John C. Hutcheson

“ When skylarking together on the upper deck one evening, Mick and another fellow caught up a couple of cutlasses that had been left inadvertently lying about the deck, and they commenced pointing and cutting and slashing at one another with the keen-edged weapons, just as if they had been mere basket-hilted single-sticks, a rap from which would have done no damage beyond a bruise. ”

“ Strangely enough, my chum the Irish lad proved himself, landsman though he had been before and never having even smelt the sea prior to his coming to Portsmouth, quite as expert as myself after a short stay aboard the training-ship; though I had been associated with ships and seafaring folk from the time I drew my first breath, and indeed, like all the Bowlings, as I told you at the beginning of my yarn, was born with the taste for ‘the briny,’ the feeling being inherent to my blood. ”

“ We buried the lieutenant and bluejacket who had fallen, at sunset; after which, hoisting in all our boats, the cruiser put on steam and made for Ras Hafim, picking up, when nearly abreast of the headland, just before dark, the steam pinnace—all the chaps aboard of which, from Mr Gresham downwards, getting quite angry when we told them of the little piece of business we had been engaged on up the coast, our shipmates being riled at having been left out in the cold and not sharing in our fun. ”

“ We had hard work sometimes to check ourselves from uttering a wild cheer when the order was given to pull the trigger and the gun went off with a grand ‘Bang!’ sending a cloud of white smoke inboard from its muzzle as its fiery iron messenger leaped forwards and splashed into the sea, either ahead or abeam as the case might be, throwing up a tall column of water on its first plunge that was like a sort of fountain, while it skipped onward, playing ‘ducks and drakes’ on the top of the waves, until it sank out of sight in the distance, its energy exhausted. ”

“ They were going it in fine style, when all at once Mick’s foot slipped; and, missing his guard as his opponent made a vicious cut ‘one’ at him, he received this on his chest, the cutlass cutting through his jumper and flannel and making a slight wound across his breastbone.
Had his head not been thrown backwards as he slipped, poor Mick would have had the most striking feature of his merry countenance sliced off as dexterously as if it had been a carrot! ”

“ Instead of living higgledy-piggledy in some close room with half a dozen others, as many poor boys have to do, and little or nothing to eat and that only at haphazard, while in the majority of cases his clothing will be none of the best, being more holey than pious; the same boy on entering the Saint Vincent finds himself at once well fed, well clothed, and with clean and roomy quarters to breathe in! ”

“ His excitement communicated itself to the commander aft, who was looking over the stern and anxiously watching the water, to see if our rudder, which was kept amidships, made any ripple on the surface; though, wide awake, our officer was keeping a keen eye, too, on the manilla hawser attached to the stream anchor, which was in such a ticklish state of tension from the strain that it was singing out like a fiddle-string.
“Hurrah!” he cried a moment after. “She is moving, Mr Gadgett. Stand by there, furrud, to veer off the cable of the port bower!” ”

“ The sail served its turn, with the backing of the screw, to make the corvette’s head pay off as we wore ship; but the strength of the nor’-east gale was such, that hardly had we made the sheet fast, ere the jib blew clean away from its lacing, with the sound of a gun going off, while a big wave came over our weather side at the same time, and nearly washed every man-jack off the forecastle, beside flooding the waist, the sea rushing down in a torrent below through the after-hatchway which had not been battened down as yet. ”

“ This reached the commodore’s ear. “Cutter, ahoy!” he hailed. “Any one alive?”
“No, sir,” came back the reply from Mr Osborne, in a sad tone. “All are dead—and a fearful death too!”
“Why,” called out the commodore eagerly, as curious as all of us were, “what’s the matter?”
“Struck by lightning, I think, sir,” answered Mr Osborne, who held his handkerchief to his face and spoke in a stifled voice, after bending down and looking over into the sternsheets of the derelict. “Can’t say exactly, sir. They’re in an awful state!”
“Ho, bad job!” ”

“ Mick soon became one of our best shots, Mr Gadgett complimenting him on having the sharpest eye on board the brig, my chum often, when acting as Number 1, who you must know invariably sights the gun, succeeding in smashing our improvised target all to pieces.
“How is it, Donovan,” asked the gunner on one of these occasions, “you have such a steady aim? Why, boy, you haven’t been at it very long. Your eye is like a hawk, by jingo!” ”

“ Unfortunately, this was during the winter months; and, as the training-brig Martin, which is attached to the Saint Vincent as a sea-going tender in order to cruise about in the Channel to give the boys practical experience of their profession—like a frolicsome chick hanging round a broody old hen that won’t leave her nest—does not go out of harbour till the spring, Mick and I were unable for some time to take advantage of the grand privilege of our rise and really go to sea. ”

“ Equally as certainly, however, I must allow that the teaching I gained, watch and watch about, in that big schoolroom astern on the lower deck turned out of considerable assistance to me, not only in my subsequent experience afloat in the navy, especially when serving abroad, but ashore too; for I there learnt the art of learning things, which is the great secret of education to man or boy, though we youngsters do not realise this when we have the chance of getting hold of it. ”

“ The rest of the novices—there being, as you know, ten other ‘unclothed’ boys besides myself—had been roughly aroused in like fashion; and to a by-stander all of us must have looked a forlorn lot of shivering creatures, adrift there on the cheerless deck in the half light of early day, not knowing what to do with ourselves until somebody told us what to do and bearing, I fancy, a strikingly strong resemblance to a flock of lambs in some strange pasture deserted by their dams! ”

“ We coaled at Teneriffe, putting into the harbour of Santa Cruz for this purpose; and Mick and I were much struck by the fact of the black ladies who carried the baskets of coal on their heads along the jetty from the shore to the ship, doing the job, too, in first-rate style and as good as any gang of wharfingers at home, all of them wearing the most expansive crinolines, which, with their thin dresses and black stockings, of nature’s own provision, had a very comical effect! ”

“ The instructor laughed.
“Your father, Tom Bowling,” said he, giving me a friendly pat on the shoulder as I went down the after-hatchway, “must be a knowing hand; and I think, my lad, you take after him.”
It being ‘pea doo and bolliky’ day, my fast friend Mick, who, from his highly developed instincts in the grub line, had been elected cook of our mess on the lower deck, had saved me a good basin of soup and hunch of bread, with which I managed to assuage the cravings of my appetite, this having been accentuated not only by my long wait but by my exercise aloft. ”

“ The ‘Jaunty’ grinned at Mick’s naïve remark, but soon mastered the difficulty of teaching us by passing the job on to other hands.
“Ah, perhaps you’d better ‘go through the ropes,’ my lads, properly, and begin at once at your ‘bag and hammock drill,’ as all new boys should; though sometimes, they wait till they get uniforms first,” said he, hailing, as he spoke, one of the first-class boys standing by the police office, detailed to act as messengers, like our friend Larrikins. ”

“ To begin with, it was ‘pay-day,’ the whole ship’s company marching up to the paymaster in turn at the temporary office he had rigged up al fresco, as Mick’s ‘Oitalian’ friends would say, on the upper deck, and receiving each his weekly pay; the boys being allowed, those of the first-class a shilling, and those of the second sixpence, for pocket-money, the balance being saved up to their account or else forwarded to their parents. ”

“ Before you could say ‘Jack Robinson’ I had quickly sprung into the lee rigging; and, clambering up the ratlines and then outward by the futtock shrouds, I gained the top long ere half the rest had started.
“Well done, my lad; I see you have been on board a ship before!” cried out the instructor, as I at once proceeded now to climb up to the crosstrees and over the head of the mast. “Look alive, you other chaps! That boy there will have done the job while you are thinking about it. Stir your stumps!” ”

“ Well, what d’ye see?”
“I see a brave sailor and a gallant defender of his country,” I answered, giving the bow oar I was pulling a vicious dig into the water as I spoke, like as if I were tackling one of the Queen’s enemies; “I see a man who has got no cause to be ashamed of his past life, though he might be getting on in years—you are that, father, you know; and one who has won his medal with four clasps for hard fighting. In real wars, mind you, not your twopenny ha’penny Bombardment of Alexandria business!—aye, I see one who ought to wear the Victoria Cross if he had his rights. ”

“ The hand that I fancied was the hand of Larry and which he had clasped round my neck in joke, was one of the great hairy paws of a huge baboon, who, with his grinning face shoved close to mine, was trying his best to choke me in grim earnest; while, getting a purchase with the other paw on to a projecting limb of the juniper-tree, he was slowly hoisting me aloft. ”

“ Jocko, who had been standing in front of: the pair at the time on the forecastle in the position of ‘present arms,’ holding his little wooden rifle as correctly as the smartest drilled marine, at once dropped this on the deck, and sprang, not into Mick’s arms, but on to his left shoulder, where he chattered and grimaced away, no doubt telling his chosen friend in the choicest monkey language how much he loved him. ”

“ It was on a Saturday when this occurred, a day the Reverend Mr Tibbits devoted to composing his usual Sunday sermon, which lay on his desk neatly written out on the usual official foolscap; the worthy gentleman having just completed his task of attending to our spiritual needs on the morrow, and being then engaged in recruiting his own inner man, after his arduous labours, with lunch in the wardroom mess. ”

“ We Nearly Lose the Cutter!
“Larrikins,” said I, whispering in his ear, as we stood up together just in the rear of Mr Dabchick, balancing myself on one of the thwarts forward, being about to make another spring for the side of the big dhow, while Larry shoved a cartridge hastily into the breech of his rifle, and was in the act of taking a pot shot at a chap who seemed to be the skipper of the batilla and had a nose on him like the beak of a Brazilian parrot, “little Dabby means business!” He did. ”

“ Trimmens, the sick-berth steward, on the contrary, never moved a muscle of his mahogany face when ‘Ugly’ said that he had knocked his head against the hatchway, and I told a ‘banger’ by volunteering the statement that I had broken a plate on the mess-table, and one of the pieces had run into my arm. The wound in my side, which was really only a scratch, I never mentioned to any one, not even to Mick, who thought, and to this day knows nothing to the contrary, I believe, that I had guarded off ‘Ugly’s’ thrust, and had been only stabbed in the arm. ”

“ As if by magic, the imposing array of ‘sucking bluejackets’ whom I had just been gazing upon with a sort of personal admiration from the fact of my being one of their number, an admiration which was tempered by a slight feeling of awe of the discipline that controlled them, melted away almost noiselessly, like those Arabs who ‘folded their tents’ according to the poem, the boys being all in their bare feet, and their patter along the deck and down the hatchways not making any sound above a faint shuffling ”

“ The meal this day, being a Wednesday, consisted, for a change, of salt pork and pea-soup; ‘pea doo and bolliky,’ as it is styled in Saint Vincent slang.
“Faith, it smills good,” exclaimed Mick, with a loud and prolonged sniff of enjoyment, on the friendly Larrikins anon placing a bowl of the steaming compound under his nose on the mess-table. “A’most as good as tay, begorrah!”
“Ga–a!” cried our caterer. “Only a Paddy wud say that!”
“Bedad, I don’t say much differ,” said Mick, after quickly gulping down the contents of his bowl with great gusto and much apparent inward satisfaction. ”

“ The cutter was rigged with a dipping lug and a spritsail; so, no sooner had crusty old Draper given his laconic answer to Mr Chisholm, than the latter sang out to Larrikins, who was in the bows.
“Look out there forrud!” he cried. “Stand by to dip!”
This is considered one of the smartest things in boat-sailing, the men having to be specially stationed for the purpose; but, as we had been living in the cutter now for three months, and had experience of her under any and every change of wind and sail, the operation did not occasion much difficulty to us. ”

“ So saying, he set about knotting the lanyard of Irish Mick’s hammock; and, after slinging it from the hooks in the deck beams, over the mess-table where the famished lad had enjoyed such a rare ‘tuck out’ that day, Larrikins went on to explain how the blankets should be ‘tucked in’ to the frail structure and wrapped round the occupant, so as to prevent him from tumbling out, which Larrikins declared, almost with tears in his eyes, he should deeply regret were such a catastrophe to occur. ”

“ All of us seemed, really, to feel as if we had lost somebody or something; and when, presently, the watch was piped down, we all went below with saddened hearts.
“Oi wondther now,” said Mick, when we were having our supper at our messing-place aft on the lower deck a little later on, “if thet theer vissil wor a raal ship, Tom, or a banshee?”
A man at the mess-table next ours heard his remark and burst out laughing. ”

“ Encouraged by his sympathising backers, of whom we allowed some five or six to enter the ring, wishing to play fair and not to have it all to ourselves, the mulatto shook himself as if he had just come out of the water; and, standing up in a proper manner now, he faced Mick, who smilingly beckoned him to come on.
“Hit ’im in de eyeball, Bim!” cried one of the dark ladies, who indeed was the cause of the fray, as generally is the case, I have been told, when menfolk fall out. “Yah, yah! Mash um face fo’ um, de imperent man-o’-war buckra!” ”