryatt’s Code—as all other codes which existed prior to the clever combinations of the author of “Peter Simple”—has made way for the International Code. In the British Navy flags are either red, white, or blue, and are hoisted at one or another of the royal mastheads, according to the rank of the Admiral. This has been the custom for centuries. Previous to 1801 the Union flag, as it was called, bore only the Crosses of St. George and St. Andrew; but it was then, as after, appropriated to the Admiral of the Fleet, who was regarded as the first military officer under the Lord High Admiral.

Indeed, the history of our flags is the history of our Navy. Much of the interest one finds in reading the old accounts of naval battles lies in waiting to see who was the first to strike. Just as a ship looks glorified when “dressed”—that is to say, when she has hung out all her colours from peak end to mastheads, and from mastheads to the end of the flying-jibboom, and thence to the water—so is our national marine story radiant with the flags, pennons, and “ancients,” which flutter through it, sometimes blowing saucily, sometimes riven and seared with flame and bullet, sometimes a mangled rag valiantly hanging by a nail at the top of the mast, or “seized” in the rigging, whilst below it the battle rages like a thunderstorm. It is, indeed, in these days, almost inconceivable that mortal men should ever have been able to achieve for the honour of their flag the triumphs which rendered the British colours the terror they became. Campbell, Brenton, James, Naval Chronicles, Annual Registers, Maritime Records of all sorts and descriptions teem with illustrations of dauntless bravery, of headlong fearlessness such as might make one believe that the Jacks of those days not only bore a charmed life, but were giants as mighty in stature as the early Irish are supposed to have been, to judge from the colossal remains that are occasionally dug up in various parts of that “kingdom.” It is impossible to read the voyage of Anson or the accounts of the early explorers of the South Seas without a feeling of pity for the miserable terror aroused in the Spaniards, the half-castes, and blacks by the sight of the English flag or by the sound of an English voice. The way the story usually runs is—the vessel is seen to approach, is recognized as an English South Seaman; whereupon the Governor collects all his plate and treasure, piles it into waggons drawn by mules, which he sends up country, and then hastily follows, occasionally, in his fright, leaving his wife behind him. A wretched priest is sent off in a boat pulled by shivering blacks, and, with teeth chattering, suggests a compromise, which the English regard as a stratagem to furnish the Governor with time enough to make good his escape. So they send the priest ashore with a polite intimation that if, by a certain hour, so many thousands of ducats and dollars, not to mention silver candlesticks and golden crucifixes, are not brought off and safely stowed away in their hold, they will sack and burn the town. If the Governor fails to comply, then we are admitted to a humiliating spectacle. The English row ashore, and find the coast lined with troops; but as the boats approach the troops retire, and by the time the keels have grounded upon the beach, the Governor’s army, along with a band of music and several hundreds of horsemen, are to be observed watching the proceedings of the English from the top of a very lofty hill. Such was the honour of the flag! Such is it still, and such is it sure to remain in the hands of those distant children of Old England who will grasp the halliards by which it is hoisted.

But let the humble “driver,” the obscure trawler, have his merit too. Were the herring woven into the symbolism of the Royal Standard it would not be amiss. When you hear the pensive cry of “fine bloaters,” or the melodious rattle of “Caller herrin,” think how much the honour of the flag owes to that kind of fish. The sovereignty of the sea is still ours, but to justify our inheritance we ought really to suffer our souls to be tinged with the old Parliamentary spirit in our response to the cries of our fishermen calling upon the country to help them against the Flemish “devil” in the North Sea, and the drift-net-cutting weapon of the Calais smacksmen in our “narrow waters.”

THE NAVAL OFFICER’S SPIRIT.

In Admiral Hobart Pasha’s sketches are many well told stories, all of them delivered with the rough simplicity of the seamen. The most striking is a slaving yarn. Some boats were in pursuit of a vessel, full to the hatches with negroes. One of them, swept forward by desperate rowers, succeeded in getting close under her bows, and a man in her sprang aboard, “like a chamois.” The slaver was going through it at six knots, and the boat, from which the man had leapt, do what the oarsmen would, dropped astern. In a few moments was heard the report of a pistol, and the vessel suddenly swept round into the wind, all aback, and her way stopped. The boats thereupon dashed alongside, and after a short struggle took possession of the brig. “There we found our lieutenant standing calmly at the helm, which was a long wooden tiller. He it was who had jumped on board alone, shot the man at the helm, put the said helm down with his leg, while in his hand he held his other pistol, with which he threatened to shoot any one who dared to touch him.”

The date of this is not given, but it falls well within living, indeed, within comparatively recent memory, and, like much else that is told in this autobiography, serves as an example of the survival of a spirit which makes our naval history as lively as if the annals were due to the imagination of the Scotts, Marryats, and Coopers of romance, and certainly far more inspiring and stirring than the choicest novels could prove.

It has always seemed to me as if the whole philosophy and spirit of British naval history lay in that memorable remark of Blake: “It is not for us to mind State affairs. We are to prevent foreigners from fooling us.” It is the broad humorous simplicity of the old salt, his shrewd perception and unadorned habit of going to work, that make all about him fascinating reading. Lord Anson said to Captain Campbell, after the defeat of Conflans, “The king will knight you if you think proper.” “Troth, my lord,” responded the captain, “I ken nae use that will be to me.” “But your lady may like it,” said Anson. “Weel, then,” replied Campbell, “His majesty may knight her if he pleases.” One finds the same curious sturdiness in demanding rights as in rejecting honours. There is nothing in this way to beat Admiral Vernon’s letter, dated June 30, 1774, to the Secretary to the Admiralty. During his retirement he had been passed over in a promotion of flag-officers. “That I might not,” he wrote, “by any be thought to be one that would decline the public service, I have thought proper to remind their lordships I am living, and have, I thank God, the same honest zeal reigning in my breast that has animated me on all occasions to approve myself a faithful and zealous subject and servant to my Royal master; and if the first Lord Commissioner has represented me in any other light to my Royal master, he has acted with a degeneracy unbecoming the descendant from a noble father, whose memory I reverence and esteem, though I have no compliments to make to the judgment or conduct of the son.”

The first lord was Daniel, Earl of Winchelsea. Long service at the cannon had taught the old sea-dogs the virtue of thunder.

In the account of the loss of the Earl of Abergavenny, it is stated that a midshipman was appointed to guard the spirit-room. The sailors pressed eagerly upon him. “Give us some grog!” they cried; “it will be all one an hour hence.” “I know we must die,” replied the gallant young officer, coolly, “but let us die like men!” Armed with a brace of pistols, he kept his place even while the ship was sinking. Byron has employed this incident in “Don Juan.” The captain of the Earl of Abergavenny was John Wordsworth, brother of the poet.

There is an extraordinary instance of naval spirit preserved in “Burnaby’s Travels in North America,” published in 1775. Captain St. Loe, commander of an English man-of-war lying in Boston harbour, being ashore on a Sunday, was taken into custody for walking on the Lord’s Day. On Monday he was carried before a justice and fined. Refusing to pay, he was sentenced to sit in the stocks one hour during the time of change. The sentence was executed. Whilst the captain sat in durance, the magistrates gravely admonished him to respect in future the wholesome laws of the province, and he was further exhorted for ever after to reverence and keep holy the Sabbath Day. At the expiration of the hour he was liberated. On regaining the use of his legs he stood up, expressed himself as greatly edified by the lesson he had learned, and declared himself so thoroughly converted as to rejoice the hearts of the Boston saints. He acted his part so well that he became extremely popular among the godly folks, who, on the day fixed for the sailing of the ship, accepted his invitation to dine with him on board. He gave them a capital dinner, plied them with bowls and bottles, and in a short time the whole ship resounded with their roaring merriment. On a sudden a body of sailors burst into the cabin, laid hold of the saints and pinioned them, then dragged them on deck, where they were stripped and tied up. How many lashes the boatswain and his mates dealt them is not stated; but the story goes that “when they had suffered the whole of the discipline, which had flayed them from the nape of the neck to the hams, the captain took a polite leave, earnestly begging them to remember him in their prayers. They were then let down into the boat that was waiting for them, the crew saluted them with three cheers, and Captain St. Loe made sail.”

This fairly comes under the heading of what Wordsworth calls the “good old plan.” And who can tell how much blood would have remained unshed had the nations left the settlement of personal affronts to ingenious individual retaliation? There is a most engaging and delightful history of England’s navy yet to be written on the plan of Granger’s entertaining story by biography. James is accurate, but dry; Brenton is always readable; but James and he are not both wanted. Dr. Campbell is dull. Tediousness, however, is inevitable in a narrative that does but tell the same story, somewhat varied, over and over again. One sea battle is very much like another, and the mind is quickly oppressed with details of starboard and larboard tacks, of falling top-masts, of broadsides and lowered colours. But let some diligent collector go to work on an anecdotal history of the navy, and I should say he can scarcely miss of a great audience. How lively, for example, would prove such a chapter as this of the spirit of the naval officer suggested to me by Admiral Hobart’s book! Let a few plums, picked up here and there from old records and chronicles, suffice as an example of the sort of pudding that awaits a cook.

On July 25, 1776, Sir Thomas Rich, in her Majesty’s ship Enterprise, met with a French fleet of two ships of the line and several frigates, commanded by the Duc de Chartres. The French admiral hailed the Enterprise, and desired the captain to come on board immediately, to which Sir Thomas replied that if the Duke had anything to communicate he must come on board the Enterprise, as he should not go out of his ship. The Duke insisted that he should, or he would sink him. “You can do as you please,” exclaimed Sir Thomas Rich, “but the only orders I receive are from my own admiral.” On this the Duke begged him as a favour to come on board, as he wished much to make his acquaintance. Sir Thomas at once went, and was received with the utmost respect.

Here is another plum from the memoirs of Sir Thomas Graves, Rear-Admiral at the Battle of Copenhagen. The scene was Noddle’s Island, off Boston. An American, more daring than the rest, advanced nearly half-way between his own people and the Marines of the squadron. Graves, who was then captain, was not a little irritated by the sight of this one Yankee insolently and contemptuously defiant of the whole of the British seamen and marines, and, borrowing a musket and bayonet from a brother officer, went out to meet the American champion in single combat. The Yankee allowed Graves to come within fifty yards of him. “The eyes of our respective parties are on us,” shouted Graves, and, after assuring the other that he had no intention to fire “before he could feel him with the point of his bayonet,” added that if the battle ended in his favour he should carry the Yankee’s scalp away with him as a trophy. Just as he said this he kicked against a stone and fell headlong, whereupon the American discharged his musket at him, threw it down, and took to his heels. The shot narrowly missed Graves, who fired in his turn without hitting his man, and then retreated, receiving as he went the fire of a score or two of persons who had concealed themselves in order to assist their American champion. A ludicrous forecast of the fight between the Shannon and the Chesapeake sixty or seventy years later!

There is wonderful spirit in that saying of old Benbow during the engagement with Du Casse. His right leg was broken to pieces by a chain shot. He was carried below to be dressed, and whilst the surgeon was at work, a lieutenant expressed great sorrow for the loss of the Admiral’s leg. Benbow replied, “I am sorry for it too, but I had rather have lost them both than seen this dishonour brought upon the English nation. But, do ye hear, if another shot should take me off, behave like brave men and fight it out.” That a man should talk composedly during the agonies of amputation by such surgical skill as was then to be found in the cockpit, is, I think, an extraordinary illustration of the fortitude and self-devotion of the sea-braves of those times.

“The spirit of your fathers” shows in many directions. It is related in the life of Rodney that when that fine old Admiral’s poverty became a subject of public notoriety, De Sartine suggested to the Duke de Biron that the command of the French fleet in the West Indies should be offered him. On this the Duke invited Rodney to spend some weeks with him, and one morning, whilst strolling about the grounds, sounded the Admiral on the subject. Rodney, not catching the Duke’s drift, thought him deranged, and began to eye him with some alarm. Eventually de Biron came out boldly with the proposal. “Those,” says the biographer, “who remember the worthy Admiral, and can recollect the countenance he would assume when anything unexpectedly broke upon him, may imagine his aspect and demeanour. He answered thus: ‘My distresses, it is true, have driven me from my country, but no temptation whatever can estrange me from her service. Had this offer been a voluntary one of your own, I should have deemed it an insult; but I am glad to learn that it proceeds from a source that can do no wrong!’”

It is in action, perhaps, that one finds the naval spirit, the wit, the heroism, the tenderness, the patriotism of the service best illustrated. I am fond of that anecdote of old Captain Killigrew (related by Campbell) whilst on a cruise with six frigates in 1695. He met with a couple of French men-of-war. When Killigrew came up with one of them, named the Content, “the whole French crew,” says Campbell, “were at prayers, and he might have poured in his broadside with great advantage; which, however, he refused to do, adding this remarkable expression: ‘It is beneath the courage of the English nation to surprise their enemies in such a posture.’” This sort of humanity sometimes finds form in a kind of ironical politeness. In Howe’s memoirs it is related that whilst the British fleet lay off Cape Race two large French men-of-war were discovered. Howe, with a press of sail, arrived just alongside the sternmost Frenchman, the Alcide, the captain of which hailed to know whether it was peace or war. Howe answered, “Prepare for the worst, as I expect every moment a signal from the flagship to fire upon you for not bringing to.” And then, observing a number of officers, soldiers, and ladies on deck, he pulled off his hat, and, speaking in French, begged they would go below, as they had no personal concern in the contest, and he would rather that they retired before he began the action. The French captain was again requested to go under the English admiral’s stern; he refused, and then Howe told him that the signal was out to engage—a red flag hoisted at the fore-topgallant-masthead. The French commander called out, “Commencez, s’il vous plaît!” to which Howe replied, “S’il vous plaît, monsieur, de commencer!” The two ships delivered their broadsides almost simultaneously. The Alcide struck in half an hour. “My lads,” cried Howe, to his crew, “they have behaved like men, treat them like men.”[^[24]]

[24]. She carried fewer seamen than Howe’s ship.

There is a good illustration of spirit in a quaint story told of Admiral Gayton. He was making his way home to England when a large man-of-war was sighted. The Admiral’s vessel, the Antelope, was a crazy old craft, under-manned, and half-armed. Every preparation, however, was made to receive the stranger, and Gayton, himself crawling on deck, exhorted his people to behave like Englishmen. “I can’t stand by you,” he said, “but I’ll sit and see you fight as long as you please.” The stranger turned out to be an English man-of-war. Gayton’s resolution was based on something more than spirit only. In fact, he had several chests of dollars belonging to himself in the ship, proceeds of the sale of American prizes. His friends pointed out the inconvenience of transporting specie, and advised him to remit his property in bills. “No,” said the old sailor, “I know nothing so valuable as money itself, and should be a fool to part with it for paper.” His friends then urged him to send his money home in a frigate, as the Antelope was old and might founder on the way. “No,” answered Gayton, “my money and myself will take our passage in the same bottom, and if we are lost there will be an end of two bad things at once.”[^[25]]

[25]. The best humour of the marine annals must be sought in anecdotes of dry old sea-dogs of the pattern of Gayton. There should be some lively stories of American naval officers. This given by Nathaniel Hawthorne in his “Note Books” is good. They are dining aboard a revenue cutter. “The waiter tells the captain of the cutter that Captain Percival (commander of the navy yard) is sitting on the deck of the anchor buoy (which lies inside of the cutter) smoking his cigar. The captain sends him a glass of champagne and inquires of the waiter what Percival says to it. He said, sir, ‘What does he send me this damned stuff for?’ but drinks nevertheless.”

Naval literature is like the ocean; many a gem of purest ray serene lies hidden in the depths of it. It is always the great conquerors one talks and thinks of; the Admiral on his quarter-deck, not Jack, half naked and mutilated, still heroically surging at his hot cannon below. It is a great many years since that an orphan, belonging to Bonchurch, Isle of Wight, was apprenticed by the parish to a tailor. As he was one day sitting alone on the shopboard—the ninth part of a man—he spied a squadron of men-of-war coming round Dunnose. Possessed by an unconquerable impulse, he ran down to the beach, cast off the painter from the first boat he saw, jumped into her, and plied the oars so well that he quickly reached the Admiral’s ship. He was received as a volunteer, and the boat sent adrift. Next morning the English fell in with a French squadron, and a hot action began. The young tailor fought with great cheerfulness and alacrity, but, growing impatient after awhile, he inquired of the sailors what was the object for which they were contending. He was answered that the fight would continue till the white rag at the enemy’s masthead was struck. “Oh, if that’s all,” he exclaimed, “I’ll see what I can do.” The vessels were engaged yard-arm and yard-arm, and enveloped in powder-smoke. The young tailor jumped aloft, gained the main-yard of the French Admiral, mounted to the masthead, and brought away the French flag. The English sailors, believing the enemy had hauled his flag down, shouted Victory! The French, perceiving their colours gone, ran from their guns, on which the English boarded and took the vessel. The young tailor’s name was Hopson. For this heroic action he was appointed to the quarter-deck, and progressing rapidly through the several ranks of the service became Admiral, with command of a squadron.[^[26]]

[26]. This told in the Naval Chronicle.

The politeness of Howe as an example of spirit is not quite so common in the annals as illustrations of heroic bluntness. I find a specimen in the narrative of the action with the squadrons under Jonquierre and St. George off Finisterre, when the Bristol, Captain Montagu, began to engage l’Invincible. Captain Fincher, in the Pembroke, tried to get in between her and the enemy, but not finding room, he hailed the Bristol, and requested Montagu to put his helm a starboard, or the Pembroke would run foul of his ship. Montagu answered, “Run foul of me and be, etc.; neither you nor any man in the world shall come between me and my enemy.” Similar bluntness is exhibited in a story told of Admiral Sir Richard King. During an action a shot struck the head of his captain and blew his brains over King, then commodore, who never flinched.[^[27]] On being told by the master, towards the close of the fight, that two more of the enemy’s ships appeared to be coming up, and asked what he would do with the ship, “Do with her!” he exclaimed contemptuously, “Fight her, sir! fight her till she sinks.” This is as good as Howe’s memorable answer to the lieutenant who told him that the fire was extinguished and that he need no longer be afraid. “Afraid!” exclaimed Howe; then, fixing his eyes on the lieutenant, “Pray, sir, how does a man feel when he is afraid? I need not ask how he looks.”

[27]. “Captain Scott of the cutter told me a singular story of what occurred during the action between the Constitution and Macedonian—he being powder-monkey aboard the former ship. A cannon shot came through the ship’s side, and a man’s head was struck off, probably by a splinter, for it was done without bruising the head or body, as clean as by a razor. Well, the man was walking pretty briskly at the time of the accident; and Scott seriously affirmed that he kept walking onward at the same pace, with two jets of blood gushing from his headless trunk, till, after going twenty feet without a head, he sunk down at once, with his legs under him.” Hawthorne Note Books. One seems to hear Mr. Burchell’s “fudge!” here.

The charm of British naval biography lies in its modesty and accuracy. A pity as much cannot be said for the marine records of other countries. There is an excellent example of impudent and deliberate lying in the Memoirs of M. du Gué-Trouin, chief of a squadron in the French navy, in the time of Louis XIV. The book is scarce. It was translated in 1732, by “A Sea Officer,” who in his dedication writes, after commenting on the Frenchman’s account of an action with the English, “But this is scarce anything to the wonders you will find wrought by Du Gué, his people, and his consorts. For my part, I had scarce gone through his book before I expected to hear he had attempted to run away with the Land’s End of England.... No ’tis in France, and France alone, where you must meet with these men who can do anything, no matter what stands in the way, no matter for the difficulties; nay, no matter whether they know what it is they are to do, they’ll do it.” But the Spanish and Dutch annals are too full of lies also to suffer us to consider the French singular in this way. As to the Yankees, one should read James’ “Naval Occurrences” to appreciate their amazing capacity as romancers.

Lord Bacon amused his leisure by collecting the witty sayings of others; Horace Walpole delighted in ana; there is no choicer reading than the Menagiana, Selden’s Table-Talk, and Spence’s anecdotes. In the face of such precursors no apology can be felt needful from any one who should think proper to attempt an anecdotal history of the British Navy.

WOMEN AS SAILORS.

A young lady of Plymouth, having illustrated her able-seamanlike capacity by diving from the masthead of a vessel at anchor in the Sound, proceeded some time afterwards to justify her marine enthusiasm by swimming from the Breakwater to the Hoe in a tumbling sea, the distance being three miles and the time occupied within an hour and a quarter. Now, if this young lady took it into her head to start away to sea, for what aforemast capacity, from boatswain down to boy, would she not be fit? Even as a skipper might she not excel after a proper course of ogling the sun through a sextant and a well-digested commitment of Norie or Raper to heart? A girl capable of measuring three miles of turbulent surges in seventy odd minutes ought to be equal to a weather top-sail ear-ring in a whole gale; whilst the lungs that could defy a league of flying spume should be able to wake some dancing silver pipings out of a boatswain’s whistle.

A good many ladies have gone to sea as sailors since the first chapters of the world’s maritime history were written, and the majority of them not only made excellent seamen, but fought their countries’ enemies with pike, cutlass, and pistol with a courage and determination equal to any exhibition of the same qualities in the bravest of their pig-tailed shipmates. And yet women are deemed unlucky at sea! A French tradition affirms that the ocean near Cape Finisterre swells at the sight of a woman. Possibly the old fear originated with the witches. Hideous crones who wrecked ships for lucre and drowned mariners to gratify their own spleen or that of others would necessarily taint Jack’s view of “the sex” in their maritime relations. An American writer[^[28]] quotes from Sandy’s Ovid: “I have heard of seafaring men, and some of Bristol, how a quartermaster in a Bristol ship, then trading in the Streights, going down into the hold saw a sort of women, his own neighbours, making merry together, and taking their cups liberally; who having espied him, and threatening that he should report their discovery, vanished suddenly out of sight; who thereupon was lame for ever after. The ship having made her voyage, nowe homeward bound, and neere her harbour, stuck fast in the deep sea before a fresh gaile, to their no small amazement, nor for all they could doe, together with the help that came from the shore, could they get her loose, until one (as Cynothea, the Trojan ship) shoved her off with his shoulder.” For bewitching the ship the ladies who had been seen taking their cups liberally in the hold were convicted and executed.

[28]. Mr. Bassett, of the United States Navy, who has collected much interesting information in this and the like superstitions in his work, “Legends of the Sea,” New York, 1886.

But, undeterred by forecastle superstitions, the girls, whenever they had a mind to go to sea, went. In Von Archenholtz’ “History of the Pirates” you read of Ann Bonny and Mary Read, two English women, as may be judged from the names, joining the buccaneers, “not from licentious motives to gratify their pleasures, but solely by a thirst of plunder, and as co-partners in their dangers as well as in their profits.” To appreciate the courage of Mary Read and Ann Bonny it is necessary to understand the kind of lives the buccaneers led—moral, physical, and intellectual. The typical pirate of the Antilles—in those times—was a bruised and battered rogue, dressed in a shirt and a pair of pantaloons, both made of coarse linen cloth, dyed with the blood of animals he had killed. His unstockinged feet were protected by boots formed from hogskins, and his head was covered with a round cap. He tied a raw hide girdle round him, hung a sabre upon it and filled it with knives. He also carried a firelock that shot two balls, each weighing an ounce.[^[29]]

[29]. Bailey says the word Bucanier is said to be derived from the inhabitants of the Caribee Islands who used to cut their prisoners to pieces “and laid them on hurdles of Brazil wood erected on sticks, with fire underneath, and when so broiled or roasted to eat them, and this manner of dressing was called bucaning. Hence our Buccaneers took their name, in that they, hunting, dressed their meat after their manner.”

Such was the dainty figure whom Ann Bonny and Mary Read made a comrade of, themselves retaining the apparel of their sex, to which they added long sailors’ trousers. With hair dishevelled, hangers at their waists, pistols on their breasts, and hatchets in their hands, they must have been objects nicely calculated to excite whatever of romantic enthusiasm there yet lingered in the bosoms of the cut-throats whose troop they had joined for love of blood and gold.

A more heroic female sailor, despite a fierceness that, though warrantable enough, makes an historical tigress of her, offers in the famous Jean de Belville, who vowing vengeance for the murder of her husband, De Clisson, at Paris, in 1343, fitted out a squadron of ships and swooped down upon the coast of Normandy, firing every castle that a torch could be put to, and reddening the seaboard with burning villages. She is represented to have been one of the finest women in Europe, and a sense of her beauty joining with perception of her wrongs and the brilliant loyalty of her very scheme of revenge, does unquestionably give a high quality of majesty to that posture of ferocity in which she is pictured by the historian.

In one of the old Dutch books of voyages—whether De Weert’s, Van Noort’s, or Schouten’s I cannot be sure—mention is made of a discovery, when the ship was off the Horn, of one of the crew as a woman. Even in these days of science, of canned meats, condensing apparatus, ice-houses, steam-winches, double-top-sail yards, clipper keels, and short voyages, a woman would find seafaring a calling bitter enough. But think of one of the sex a member of the crew of the Dutch ship of the seventeenth century, on a voyage of discovery, struggling against the western sleet-laden tempests of the bleak, iron melancholy Horn! Ships were butter-boxes in those times,[^[30]] sawed-off old wagons, as broad as they were long, with running gear that worked like drawing teeth, and a discipline composed of keel-hauling, fixing to the mast by driving a knife through the hand, and marooning, or, in other words, setting the culprit ashore on an uninhabited island, with a day’s provisions, and without the means of obtaining more if more was to be had. That men died by the scores in those days of scurvy, months of bitter bad meat and foul water, pestiferous ’tween-deck atmosphere, supplemented by the barbarous ignorance of the chirurgeons, is readily intelligible; but that a woman should have managed to exist under such conditions all the way from the Texel to the Straits Le Maire, doing the sailors’ work, and eating the sailors’ food, and living in the sailors’ quarters, is little short of a miracle and an amazing instance of female endurance.

[30]. Few features of those chronicles of adventure which are included in the collections of Hakluyt, Purchas, Churchill, Harris, and others are more interesting than the descriptions given of the tonnage, arms, and crews of the vessels which discovered the Indies, penetrated the great South Sea, gave names to capes and headlands of the vast but still shadowy continent of New Holland; coasted the bleak shores of Newfoundland, and searched the ice of the Frozen Ocean for the North-west Passage. Of course, the measurements of those days are not the measurements of these. A tun might signify a capacity for different kinds of freight without reference to cubical dimensions. The capacity of some vessels in those days was measured by the number of pipes of wine which could be stowed in them. Even in recent times there is a considerable difference between old and new measurements, the old representing less than the new. Nevertheless it is impossible to read about the ships in which the early navigators sailed—it is impossible to think of their tub-like forms, their enormous top-hamper, the astonishing clumsiness of their yards and gear, their castellated poops and rampart-like quarters, without wondering how on earth such structures managed to roll in safety over the stormy ocean, and to push their way, however slowly, against opposing winds and adverse tides. Certain expressions have changed their meaning, and on reading the old voyages one is often puzzled with names given to craft which, to modern experience, do not in the least degree correspond with their titles. For instance, the galley in our times is known as a long rowing boat, mounting so many oars. But in former days by the term galley was meant a vessel whose complement of men was one thousand or twelve hundred. She mounted a good show of ordnance, had three masts and thirty-two banks of oars, every bank containing two oars, and every oar being handled by five or six men. Equally perplexing are those names of shallops, skiffs, pinnaces, lighters, and so forth, which are met in abundance in the old stories, and which express fabrics very different indeed from the kinds of craft they now designate. For Drake’s glorious voyage five ships were equipped. The Hind was one hundred tons, the Elizabeth eighty tons, the Marigold thirty tons, the Swan fifty tons, and the Christopher fifteen tons. The captain of this fifteen-ton pinnace was Thomas Moon, and we hear of her disappearing in great storms and reappearing in fine weather, to the general joy of the rest of the fleet. Such an old skipper as this must have made noble company over a mug of strong beer, and would have been able to tell of things even more wonderful than trees with oysters growing upon them. Schouten, who discovered and named Cape Horn, put to sea in vessels which in these days would class amongst small, inferior coasters; yet the Unity managed to carry nineteen pieces of cannon and twelve swivels and a company of sixty-five men. How those ancient mariners contrived to stow themselves away in their dark ’tweendecks and black forecastles, how in their little holds they could find room for sufficient provisions and water to last them for months, not to mention the gunpowder and cannon balls which they carried, surpasses modern marine comprehension. Among the ships William Funnell writes about, in a narrative that is commonly taken to be William Dampier’s, was the Cinque Ports galley, for ever memorable as the craft in which Alexander Selkirk sailed. This vessel, that was equipped for a buccaneering cruise in little known waters against towering and powerful galleons, was ninety tons, a burthen which in these days would about fit a pleasure yacht intended for the blue skies and summer seas of the holiday period. Or take Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s expedition, which included the Golden Hind of forty tons, the Swallow of forty tons, and the Squirrel of ten tons. “The resolution of the proprietors was that the fleet should begin its course northerly, and follow as directly as they could the trade-way to Newfoundland.” Think of a ten-ton boat starting on such an expedition as this! Yet Sir Humphrey took command of her when her master deserted, with this sequel: that when off Cape Race homeward bound, “the storms and swellings of the seas increasing, he (namely, Sir Humphrey) was again pressed to leave the frigate (that is, the Squirrel), but his answer was, ‘We are as near to Heaven by sea as by land.’ About midnight, the Squirrel being ahead of the Golden Hind, her lights were at once extinguished, which those in the Hind seeing cried out ‘Our general is lost!’ and it is supposed she sank that instant, for she was never more heard of.” Lord Byron exclaims:

“Columbus found a new world in a cutter,

Or brigantine, or pink, of no great tonnage,

While yet America was in her non-age.”

The conjecture—it seems no more—of Washington Irving that Columbus’ ships were undecked boats “not superior to river and coasting craft of more modern days,” is disproved by Lindsay in his “History of Shipping.”

In the cases of women who have put on men’s clothes and shipped as sailors many were incited by love or jealousy. The old ballad of Billy Taylor is representative. The best known instance is that of Hannah Snell, whose story has been often told.[^[31]] This distinguished female was born in 1723, and married, at Wapping, one James Summs, a Dutch sailor, who spent her money and abandoned her. Thereupon Hannah made up her mind to go in quest of her faithless spouse. She dressed herself as a man, and started. Her adventures would fill three volumes. Romance and farce, tragedy and comedy are happily combined. She first went a soldiering, and, of course, a young woman fell in love with her. She deserted, re-enlisted as a marine, and saw a great deal of active service. How many men she killed is not stated, but it is conceivable that her love for the sex was not keen, and that she never discharged a musket without an emotion of joy mingled with hope that James Summs was not far off. She was wounded on several occasions, but contrived to conceal her sex until the news reached her that her Jim, whilst a prisoner at Geneva, had committed a murder, for which he was stitched up in a bag and thrown into the sea, when, without further ado, she resumed the petticoat and returned to London. From a grateful country she obtained an annuity of £50, which with her earnings as an actress—it seems she achieved a great popularity as Bill Bobstay, a sailor—enabled her to cut a genteel figure. Growing weary of the stage, she opened a public house in Wapping that was very handsomely supported down to the time of her death by the numerous jolly tars of that marine district.

[31]. A very full account of this extraordinary woman is printed in a little volume entitled “Eccentric Biography,” 1803.

A less known, but to the full as remarkable a case of a woman masquerading as a sailor occurs in the life of Mary Anne Talbot, “otherwise John Taylor.” Her story was written and published by herself at the beginning of the present century, and may be accepted as certainly not less accurate than the memoirs of George Ann Bellamy, whose sweet face crowned with feathers still looks laughingly over the mask in her hand from the plate after Ramberg in the old collections. Miss Talbot, otherwise John Taylor, was born in 1778, and was induced by an officer in an infantry regiment to assume male attire and accompany him as his foot-boy to the West Indies. Afterwards she acted in the capacity of a drummer at the siege of Valenciennes, and was twice wounded. It is observable that this young lady, who claimed to be the natural daughter of Lord William Talbot, Baron of Hensol, began her amazing career, like Hannah Snell, as a soldier. The infantry officer having been killed, Miss Talbot threw off her drummer’s dress, assumed that of a sailor, and, having made her way to Luxembourg, engaged with the captain of a French lugger, and sailed with him, in the belief that the vessel was a peaceful trader. After cruising about awhile the lugger fell in with the British fleet under the command of Lord Howe. Mary Ann refused to fight. The French captain swore at her and beat her, but she was not to be manhandled into firing upon her countrymen. The lugger hauled down her flag, and her captain and crew were taken on board the Queen Charlotte to be examined by Lord Howe. On being questioned Mary Anne replied that she was an English boy, and had shipped in the lugger in order to escape from France, and with the intention of deserting when the chance occurred. Fortunately Lord Howe’s questions were not very minute. She was dismissed, and stationed on board the Brunswick, Captain Harvey. In the great sea fight that followed Mary Anne was desperately wounded, and conveyed to the cockpit, and on the arrival of her ship at Spithead was sent to Haslar Hospital, from which, after four months’ attendance as an out-patient, she was discharged, partially cured. She then entered the Vesuvius bomb; the vessel was carried by privateers, and Mary Anne was taken to Dunkirk and lodged in the prison of St. Clair. On the prisoners being exchanged she met with an American captain, engaged with him and sailed to America as ship’s steward. She resided with the captain’s family at New York, and declares that she was subjected to much embarrassment on account of an attachment conceived for her by the captain’s niece, who actually proposed marriage, and obtained a miniature of her beloved in the full uniform of an American officer, for which Mary Anne paid eighteen dollars. Shortly after her return to England, the press being hot, she was seized by a gang, and in the scrimmage received a severe cutlass-wound on the head. She was carried on board the tender, but having probably had enough of the sea, she revealed her sex and recovered her liberty. How much truth there is in this narrative it would now be idle to conjecture. It is certain, however, that she obtained a pension of £20 a year, and that she received her money from the Navy Office as John Taylor, the name she had assumed when she followed the officer in the walking regiment to the West Indies.

In October, 1759, a person named Samuel Bundy, twenty years old, married a girl named Mary Parlour. He said he was ill, and his bride patiently waited until the following March, hoping meanwhile that he would be cured. Her friends growing tired, insisted upon searching him, and to the general amazement the bridegroom proved a female. Her story was that seven years previously she had been betrayed by a sweetheart and taken away from her mother, and that to prevent her from being discovered he dressed her as a boy. They separated after a year, and she went to sea as a sailor. This life she quitted after twelve months of rough work, and apprenticed herself to a Mr. Angel who lived at the King’s Head, Gravel Lane, Southwark. A young woman, Mary Parlour, fell in love with Mr. Angel’s brisk and saucy-looking apprentice, and they were married. The “husband” declared that his “wife” speedily found out the mistake she had made, but determined not to expose the matter. After her marriage “Samuel Bundy,” as she called herself, entered on board a man-of-war, but deserted for fear of detection. She then tried a merchantman, but left her also to return to the “wife” whom, says the account, “she says she dearly loves.”

In 1761, as a sergeant was drilling some soldiers aboard a transport, he was struck with the prominent breast of one of them named Paul Daniel. When the drill was over he sent for him to the cabin, where, after taxing “him” she confessed her sex. Her story was that she had a husband whom she dearly loved, and who had been reduced to beggary; he enlisted in a marching regiment and was in Germany for two years, as she believed. She had not heard of or from him in all that time, and she finally decided to hunt for him the world over. On learning that troops were being despatched to Germany she enlisted. This, to be sure, is a tale of a female soldier, but I introduce it here for its strangeness and likewise for the scene of it being on board ship.

In 1771, a man named Charles Waddall, on board the Oxford man-of-war, was sentenced to receive two dozen lashes for desertion; but when tied up the sailor was discovered to be a woman. She said that she had travelled from Hull to London after a man with whom she was in love, and hearing that he was a sailor on the Oxford she entered for that ship. When she arrived on board she learnt that her sweetheart had deserted, on which she resolved to run away too. The admiral gave the poor creature half a guinea, and others connected with Chatham dockyard made up a purse for her.

The following is illustrative of the power of the passion that inspires the lass who loves a sailor: In 1808, the relatives of a girl who had given her heart to a sailor, hoped to end the attachment by procuring his impressment; but she resolved nevertheless to marry him, and he was accordingly brought ashore and escorted by the press-gang to the church, whence, after the marriage ceremony, he was again conveyed to the tender. I think I see the commiserating expression on the mahogany faces of those old Jacks, as they witness the impressed man saying good-bye to his Poll.

In 1807, a woman, dressed in sailor’s clothes, was brought before the Lord Mayor of London. She said that she had been apprenticed by her step-father at Whitby to a collier called the Mayflower; that she had served four years out of the seven without her sex being discovered; that she was bound when she was thirteen years old, and that her step-father had likewise bound her mother to the sea—this lady being killed, whilst serving as a sailor, at the battle of Copenhagen! She said that her ship was at Woolwich, and that she had run away because the mate had rope’s-ended her for not getting up. She was provided with female attire and sent to her parish.

In 1792, the Marchioness de Bouillé and Madame de Noailles arrived at Brighton from Dieppe. The marchioness crossed the channel in an open boat, and was disguised as a sailor! The other, who was in mean male attire, crossed in one of the packets, the master of the vessel having pitied her and taken her under his protection.

Another romantic instance may be quoted: it is given in the Naval Chronicle (1802), and seems authentic enough. A gentleman, towards the end of the last century, became bankrupt. He went to Bradford with two daughters, and there died of a broken heart. The girls were left absolutely without provision. Rather than starve—or beg, which was worse than starving to these high-spirited women—they resolved to assume the character and dress of men and enter the navy. They went to Portsmouth and obtained a situation on the quarter-deck—as the term then was—of a troopship bound to the West Indies. They were engaged, we are told, in the reduction of Curaçoa, “and served with credit in two or three actions in those seas, till one of them was wounded by a splinter in her side, when her sex being discovered, she was discharged, and came to England about six weeks since,” making the date about May, 1802. Meanwhile, the other sister was ill with fever, having been put ashore at Dominica. Believing herself to be dying, she sent for one of the officers of the ship, disclosed her sex to him, and related her story. “The discovery gave tenderness to the esteem he had before entertained for his young friend; his attentions contributed to her convalescence. In short, she recovered, they were married, and are now returned to England in possession of the means to render happy the remainder of their days.”

It is a common saying at sea on a fine bright day, “That if it were always such weather, ships would go manned with ladies.” Possibly if the romance of women sailors terminated with handsome lovers and well-to-do husbands, there might, even in these practical days, arise the same necessity for overhauling the forecastle for masquerading girls that is now found for overhauling the hold for stowaways. But the time for Hannah Snells, for Mary Anne Talbots, otherwise John Taylors, for Ann Bonnys and Mary Reads is dead and gone. Those heroines belonged to a seafaring age of which old salts are ridiculed for deploring the extinction. And in sober truth old salts must not grumble if they are laughed at for thus lamenting, for surely better six days to New York in a steamer wholly free of Hannah Snells than four months to the same port in a ship entirely worked by Mary Anne Talbots.

FIGHTING SMUGGLERS.

I have noticed of late (1886) an exceptional degree of spasmodic vigour in the direction of the suppression of smuggling. It is not, indeed, that the Customs’ people have afforded proofs more astonishing than usual of their peculiar power of discovering tobacco, spirits, eau-de-Cologne, cigars, and the like in inconceivable and apparently impracticable shipboard nooks and holes; the special display takes the comparatively unaccustomed form of small men-of-war chasing smack-rigged craft flying Dutch colours, and bearing the strange name of “coopers” or “copers.” It is not known, I think, that there is any British or other law which renders illegal the act of sailing the high seas with a hold freighted with spirits, tobacco, and perfumes. That this is so may be gathered from the case of a Dutch cooper which, after an “exciting chase,” was brought to and boarded by a small cruiser and carried into an English port. But she had not been long detained before orders arrived for her release. One sees in a thing of this kind how hard it is to squeeze the least drop of romance from marine events in these days. Chases may be “exciting:” but they are of the rocket pattern—fire going up and stick coming down. Where is now the burly smuggling salt with a face as big and as full of colour as a topside of beef, great fearnought trousers, and boots; a stout jacket, plentifully garnished with buttons; a striped shirt and a large silk neckerchief, and a belt broken by the shafts of knives, the hilt of a cutlass, the butt-ends and gleaming barrels of a brace or more of big pistols? “Old Stormy he is dead and gone!” is the burden of a sea-chorus that is very applicable to those heavy villains of the long-shore theatre, Dirk Hatterick and bold Will Watch. The issue of a chase in these times is strictly in correspondence with the decidedly sneaking way in which smuggling—such as it is—is carried on. The concealment of a few watches in the heels of a pair of shoes; yards of pigtail snugly coiled away in cheeses; cigars marvellously well packed in the hollow hearts of balks of timber; how dull, mean, twopenny are such devices in the face of the defiant heroism of those historic braves who, waiting for moonless nights, mastheaded their lug-sails in death-like silence, and stole out into the wide waters of the English, the Irish, the Bristol Channels, a mere blot of ink upon the dusk, crossing the hawse of cruisers like shadows of vaporous wings, and melting into the sullen gloom of some secret bay flanked by cliffs liberally honeycombed with caves and echoing corridors![^[32]]

[32]. Nevertheless instances abound of extraordinary ingenuity even in the faint-hearted directions. “When,” says a writer whose book now dates back many years, “I arrived the first voyage from Bombay, I had a few rows of Cornelian beads which I had purchased there for some friends at home. For some time they lay snug enough in the toe of an old shoe, at the bottom of my chest, until we got in the river, when I gave them to the second mate to place in greater security. Next day, as the men were receiving rations, the word was passed that the searchers were alongside. At the instant the second mate came running to me with my beads. He had not been able to discover a good place to conceal them. I ran to the steward; he took them, and lifting up one of his lockers, where lay a large snake coiled up like a top-sail sheet, he lifted up its terrific head and threw my beads under its straw. The searchers came, overhauled the steward’s traps and lifted up the lid of the locker. The snake put forth its forked tongue—the lid dropped from the searcher’s hand!”

Long antecedent to the days in which the Dutch cooper coquets with her Majesty’s customs, and seduces Revenue cruisers into issueless pursuits, the smuggler gave the naval officer as much to do as the Frenchman or the Batavian. The fights were desperate; there was scarce an anker of run brandy that did not represent a life. It is not pleasant, perhaps, in the old pictures and book “embellishments” to see a smart frigate in hot pursuit of a top-sail lugger, and to know that yon puff of smoke at the bow of the chaser represents a cannon ball fired by an Englishman at his own countrymen. Whenever that sort of thunder is raised under the British Jack, you feel that the destination of the levin-brand which preceded it ought not at all events to be an English hull or an English breast. Nevertheless the blood will tingle to those early cuts and whole-page illustrations. How grandly the cruiser looms up astern! The spray breaks as far aft as the gangway, and the silver glitter sweeps in sparkling smoke over the sprit-sail yard that has been got “fore and aft” in readiness. Her royals soar cloud-like among the clouds, and her flag, as big as the main-topgallant-sail, streams its milky splendour of white bunting, crimson-crossed and nobly jacked in the corner, from the signal halliards at the end of the spanker gaff. But the eye, and, perhaps, the heart, is with that nimble shape in the foreground. She is a three-masted lugger, with yards long enough to give as much head to the canvas as would serve to blow a Royal George along. What a spring she has of bow! How elegant is the sweep of the line of her lee rail, lying dark amid the wash of cream there! Not so much as a puff from a musket-barrel answers that fore-chaser, blazing away at her astern. If the Revenue were not the abstraction that, with Charles Lamb, one somehow regards it, one would wish that saucy smuggler speedily overhauled. As it is, the sympathetic artist, by introducing a touch of thickness away to windward there, hints at the approach of a fog, and at the possibility, even yet, of that crouching whiskered crew successfully landing their tobacco, spirits, silk, and tea.

The old smuggling laws were somewhat stiff. Compared to them how mild are the penalties which the modern collector of Customs can press for! In the good old times, in the days of the fine old English gentleman—on whose account, by the way, it is nowhere recorded that any human being ever went into mourning—a penalty of £300 was imposed upon any master of a ship coming from abroad having more than one hundred pounds of tea on board or more than one hundred gallons of foreign spirits in casks under sixty gallons (besides two gallons for each seaman). Foreign spirits imported from any part of Europe, in a vessel containing less than sixty gallons, were forfeited along with the ship and her furniture. If any goods, such as tea or coffee, liable to forfeiture were found on board a ship bound from foreign ports, lying at anchor or “hovering” within two leagues of the coast, the ship, if not above two hundred tons, was forfeited. Any person selling coffee, tea, cocoa-nuts, or chocolate was forced to write “Dealer in coffee, etc.,” over his door under a penalty of £200. Illustrations of this kind make one see the sort of risks the smuggler ran in those days. Not but that the public should have held themselves very much obliged for all these penalties and punishments. It is on record that, information having been laid against some persons living in Dorsetshire for harbouring smuggled tea, their houses were searched, and there were found about thirty pounds of tea, mixed with leaves, and one thousand and thirty pounds weight of ash, elder, and sloe leaves, dried and prepared, ready for mixing with the tea! This was about the time when the poet Cowper in his nightcap was celebrating the merits of the cup that cheers. But did it not inebriate? Think of the proportion of a thousand and thirty pounds of ash, elder, and sloe leaves, to thirty pounds of the Hong merchant’s sample! All these leaves were got in the summer, and I read that the poor of the district were so well paid for collecting them, that the farmers could not obtain labourers for their harvests.

The war waged by the State against the smuggler was as vengeful as the hottest against a foreign foe. As an example: in 1784 the severity of the winter had obliged the smugglers to lay up a great number of their vessels. It was suggested to Mr. Pitt that a fine opportunity offered for destroying these boats, if sufficient force could be procured to prevent the smugglers from attempting a rescue. Pitt sent word to the war office for a regiment of soldiers to be at Deal on a certain day. The officer in command of the soldiers found on his arrival that the people of the town having got scent of what was to happen, had advised the publicans to pull down their signs that the soldiers should not be able to get quarters. They consented and no quarters were to be had. Eventually the men obtained shelter in a barn, but the officer had the utmost difficulty to procure provisions for them. Next day some cutters were seen lying off the beach and the soldiers marched down to the water. The inhabitants thought the troops would embark in the cutters. Then it was that the order was given to burn the boats, and the force being great, the people were obliged to stand idly looking on, not daring a rescue.

Those were days when a cruise against the smugglers promised some excellent pickings. One of the most successful of the cruising ships was the Atalanta, of eighteen guns, that was hardly paid off and her crew discharged when, such was her popularity, on being almost immediately re-commissioned men entered with extraordinary eagerness. In one short cruise alone she captured eight sail and nearly two thousand ankers of spirits, besides bale goods; and every man’s share of the prize money amounted to twice the value of his wages. The old reports run thus: “Came in the Atalanta, eighteen guns, Captain Mansfield, with a fine smuggling cutter of eighty tons, called the Admiral Pole, of Exeter, with one hundred and seventy ankers of spirits, taken after a long chase. She was seized some months since at Weymouth for having an over quantity of spirits on board, and was liberated on bond being given to the Board of Customs and Excise.” Or, “Came in, the Eagle, Excise cutter, Captain Ward, with a fine smuggling cutter, called the Swift (formerly the Bonaparte, French privateer), with five hundred tubs of brandy, after a long chase within the limits of the Dodman.” Or, “Sailed on a cruise against the smugglers, the Ranger, cutter, Captain A. Fraser.” Or, “Came in from a cruise against the smugglers, the Galatea, of thirty-six guns, Captain Wolfe.”

It will be judged that if bold Will Watch or belted Joe Marline succeeded in running his goods it was certainly not through lack of attention to him on the part of the King’s navy. And, as may be supposed, many black deeds of violence and murder are on record. The story of an assassination eminently characteristic of the old smuggling times is preserved in the Old Bailey annals. On the night of December 26, 1798, a Custom House officer went in a boat to look after smugglers near Cawsand Bay on the coast of Cornwall. He saw a sloop lying at anchor, the people of which hailed him, and asked him whose boat it was. He answered that it was a King’s boat. They warned him not to approach; if he did, they would fire on him; he was then some eight or ten fathoms distant from the sloop. His men, nothing daunted, continued to row, whilst he held the Revenue colours in his hand. The smugglers fired a volley from their muskets, slipped their cable, and made off. One of the men in the boat was killed. The smugglers were apprehended on the evidence of one of their own people. This man, named Tom Rogers, said that he was a sailor on board the vessel (named the Lottery) on the night referred to. They had just arrived from Guernsey with a cargo of smuggled spirits, and, at the moment of the approach of the Customs’ boat, they were discharging the tubs into boats alongside. The witness declared that after they had made sail, one of the crew named Potter said it was he who had fired, that he had taken good aim, and had seen a man drop in the boat. On this evidence Potter was found guilty, and hanged at Execution Dock.

But whatever may be thought of the morality of the smuggler, it is indisputable that his cutter or lugger was a magnificent nursery for seamen. The exploits of some of these fellows in respect of recaptures alone would fill a stout volume with wonderful instances of intrepidity and seamanship. Take the case of the Echo, of Poole, that was boarded by a French privateer, and retaken by the mate and a boy of twelve, who seized the helmsman, forced him below with two French seamen, battened them down, and brought them to Plymouth.

Of the Marquis of Granby, that was captured off the Goodwins by a French lugger; the captain and two men were put into the Frenchman’s boat, in order to be conveyed on board the privateer, that was giving chase to another vessel, and that, by carrying a press of sail, in a short time left the boat nearly five miles astern. On observing this the smuggling skipper wrested a sword out of the hands of the officer of the boat, and compelled the French sailors to row him back to his own ship. This done, he gallantly boarded her, sword in hand, and speedily cleared the deck of the Frenchmen, who, to save their lives, jumped overboard, and were picked up by their own boat. The smuggler then proceeded on his voyage; but what became of the French sailors was never known.

Of the William, that was captured by a privateer off Bridlington; all the crew, except three, were taken out and five Frenchmen put on board. The three Englishmen found means to choke the pumps with ashes, and made the Frenchmen believe the vessel was sinking. Sooner than go to the bottom they agreed to make for the nearest port, and eventually they carried the William to Sunderland. The Frenchmen, I read, were landed the same evening, “and have since been sent to Durham gaol.”

Of the Beaver, that was captured by a French privateer, named La Braave, of eighteen guns and seventy men. They put a prize-master and four seamen in the prize, leaving only the captain and a boy on board. The skipper contrived to secure the French prize-master by seizing him in the cabin and fastening his hands behind him; he then ran on deck with a crow-bar and a pistol, and in the scuffle the steersman fell overboard, and was drowned. The other three were aloft. The English captain, taking the helm, ordered them to remain aloft, or he would shoot them. In this manner he steered the vessel all night, and next morning sighting an English frigate, signalled and was brought safely to port by her. There is something not a little humorous in the thought of those three Frenchmen hanging on aloft all night, the smuggling Britisher at the helm, steering with one hand and with the other covering them with a pistol.

These are but a plum or two from a pudding very rich with such fruit. Somehow the British mariner of that period never could be taught to respect the French seaman as an adversary. Again and again you read of a man and a boy out-manœuvring and subduing a fair ship’s company of wooden-shoes. I sometimes fancy that Napoleon Bonaparte helped to confirm the Englishman’s indifference to the French mariner—the intellectual heritage of years of conquest—by his coddling policy of dress and treatment. The uniform he himself designed for his nautical braves consisted of a blue jacket in the manner and of the cut of those of dragoons; red waistcoat with gilt buttons, and blue cloth pantaloons; red stockings, pointed shoes with round buckles, cropped hair “without powder!” They were ordered to change their shirts three times a week, and when on shore to wear small cocked hats. They were also provided with red nightcaps, ordered to be washed once a week. Every man had two nightcaps and two neckcloths. They were obliged to comb their hair three times in the seven days, and to be shaved twice a week. Their captains called them “mes enfans.” It was impossible for Jack to have a high opinion of marine masqueraders after this pattern, and when it came to fighting, the more the merrier, as you notice in the actions of smuggling men and boys.

The smugglers often turned out some fine useful seamen. There was Mr. Harry Paulet, who happened to be sneaking home with a cargo of brandy one morning when the French fleet, under Conflans, had stolen out of Brest, while Admiral Hawke lay concealed behind Ushant to watch the motions of the enemy. Paulet, loving his country better than his cargo, ran up to the British admiral, and, asking leave to speak to him, was allowed to go aboard. On his telling what he knew of the enemy, Hawke said if he was right he would make his fortune; but that if he lied he would hang him at the yard-arm. The fleet was instantly under weigh, and by Paulet’s directions was presently brought between the enemy and the French coast. The admiral then ordered Paulet into his own vessel; but the bold smuggler begged leave to remain, that he might assist in beating the enemy. This favour was granted, a station was assigned to Paulet, who fought like a gamecock, and when the battle was over he was sent home with a pocket full of letters of commendation, and subsequently rewarded in such a manner as to enable him to live in ease during the rest of his life. The famous comedian, Parsons, used to say that “he would rather spend a crown to hear Harry Paulet relate one of Hawke’s battles than sit gratis by the most celebrated orator of the day. There was,” said Parsons, “a manner in his heart-felt narrations that was certain to bring his auditors into the very scene of action; and when describing the moments of victory I have seen a dozen labouring men, at the Crown public house, rise together and, moved by an instantaneous impulse, give three cheers while Harry took breath to recite more of his exploits.”

Johnson, a smuggler, achieved amazing reputation as a pilot and seaman. He was several times locked up, laid in irons, as for instance in the New Jail in the Borough, and the Fleet, but always managed to break out, and at this work was a complete Jack Sheppard. He went to Holland, and his fame as a seafarer having spread, the French Government offered to make a settlement of £600 a year upon his family if he would engage in the attempt to invade England; but the bold smuggler was a patriot, and said no. His life was then threatened, but the skill that was equal to a Borough jail was superior to a French prison. Johnson got away, came home, and received King George’s pardon in consideration of “qualities which would do honour to a more elevated state.” But smugglers after the pattern of Paulet and Johnson have long ceased to flourish. Well may the old tar sing:

Farewell to every sea-delight!

The cruise, with eager watchful days,

The skilful chace by glimmering night,

The well-worked ship, the gallant fight,

The lov’d commander’s praise!

Will Watch has flung down his hanger and pistols, and appears in the more amiable and less hazardous part of a ship’s steward, a lascar, a foremast seaman, with a few pounds of cigars in his shirt or a cube of honeydew under his bunk boards. The coastguard, it is true, still keeps a look-out; but if it were not for the gardens and lawn-tennis grounds which his superior officer sets him to work upon, he would find his calling very dull and uneventful.

SEA PHRASES.

“The sea-language,” says Sir William Monson in his “Naval Tracts,” “is not soon learned, and much less understood, being only proper to him that has served his apprenticeship; besides that, a boisterous sea and stormy weather will make a man not bred to it so sick that it bereaves him of legs, stomach, and courage so much as to fight with his meat; and in such weather, when he hears the seamen cry starboard or port, or to bide aloof,[^[33]] or flat a sheet, or haul home a clew-line, he thinks he hears a barbarous speech, which he conceives not the meaning of.” This is as true now as then. But the landsman is not to blame. There is no dialect peculiar to a calling so crowded with strange words as the language of the sea. Dr. Samuel Johnson, who is never more diverting than when he thunders forth his abhorrence of naval life and of sailors as a community of persons, has in some cases perpetuated, and in some cases created, the most ludicrous errors regarding ships, their furniture and crews. If, as Macaulay declares, the Doctor was at the mercy of Junius and Skinner in many of his shore-going derivatives, he was equally at the mercy of Bailey and Harris when he came to the ocean. A few samples will suffice.

[33]. “Keep your luff!”

“Topgallant, the highest sail.” “Topsail, the highest sail.” The word topgallant, as Johnson prints it, is not a sail at all. Had Johnson defined the “topgallant-sail” as the highest sail, he would have been right; for in his day there was no canvas set above the topgallant yard. But it is manifest that if the “topgallant-sail” was the highest sail, the top-sail could not be the highest too. “Tiller, the rudder of a boat.” The proverbial schoolboy knows better than that. “Shrouds, the sail-ropes. It seems to be taken sometimes for the sails.” It is hardly necessary to say that the shrouds have nothing whatever to do with the sails. They are ropes—in Johnson’s day of hemp, in our time of wire—for the support of lower, top, and topgallant masts. “Sheets.” This word he correctly defines, borrowing his definition from a dictionary. But he adds, “Dryden seems to understand it otherwise;” and quotes—

“Fierce Boreas drove against his flying sails,

And rent the sheets.”

It is very evident that Dryden perfectly understood the term as signifying the ropes at the clews or corners of sails. “Quarter-deck, the short upper deck.” This is as incorrect as “Poop, the hindmost part of the ship.” The poop lies aft, to be sure, but it is no more the hindmost part of the ship than the mizzen-mast is—any more than the quarter-deck need necessarily be “short” or “upper”—in the sense clearly intended by Johnson. “Overhale, to spread over.” Overhale then signified what is now meant by overhaul. To overhaul a rope is to drag it through a block; to overhaul a ship is to search her. It certainly does not mean “to spread over,” nor, in my judgment, does Spenser employ it in that sense in the triplet that Johnson appends. “Loofed, gone to a distance.” Loofed in Johnson’s day denoted a ship that had luffed—i.e. put her helm down to come closer to the wind. “Keel, the bottom of the ship.” No doubt the keel is at the bottom of the ship, but sailors would no more understand it as a ship’s bottom than they would accept the word “beam” as a definition of the word “deck.” Johnson gives “helm” as “the steerage, the rudder.” It is plain that he is here under the impression that “steerage” is pretty much the same as “steering.” In reality the helm is no more the rudder than it is the tiller, the wheel, the wheel-chains, or ropes and the relieving-tackles. It is a generic term, and means the whole apparatus by which a ship is steered. “Belay, to belay a rope; to splice; to mend a rope by laying one end over another.” To belay a rope is to make it fast.[^[34]]

[34]. Bailey correctly defines this word: “to fasten any running rope so that when it is haled it cannot run out again.” Either Johnson doubted Bailey (whom he quotes nevertheless) as an authority, or consulted him for his sea-words at capricious intervals.

These examples could be multiplied; but it is not my purpose to criticize Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary. Yet, as it is admittedly the basis of most of the dictionaries in use, it is worth while calling attention to errors which have survived without question or correction into the later compilations.

These and the like blunders merely indicate the extreme difficulty that confronts, not indeed the etymologist—for I nowhere discover any signs of research in the direction of marine originals—but the plain definer of nautical words. The truth is, before a man undertakes to explain the language of sailors he should go to sea. It is only by mixing with sailors, by hearing and executing orders, that one can distinguish the shades of meaning amidst the scores of subtleties of the mariner’s speech. It is, of course, hard to explain what the sailor himself could not define save by the word he himself employs. Take, for example, “inboard” and “aboard.” You say of a man entering a ship that he has gone “aboard her;” of a boat hanging at the davits that it must be swung “inboard.” There is a nicety here difficult of discrimination, but it is fixed nevertheless. You would not say of a man in a ship that he is “inboard,” nor of davits that they must be slewed “aboard.” So of “aft” and “abaft.” They both mean the same thing, but they are not applied in the same way. A man is “aft” when he is on the quarter-deck or poop; you could not say he is “abaft.” But suppose him to be beyond the mizzen-mast, you would say “he is standing abaft the mizzen-mast,” not “he is standing aft it.”

Peculiarities of expression abound in sea-language to a degree not to be paralleled by the eccentricities of other vocational dialects. A man who sleeps in his bunk or hammock all night, or through his watch on deck, “lies in” or “sleeps in.” But neither term is applicable if he sleeps through his watch below. “Idlers,” as they are called, such as the cook, steward, butcher, and the like, are said to have “all night in”—that is, “all night in their bunks or hammocks.” To “lay” is a word plentifully employed in directions which to a landsman should render its signification hopelessly bewildering. “This word ‘lay,’” says Richard Dana, in a note to “Two Years Before the Mast,” “which is in such general use on board ship, being used in giving orders instead of ‘go,’ as ‘Lay forward!’ ‘Lay aft!’ ‘Lay aloft!’ etc., I do not understand to be the neuter verb lie mis-pronounced, but to be the active verb ‘lay’ with the objective case understood, as ‘Lay yourselves forward!’ ‘Lay yourselves aft!’ etc. At all events, lay is an active verb at sea and means go.” It is, however, used in other senses, as to “lay up a rope,” “the ship lay along,” the old expression for a vessel pressed down by the force of the wind. Other terms strike the land-going ear as singular contradictions, such as “to make land,” to “fetch such and such a place”—i.e. to reach it by sailing, but properly to arrive at it by means of beating or tacking; “jump aloft,” run aloft; “tumble up,” come up from below; “bear a hand,” look sharp, make haste; “handsomely,” as in the expression, “Lower away handsomely!” meaning, lower away with judgment, but promptly; “bully,” a term of kindly greeting, as “Bully for you!”[^[35]]

[35]. This and other terms must now be called Americanisms. But they are Americanisms only as are other old words which the people of the United States have preserved from the language of their English forefathers, but which on this side of the water are obsolete, or employed with a different meaning.

The difficulties of the lexicographer desiring the inclusion of nautical terms in his list are not a little increased by the sailor’s love of contractions, or his perversities of pronunciation. Let me cite a few examples. The word “treenail,” for instance—a wooden spike—in Jack’s mouth becomes “trunnel.” “To reach” is to sail along close-hauled; but the sailor calls it “ratch.” “Gunwale,” as everybody knows, is “gunnel,” and so spelt by the old marine writers. “Crossjack,” a sail that sets upon a yard called the “crossjack yard,” on the mizzen-mast, is pronounced “crojjeck.” The “strap” of a block is always termed “strop;” “streak,” a single range of planks running from one end of the ship or boat to the other, is “strake;” “to serve,” that is, to wind small stuff, such as spun-yarn, round a rope, is “to sarve.” The numerous contractions, however, are pre-eminently illustrative of the two distinctive qualities of the English sailor—nimbleness and alertness. Everything must be done quickly at sea: there is no time for sesquipedalianism. If there be a long word it must be shortened somehow. To spring, to jump, to leap, to tumble, to keep his eyes skinned, to hammer his fingers into fish-hooks: these are the things required of Jack. He dances, he sings, he drinks, he is in all senses a lively hearty; but underlying his intellectual and physical caper-cutting is deep perception of the sea as a mighty force, a remorseless foe. The matter seems trifling, yet the national character is in it.

A great number of words are used by sailors which are extremely disconcerting to landsmen, as apparently sheer violations of familiar sounds and the images they convey. To lash: ashore, this is to beat with a whip, to thrash; at sea it means to make anything fast by securing it with a rope. To foul: when a sailor speaks of one thing fouling another, he does not intend to say that one thing soils or dirties another, but that it has got mixed in a manner to make separation a difficulty. “Our ship drove and fouled a vessel astern.” A line is foul when it is twisted, when it jams in a block. “Seize” is to attach: it does not mean, “to grasp.” “Seizing” is the line or lanyard or small stuff by which anything is made fast. “Whip:” this word naturally conveys the idea of the implement for flogging, for driving; in reality, it signifies a line rove through a single block. “Whip it up!” hoist it up by means of the tackle called a whip. “Get it whipped!” get it hoisted by a whip. “Sweep” looks like a fellow who cleans a chimney; at sea it is a long oar. “Board” is not a plank, but the distance measured by a ship or vessel sailing on either tack, and beating against the wind before she puts her helm down for the next “ratch.” “Guy” has nothing to do with the fifth of November, nor with a person absurdly dressed, but is a rope used for steadying a boom. “Ribands” are pieces of timber nailed outside the ribs of a wooden ship. “Ear-rings” are ropes for reefing or for securing the upper corners of a sail to the yard-arms.

The bewilderment increases when Jack goes to zoology for terms. “Fox” is a lashing made by twisting rope-yarns together. “Spanish fox” is a single yarn untwisted and “laid up” the contrary way. “Monkey” is a heavy weight of iron used in shipbuilding for driving in long bolts. “Cat” is a tackle used for hoisting up the anchor. “Mouse” or “mousing” was formerly a ball of yarns fitted to the collars of stays. “To mouse” is to put turns of rope-yarn round the hook of a block to prevent it from slipping. “Spider” is an iron outrigger. “Lizard” is a piece of rope with a “thimble” spliced into it. “Whelps” are pieces of wood or iron bolted on the main-piece of a windlass, or on a winch. “Leech”[^[36]] is the side-edge of a sail. “Sheepshank” is the name given to a manner of shortening a rope by hitches over a bight of its own part.

[36]. Sometimes spelt “leach,” and perhaps correctly. “To leach” formerly signified to “cut up.” In a sense the “leach,” or “leech,” may be taken as meaning the cut sides of the sail. Leach also meant “hard work.”

Of such terms as these, how is the etymology to be come at? The name of the animal might have been suggested in a few cases, as in “lizard,” perhaps, by some dim or fanciful resemblance to it in the object that wanted a title. But “monkey,” “fox,” “cat,” and other such appellations, must have an origin referable to any other cause than that of their likeness to the creatures they are called after. It is possible that these names may be corruptions from Saxon and other terms expressive of totally different meanings. It will be supposed that “Spanish fox” comes from the Spaniards’ habit of using “foxes” formed of single yarns. We have, for example, “Spanish windlass,” as we have “French fake,” “French sennit,” etc. The derivatives of some words are suggested by their sounds. “Bowse,” pronounced “Bowce,” is a familiar call at sea. “Bowse it taut, lads!” “Take and bowse upon those halliards!” The men pull off upon the rope and bow it by their action. It is therefore conceivable that “bowse” may have come from “bow,” “bows.”[^[37]] “Dowse,” pronounced “dowce,” signifies to lower, to haul down suddenly. Also to extinguish, as “dowse the glim,” “put out the light.” The French word “douce” is probably the godfather here. But “rouse,” pronounced “rouce”? “Rouse it aft, boys!” It means, to drag smartly. Does it really signify what it looks to express—to “rouse up” the object that is to be handled? It is wonderful to note how, on the whole, the language of the sea has preserved its substance and sentiment through the many generations of seafarers down to the present period of iron plates and steel masts, of the propeller and the steam engine. The reason is that, great as has been the apparent change wrought in the body and fabric of ships since the days of the Great Harry of the sixteenth century, and the Royal George of the eighteenth century, the nomenclature of remote times still perfectly answers to a mass of nautical essentials, more especially as regards the masts, yards, rigging, and sails of a vessel. And another reason lies in the strong conservative spirit of the sailor. There was a loud outcry when the Admiralty many years ago condemned the term “larboard,” and ordered the word “port” to be substituted. The name was not to be abandoned without a violent struggle, and many throes of prejudice, on the part of the old salts. What was good enough for Hawkins, Duncan, Howe, Rodney, Nelson, was surely good enough for their successors.

[37]. Old dictionaries give “to bowse” as meaning “to drink hard.” The correct etymology might lie in this direction.

Not in many directions do I find new readings of old terms. As a rule, where the feature has disappeared the term has gone with it. Where the expression is retained the meaning is more or less identical with the original words. A few exceptions may be quoted: “Bittacle” was anciently the name of the binnacle; obviously derived from the French habitacle (a small habitation). “Caboose” was formerly the name of the galley or kitchen of small merchantmen. Falconer spells it “coboose,” and describes it as a sort of box or house to cover the chimney of some merchant ships. Previous to the introduction of the caboose, the furnaces for cooking were, in three-deckers, placed on the middle deck; in two-decked ships in the forecastle; and, adds my authority (the anonymous author of a treatise on shipbuilding, written in 1701), “also in all ships which have forecastles the provisions are there dressed.” “Cuddy” is a forcible, old-fashioned word that has been replaced by the mincing, affected term “saloon.” In the last century it signified “a sort of cabin or cookroom in the fore-part or near the stern of a lighter or barge of burden.” It is curious to note the humble origin of a term subsequently taken to designate the gilded and sumptuous first-class cabin accommodation of the great Indian, American, and Australian ships. “Forecastle,” again, I find defined by old writers as “a place fitted for a close fight on the upper deck forward.” The term was retained to denote the place in which the crew live.

The exploded expressions are numerous. A short list may prove of interest. “Hulling” and “trying” were the words which answer to what we now call “hove-to.” “Sailing large,” having the wind free or quartering; this expression is dead. “Plying” was the old term for “beating”—“we plyed to windward”—i.e. “we beat to windward.” The word is obsolete, as is “spooning,” replaced by “scudding.” For “veering” we have substituted “wearing.” Some good strong, expressive phrases have vanished. Nobody nowadays talks of “clawing-off,” though the expression is perfect as representing a vessel clutching and grabbing at the wind in her efforts to haul off from a lee shore. For “shivering” we now say “shaking.” “The top-sail shivers in the wind!” In these days it “shakes.” We no longer speak of the “top-sail atrip,” but of the top-sail hoisted or the yard mast-headed. “Hank for hank,” signifying two ships beating together and always going about at the same moment, so that one cannot get to windward of the other, is now “tack for tack.” We have ceased to “heave out stay-sails:” they are now loosed and hoisted. The old “horse” has made way for the “foot-rope,” though we still retain the term “Flemish horse” for the short foot-rope at the top-sail yard-arms. The word “horse” readily suggests the origin of the term “stirrup,” a rope fitted to the foot-rope that it may not be weighed down too deep by the men standing on it. It is plain that “horse” is owing to the seamen “riding” the yard by it. Anything traversed was called a “horse.” The term is still used. The “round-house” or “coach” yielded to “cuddy,” as “cuddy” has to “saloon.” The poop remains; but the “poop-royal” of the French and the Spaniards, or the “topgallant poop” of our own shipwrights—a short deck over the aftermost part of the poop—has utterly disappeared.

“Whoever were the inventors,” writes Sir Walter Raleigh in “A Discourse of Shipping,” included in his Genuine Remains, “we find that every age hath added somewhat to ships, and to all things else; and in mine own time the shape of our English ships hath been greatly bettered. It is not long since the striking of the Top-mast (a wonderful ease to great Ships both at Sea and in Harbour) hath been devised, together with the Chain Pump, which takes up twice as much water as the ordinary did. We have lately added the Bonnet and the Drabler. To the Courses, we have devised Studding Sails, topgallant Sails, Sprit-sails, Topsails. The Weighing of Anchors by the Capstone is also new. We have fallen into consideration of the length of Cables, and by it we resist the malice of the greatest Winds that can blow.”

Although this passage has reference to improvements made in the fabrics of ships during the closing years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth and of the opening of that of James I., it is curious, as illustrative of the conservatism of the sailor, that by omitting the “sprit-sail” these words of Raleigh might stand for the ships of to-day. No sailor unacquainted with the archæology of his own calling would believe that the studding-sail, the bonnet, the drabbler, the chain-pump, the topgallant-sail, and even the sprit-sail (a sail that was in use down to so late a period as the close of the first quarter of the present century) were as old as Raleigh’s hey-day. Certainly the terms given by Sir Walter would furnish us with a clue to the paternity of these cloths. “Studding-sail,” for example. Falconer derives it from scud, stead, or steady. I am inclined to think it is derived from the verb “to stud”—to adorn, to cover, but not necessarily, as Johnson says, “with studs or shining knobs.” It is quite conceivable to think of a forked-beard lifted over a ruff in admiration of canvas that raises the cry, “By’r Lady, but she is now studded with sail!” Assuredly we moderns would not regard a studding-sail as a steadying sail in any sense of the word. The “bonnet” mentioned by Raleigh is an additional piece of canvas made to lace on to the foot of a sail. The term bonnet applied to a thing worn at the foot advises us of an ironical derivative. But of “drabbler” the etymology is obvious. To drabble is to wet, to befoul. Now the drabbler is an additional piece of canvas laced to the bonnet, and necessarily coming very low, unquestionably takes its name from “drabbling”—getting wet. The sprit-sail and sprit-top-sail are among the vanished details; so indeed is the sprit-sail-yard, which may be said to have been conquered, like a cold young virgin, by the invention of “whiskers”—small booms or irons, one on each side the bowsprit, and formerly projecting from the cat-heads, whence possibly the term. Of many sea-expressions the origin is sufficiently transparent. I offer a few examples. “Bilge” is the part of a vessel’s bottom which begins to round upwards. The word is corrupted from the old “bulge, the outermost and lowest part of a ship, that which she bears upon when she lies on the ground.” “Butt” is the joining of two planks endways. “To start a butt” is to loosen the end of a plank where it unites with another. This word is got from “abut.” “Chock-a-block,” said when anything is hoisted by a tackle as high as the block will let it go. Chock here means choke, and in that sense is implied in such expressions as “chock-aft,” “chock-home,” etc. Formerly “jib” was spelt “gyb.” A vessel in running is said to “gybe” or “jibe” when the wind gets on the lee side of her fore and aft sails and blows them over. As this in the old days of square rigs and “mizon yards” would be peculiar to the “gyb” or “jib,” the expression is sufficiently accounted for. “To stay” is to tack; a ship “in stays” is a ship in the act of tacking. I interpret “to stay” by the verb “to stop;” “she is staying”—she is stopping; “in stays”—in the act of stopping.[^[38]] “Tack” is the weather lower corner of a square-course when set. “To tack” may be accepted as metaphorically expressing the action of rounding into the wind in the direction of the tacks. “topgallant,” says Johnson, “is proverbially applied to anything elevated or splendid,” and quotes from L’Estrange: “I dare appeal to the consciences of topgallant sparks.” Prior to the introduction of topgallant sails, there was nothing higher than the topsails. Taking “topgallant” as of proverbial application to whatever is elevated, if not splendid, one easily sees how the topgallant fabric of a ship—its sail, mast, and gear—obtained the name it is known by. “To luff” is to put the helm down, so as to bring the vessel closer to the wind. This word is manifestly taken from “loof,” which in olden times was the term applied to the after-part of the bows of a ship. “Quick-work” was the name given to that part of a ship’s sides which is above the channel-wales. “’Tis commonly perform’d with Firdeal,” says an old writer, “which don’t require the fastening nor the Time to work it, as the other parts, but is Quicker done.” The ancient spelling gives us “halyards” for “halliards”—ropes and tackles for hoisting sails and yards. To hale is to haul; so that “halyards,” “halliards,” is ben trovato.[^[39]]

[38]. This may seem too obvious; but meanings may often be sought a great deal too deep. “To bring a ship upon the stays” formerly signified to luff till the vessel lost all way.

[39]. “Dead-eyes” were originally called “dead man’s eyes.” They are blocks with holes in them for setting up the rigging with.

In old marine narratives and novels the term “lady’s hole” frequently occurs. I was long bothered by this expression, which I indirectly gathered to signify a sort of cabin; but in what part of the ship situated, and why so called, I could not imagine, until in the course of my reading I lighted upon a description of a man-of-war of 1712, in which it is stated that “the lady’s hole” is a place for the gunner’s small stores, built between the partners of the mainmast, and looked after by a man named “a lady,” “who is put in by turns to keep the gun-room clean.” Terms of this kind are revelations in their way, as showing for the most part the sort of road the marine philologist must take in his search after originals and derivatives. A vessel is said to be “hogged” when the middle part of her bottom is so strained as to curve upwards. To the shape of a hog’s back, therefore, is this expression owing. But the etymology of the word “sagged,” which expresses the situation of a vessel when her bottom curves downwards through being strained, I am unable to trace.[^[40]] “Gangway” means the going-way—the place by which you enter or quit a ship. “Gudgeons”—braces or eyes fixed to the stern-post to receive the pintles of a rudder, I find the meaning of in the old spelling for the same thing, “gougings”—the eye being gouged by the pintle. “Lumpers” is a name given to dock-labourers who load or discharge vessels; it was their custom to contract to do the work by the lump, and hence the word. “Stevedore” (one whose occupation is to stow cargoes) originates with the Spanish estibador, likewise a stower of cargoes. The etymology of certain peculiarly nautical expressions in common use on shipboard must be entirely conjectural. Take “swig off”—i.e. to pull upon a perpendicular rope, the end of which is led under a belaying-pin. The old readings give it as “swag off,” “swagging off.” The motion of this sort of pulling is of a swaggering kind, and I have little doubt that the expression of “swig,” or “swag,” comes from “swaggering.”[^[41]] “Tail on, tally on!” the order for more men to haul upon a rope, possibly expresses its origination with some clearness. “Tail on!”—lengthen the tail of pullers; “Tally on!”—add men in a countable way. It is usual to speak of a ship as being “under way.” It should, I think, be “under weigh.” The expression is wholly referable to the situation of a ship in the act of moving after her anchor has been lifted or “weighed.” Similarly should it be, “the anchor is aweigh,” not the anchor is “away”—the mate’s cry from the forecastle when the anchor is atrip or off the ground.

[40]. To sag used to mean “to hang as a bag on one side.” I cannot find anything in this definition to correspond with the sea-term. It suggests the etymology, however, of the phrase “to sag to leeward,” applicable to a ship trending leewardly through the action of waves and wind whilst sailing.

[41]. Since this was written I find in Bailey, “To swag: to force or bear downwards as a weight does to hang on.” This settles the paternity of “swig.”

Blocks, a very distinctive feature in the equipment of a vessel, get their names in numerous cases from their shape or conveniency. A cant-block is so called because in whalers it is used for the tackles which cant or turn the whale over when it is being stripped of its blubber; a fiddle-block, because it has the shape of that instrument; a fly-block, because it shifts its position when the tackle it forms a part of is hauled upon; leading-blocks, because they are used for guiding the direction of any purchase; hook-blocks, because they have a hook at one end; sister-blocks, because they are two blocks formed out of one piece of wood, and suggest a sentimental character by intimate association; snatch-blocks, because a rope can be snatched or whipped through the sheave without the trouble of reeving; tail-blocks, because they are fitted with a short length or tail of rope by which they are lashed to the gear; shoulder-blocks, because their shape hints at a shoulder, there being a projection left on one side of the shell to prevent the falls from jamming. In this direction the marine philologist will find his work all plain sailing. The sources whence the sails, or most of them, take their appellations are readily grasped when the leading features of the apparently complicated fabric on high are understood. The stay-sails obtain their names from the stays on which they travel. “Top-sail” was so entitled when it was literally the top or uppermost sail. The origin of the word “royal”[^[42]] for the sail above the topgallant-sail we must seek in the fancy that found the noble superstructure of white cloths crowned by that heaven-seeking space of canvas.

[42]. This sail was, on its introduction, called “topgallant-royal.”

The etymology of “hitches” is not far to seek. But first of the “hitch” itself. “To hitch, to catch, to move by jerks.” I know not where it is used but in the following passage—nor here know well what it means:

‘Whoe’er offends, at some unlucky time

Slides in a verse, or hitches in a rhyme.’—Pope.

So writes Dr. Johnson. Had he looked into the old “Voyages,” he would have found “hitch” repeated very often indeed.[^[43]] From the nautical standpoint, he defines it accurately enough as “to catch.” Pope’s use of the term puzzled the Doctor, and he blundered into “to move by jerks.” But Pope employs it as a sailor would; he hitches the culprit in a line—that is, takes an intellectual “turn” with his verse about him, or, as the poet puts it, suffers the person to “hitch” himself. To hitch is to fasten, to secure a rope so that it can run out no further. From “hitch” proceed a number of terms whose paternity is very easily distinguished. The “Blackwall hitch” takes its name from the famous point of departure of the vanished procession of Indiamen and Australian liners;[^[44]] the “harness hitch,” from its form, which suggests a bit and reins; “midshipman’s hitch,” from the facility with which it may be made; “rolling hitch,” because it is formed of a series of rolling turns round the object it is intended to secure, and other rolling turns yet over its own part; a “timber hitch,” because of its usefulness in hoisting spars and the like through the ease of its fashioning and the security of its jamming. The etymology of knots, again, is largely found in their forms. “The figure-of-eight knot” is of the shape of the figure eight; the diamond readily suggests the knots which bear its name (single and double diamond-knots); the “Turk’s-head knot” excellently imitates a turban. To some knots and splices the inventors have given their names, such as “Elliot’s splice” and “Matthew Walker” knot. The origin of this knot is thus related by a contributor to the Newcastle Weekly Chronicle:—

[43]. Indeed, any old Dictionary would have supplied the meaning.

[44]. As does the “Blackwall lead,” signifying a rope taken under a pin.

“Over sixty years ago an old sailor, then drawing near to eighty years of age, said that when he was a sailor-boy there was an old rigger, named Matthew Walker, who, with his wife, lived on board an old covered hulk, moored near the Folly End, Monkwearmouth Shore; that new ships when launched were laid alongside of this hulk to be rigged by Walker and his gang of riggers; that also old ships had their rigging refitted at the same place; and that Matthew Walker was the inventor of the lanyard knot, now known by the inventor’s name wherever a ship floats.”