Seven Frozen Sailors

I went to sea, because, when I was about ten years old, my father thought that I had had enough schooling. I thought that I had had enough to last me for a lifetime; for the Reverend Pastor Slagkop had a monstrous heavy hand; but at least he had taught me to read and write, and to cast accounts – and that it was about time for me to set about earning my own livelihood, which my elder brothers were already doing. I was quite of his way of thinking, for I was a hard-working boy, and was tired of eating the bread of idleness; only my dad and I didn’t exactly agree as to the precise manner by which I should earn a living. He wanted me to wander with him, mostly by treykschuyt, or canal-boat, up and down the United Provinces, helping him to carry his pack, and trying to sell the clocks, watches, cutlery, spoons, hats, caps, laces, stockings, gloves, and garters, in which, and a hundred things besides, he traded. But I didn’t like the peddler business. I was never a good hand at making a bargain, and when I had to sell things, I was just as bad a salesman. I let the customers beat me down; and then my father, who was a just man, but dreadfully severe, beat me. Besides, to make a good peddler, you must tell no end of lies, and the telling of lies (although sailors are often said to spin yarns as tough as the chairs and tables pretend to do) was never in my line. Again, although I was of a roving disposition, and delighted in change, my native country had no charms for me. At the seaports, where there were big ships, I was as pleased as Punch; but, inland, the country seemed to me to be always the same – flat, marshy, and stupid, with the same canals, the same canal-boats, the same windmills, the same cows, the same farmhouses, the same church steeples, the same dykes, the same dams, and the same people smoking the same pipes, or sliding to market in winter time, when the canals were frozen, on the same skates. To make an end of it, a peddler’s life was to me only one degree above that of a beggar; for you had to be always asking somebody to buy your goods; and I have always hated to ask favours of people. I told my father so; but he would not hear of my turning to any trade, and there being no help for it, I had to help him at peddlering for a good two years, although I fancy that he lost more money than he gained by my lending him a hand. But, when I was twelve years of age, and feeling stouter and stronger – and I was taller for my age than most Dutch boys are – I told my father flatly that I had had enough of peddlering, and that if he did not let me try to find some other calling, I would run away. He told me, for an ungrateful young hound as I was, that I might run away to Old Nick if I chose – not the Sant Niklas of the Oude Kerke, but a very different kind of customer. “Thank you, father,” said I, beginning to tie up my few things in a bundle. “Stop,” says he. “Here’s five guilders for you. I don’t want you to starve for the first few days, while you are seeking for work, graceless young calf as you are!” – “Thank you, father, again,” I says, pocketing both the guilders and the compliment. “And stop again, my man,” he says; “and take this along with you, with my blessing, for your impudence!” With this, he seizes me by the collar, gets my head between his legs, and, with the big leathern strap he used to bind his pack with, he gives me the soundest thrashing I ever had in my life. That’s the way to harden boys! It was in the middle of January, and pretty sharp weather, when we had this explanation. It was at our home at Amsterdam; and my good mother sat crying bitterly in a corner, with my little sisters clinging to her, and squalling; but as I walked out of the house forever, I felt as hot all through me as though it had been the middle of July.

I walked from Amsterdam to Rotterdam steadily, bent upon going to sea. Of course, I had never as yet made a voyage, even in a fishing-boat; but I had been up and down all the canals in Holland ever since I was a child; and I fancied that the ocean was only a very large canal, and that a sea-going ship was only a very big treykschuyt. In a large port like Rotterdam I thought that there would be no difficulty in finding a craft, the skipper of which would give me a berth aboard; and, indeed, throughout a very long life I have usually found that it does not matter a stuyver how poor, ignorant, and friendless a boy may be, there is always room for him at sea, if he sets his mind steadily on finding a ship. Mind, I don’t say that he won’t be the better sailor for the book-learning he may have been lucky enough to pick up. I never despised book-learning, although no great scholar myself; but a boy should learn to use his hands as well as his eyes. He should have a trade, never mind what it is; but it must be a trade that he can earn pay, and lay a little prize-money by, now and then; and a scholar without a trade is but a poor fellow. He may turn parson, or schoolmaster, to be sure; but it would be a mighty queer ship, I reckon, aboard which the captain was a parson, and the bo’sun a schoolmaster, and the crew a pack of loblolly-boys, with their brains full of book-learning, and nothing else.

I wasn’t so very quick, though, as I thought, in my boyish foolishness, that I should be, in finding a ship at Rotterdam. Indeed, when I got down to the Boompjes, and boarded the craft lying at anchor there, I think I must have tried five-and-twenty before I could find a skipper who would as much as look at me, much less offer me a berth. “If you please, do you want a boy?” was my invariable question. Some of the skippers said that they had more boys than they knew what to do with; others, that boys were more trouble than they were worth, which worth did not amount to the salt they ate. Off the poop of one ship I was kicked by a skipper, who had had too much Schiedam for breakfast; from the gangway of another I was shoved ashore by a quartermaster, who didn’t like boys; one bo’sun’s mate gave me a starting with a rope’s-end, as he swore that I had come aboard to steal something; and another pulled my ears quite good-naturedly (although he made my ears very sore), and told me to go back to school, and mind my book, and that a sailor’s life was too rough for me. There was one captain – he was in the China trade – who said that he would take me as a ’prentice if my father would pay a hundred and fifty guilders for my indentures; and another, who offered to ship me as cook’s mate; but I knew nothing about cooking, and had to tell him so, with tears in my eyes. I was nearly reduced to despair, when one skipper – he was only the master of a galliot, trading between Rotterdam and Yarmouth, in England – seeing that I was a stout, bright-eyed lad, likely to be a strong haul on a rope, and a good hand at a winch or a windlass, told me that he would take me on first for one voyage, and see what wages I was worth when we came back again. He advanced me a guilder or two, to buy some sea-going things; so that, with the trifle my father had given me, when he dismissed me with his blessing and a thrashing, I did not go to sea absolutely penniless.

I have been at sea sixty years; yet well do I recollect the first day that I shipped on board the galliot Jungvrauw, at Rotterdam, bound for Great Yarmouth, England. When I got on board the vessel was just wearing out of port, and, thinking that about the best thing I could do was to begin to make myself useful at once, I tailed on to a rope that some of the crew were hauling in; and the next thing I began to learn was to coil a rope. There’s only two ways to do it – a right one and a wrong one. The right way is to coil it the way the sun goes round. And then I learned that about the surest manner in which a young sailor can get a knowledge of his trade is to watch how his shipmates set about doing their work. He may be laughed at, grumbled at, or sworn at, but at last he’ll learn his duty, and that’s something.

If I were to tell you all the wonderful things that have happened to me, man and boy, as carpenter, bo’sun, third mate, second mate, and first mate – I never had the luck to rise to be a skipper – I am afraid that you wouldn’t believe half the yarns I could spin for you. I’ve been in both the Indies, and in both the Americas, and in our own Dutch Colony of Java, and in China and Japan (where the Dutch used to have a mighty fine factory) over and over again. I’ve been in action; and was wounded once by a musket-ball, which passed right through the nape of my neck. I’ve been a prisoner of war, and I was once nearly taken by a Sallee rover. I’ve had to fight with the Dutch for the French, and with the French against the Dutch, and with the Dutch for the English. I’ve had the yellow fever over and over again. I’ve had my leg half bitten off by a shark; and if anybody tells you that a shark won’t eat niggers, tell him, with my compliments, that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, for I saw a shark bite a nigger that had fallen overboard, right in two, in the harbour of Havana. I don’t say that the shark doesn’t like white flesh best. The black man, perhaps, he locks upon as mess beef, not very prime; but the white man he considers as pork or veal, and the nicer of the two. At all events he’ll eat nigger if he’s hungry, and a shark’s always hungry.

Perhaps the strangest thing that ever happened to me in the coarse of all my voyages was in connection with a lot of swallows, and I’ll wind up my yarn with this one, first because it’s short, and next because I think it’s got something that’s pretty about it, and will please the yunkers and the vrauws; and, old man-like, I always like to please them. It was about thirty years ago, and in the middle of September, that I signed articles at Liverpool as second mate of a brig bound to Marseilles, Barcelona, in Spain, Gibraltar (that belongs to the Englanders), Oran, and Algiers. The middle of September mind. The name of the brig was the Granite, and the skipper, Captain Marbles, a Yorkshireman, was about the hardest commander I ever sailed under. He never swore at the men, – that they wouldn’t have much minded; but he was always turning up the hands for punishment; and punishment in the merchant service, thirty years ago, was little less severe than it was in the navy. Indeed, it was often more unjust, and more cruel; for when a merchant skipper flogged a man he was generally drunk, or in a fearfully bad temper; whereas on board a man-o’-war a sailor was never punished in cold blood, and had at least some show of a trial. I must do Captain Marbles the credit to say that he was never half seas over; but on the other hand he was always in a bad temper. On me he dared not lay a finger, for I was an officer, and I would have knocked him down with a marlinspike had he struck me; but he led the foremast-men and the boys, of whom we had at least half a dozen aboard – principally, I fancy, because the Captain liked to torture boys – a terrible life. Well, we had discharged cargo at Marseilles, and taken in more at Barcelona. We had put in at Gibraltar, and after clearing out from the Rock were shaping our course with a pretty fair wind for Gran, when, one evening – now what in the world do you think happened?

The swallow, you know, is a bird that, like our stork, cannot abide the cold. He is glad enough to come and see us in summer, when the leaves are green, and the sun shines brightly; but so soon as ever the weather begins to grow chilly, off goes Mr Swallow to the Pyramids of Egypt, or the Desert of Sahara, or some nice, warm, comfortable place of that kind. He generally arrives in our latitudes about the second week in April; and he cuts his stick again for hot winter quarters toward the end of September. I’ve heard book-learned gentlemen say that the birds almost always fly in a line, directly north and south, influenced, no doubt, by the magnetic current which flows forever and ever in that direction. Well, on the afternoon to which my yarn relates, our course was due south, and, just before sunset, we saw a vast space of the sky astern absolutely darkened by the largest flight of birds I ever saw, winging their way together. As a rule, I’ve been told, the swallows don’t migrate in large flocks, but in small families. This, however, must have been an exception to the rule, for they appeared absolutely to number thousands; and what should they do when they neared us but settle down in their thousands on the masts and rigging of the brig Granite. They were tired, poor things, no doubt, with long flying; and I have been told that it is a common custom for them to rest themselves on the riggings of ships. But there were so many of them this time that the very deck was covered with them, and vast numbers more fluttered below, into the forecastle and the captain’s cabin. The skipper ordered the hatches to be battened down, and all was made snug for the night. In the morning the birds on the deck and the rigging were gone, but we had still hundreds of swallows in the hold and in the cabin, and the noise the poor creatures made to be let out was most pitiable – indeed, it was simply heartrending. It was like the cry of children. It sounded like, “For God’s sake, let us go free!” Captain Marbles – I have said so before – was a hard man, but he could not stand the agonised twittering of the wretched little birds; and as he ordered me to have the hatches opened, I noticed that there were two great tears coursing down his stern, weather-beaten cheeks. He had, for the first time in his life, perhaps, become acquainted with a certain blessed thing called PITY. Nor did we fail to notice afterward that he was not half so hard on the boys we had aboard. Perhaps he remembered the cry of the swallows.

That’s my yarn. There’s nothing very grand about it; but, at least, it’s true. As true, I mean, as old sailors’ yarns usually are.

“Gone!” cried the doctor, as the Dutchman, a minute before solid in appearance, suddenly collapsed into air and moisture, which directly became ice. “If I hadn’t been so polite I might have stopped him. I suppose the effort of telling their histories exhausts them.”

“Well, sir, it’s jolly interesting!” said Bostock.

“Yes, my man,” said the doctor; “but there’s no science in it. What is there in his talk about how he came here, or for me to report to the learned societies?”

“Can’t say, I’m sure, sir,” I said; “only, the discoveries.”

“Yes, that will do, Captain. But come, let’s find another?”

We all set to eagerly, for the men now thoroughly enjoyed the task. The stories we heard enlivened the tedium, and the men, far from being afraid now, went heartily into the search.

“Shouldn’t wonder if we found a nigger friz-up here, mates,” said Binny Scudds.

“Or a Chine-hee,” said one of the men.

“Well, all I can say,” exclaimed Bostock, “is this here, I don’t want to be made into a scientific speciment.”

“Here y’are!” shouted one of the men. “Here’s one on ’em!”

“Get out!” said Binny Scudds, who had run to the face of a perpendicular mass of ice, where the man stood with his pick. “That ain’t one!”

“Tell yer it is,” said the man. “That’s the ’airs of his ’ead sticking out;” and he pointed to what appeared to be dark threads in the white, opaque ice.

“Tell you, he wouldn’t be standing up,” said Binny Scudds.

“Why not, if he was frozen so, my men?” said the doctor. “Yes; that’s a specimen. This ice has been heaved up.”

“Shall we fetch him out with powder,” said Bostock.

“Dear me, no!” said the doctor. “Look! that ice is laminated. Try driving in wedges.”

Three of the men climbed onto the top, and began driving in wedges, when the ice split open evenly, leaving the figure of what appeared to be a swarthy-looking Frenchman, exposed as to the face; but he was held in tightly to the lower half of the icy case, by his long hair.

“Blest if he don’t look jest like a walnut with one shell off!” growled Scudds; but he was silent directly, for the Frenchman opened his eyes, stared at us, smiled, and opened his lips.

“Yes; thank you much, comrades. You have saved me. I did not thus expect, when we went drift, drift, drift north, in the little vessel, with the rats; but listen, you shall hear. I am a man of wonderful adventure. You take me for a ghost?”

Bostock nodded.

“Brave lads! brave lads!” said the Frenchman; “but it is not that I am. I have been taken for a ghost before, and prove to my good friends that I am not. I prove to you I am not; but a good, sound, safe, French matelot! – sailor, you call it.”

“I should like to hear you,” said Binny Scudds, in a hoarse growl.

“You shall, my friend, who has helped to save me.”

“Let it be scientific, my friend,” said the doctor.

“It shall, sir – it shall,” said the Frenchman.

Chapter Seven.

The French Sailor’s Yarn

I am master of the yacht Zéphire; at least I was her master. A hundred fathoms of green water roll over her masts now. Fishes of monstrous shape feed on our good stores. For anything I know, a brood of young sea-serpents is at this moment in possession of my hammock. Let be, I will tell the story of the Zéphire. Ten years ago an American vessel lay off the little port of Bénévent, in the south of France. The time was high noon; the month, August. The day was bright. The sunbeams danced over the white spray and green waves. A boat put off for the shore. I, Pierre Crépin, sat in the stern and held the rudder-lines. My heart was full of joy. I had been born in Bénévent; my friends were there – if they were alive. My mother, with good Aunt Lisette, in the little cottage by the hill-side. My old companions drinking white wine at “The Three Magpies.” All the old faces I knew – had known from childhood – loved better than anything else in the world. I could throw a stone to where they sat. I could almost hear them talk. “Pull, my comrades, pull!” I grow impatient; I, the lost found; I, the dead returned to life; I, Pierre Crépin, back in Bénévent. Who will believe it? For some time I must seem the ghost of myself. My old companions will put down their glasses and stare. Then they will till them to the brim and drink the health of Pierre Crépin, till the roof-tree of “The Three Magpies” echoes with “Pierre – Pierre Crépin, welcome back!” And my mother, she will know the footsteps of her son on the pebbles. She will rush out to fold me to her heart. And good Aunt Lisette! She is feeble – it will be almost too much for her. And —

The boat’s keel grates harshly on the shingle. “Steady!” say the seamen. I make my adieux tenderly, for they have been too kind to me. I wring their hands; I leap ashore. They go back to their ship. I turn my steps first to the little whitewashed cottage on the hill-side.

Is it necessary for me to tell how my mother embraces me. Poor Aunt Lisette! She knows I am back; but she is not here to welcome me. She is at rest. At last I have told all. It is night now, and I am free to go to the kitchen of “The Three Magpies.”

There it is. “Mon Dieu!” “Impossible; it is his ghost!” I soon convince them that it is, indeed, I myself. The news spreads over the market place. “Pierre Crépin is come back to Bénévent. After all, he is not drowned; he is alive and well.” The kitchen of “The Three Magpies” will not hold the crowd. Antoine, the drawer, cannot pull the corks fast enough. My eyes fill with tears. The brave fellows are too good to me. I must tell them my story. Pouches are drawn out; pipes and cigars are lighted; glasses are tilled for the twentieth time. I begin my yarn.

You see me, my good friends, safely back in Bénévent. It is four years since I parted from you. The ship in which I sailed from Marseilles was wrecked on a coral reef. All hands were lost. The last I saw alive was Marc Debois. He had seized a spar, and was struggling manfully for life. There are sharks in those seas. The waves ran high, and the foam of the breakers blinded me. I was safe on the land. I could not help Marc, but I watched him. A great wave came. It rolled on toward my feet.

There was a patch of blood on the water, mingling with the white foam of the breakers, then disappearing. Poor Marc had met his fate. All was over. I saw him no more. The spar to which he had clung was washed ashore at my feet. I was alone, wet, cold, wretched. I envied Marc. Shaking myself, I ran along the shore, to restore to my drenched limbs heat and life. Then I climbed a precipitous crag – one of a line that stretched along the shore as far as the eye could see. But I must not become tedious with my tale.

“Go on, Pierre Crépin!” they all cried.

Well, then, I continued, the island was desolate, uninhabited. There were fruits and berries, turtles, young birds in nests. Long times of dry weather under a tropical sun. In this I made a fire day after day by rubbing sticks together till I could kindle the dry leaves. Then came seasons of wet of weeks together. In these I had no fire, and had to subsist on berries and fruits, and the eggs of sea-fowl. I was there, as it seemed, an age. It was three years. I had long given up all hope of seeing Bénévent or men again. My island was about nine leagues round. On the highest hill, by the shore, I raised a mast. In a cleft in it I struck a piece of plank. On the plank I wrote, with white chalk —

“Au Secours! Pierre Crépin!”

This I renewed as the rains washed out my characters. At last help came. Unshaven, ragged, unkempt, I was taken on board an American vessel that had been driven by stress of weather far out of her course. And I am here.

My narrative ended, I was plied with a thousand questions, and it was not until mine host closed his doors for the night, and thrust us good-humouredly into the street, that I was able to bid my friends good-night, and turn my steps toward my mother’s cottage – that cottage where the dear soul awaited me with the anxiety of a mother who has mourned her only son as lost. That cottage where the soft bed of my boyish days, spread for me, with snowy linen, by the kindest of hands, had been ready for me these three hours. But I was not unattended. My friends, some dozen of them, would see me home to my mother’s door – would wring her hand in hearty congratulation at my return.

In the morning you may be sure I had plenty of callers. It was like a levée. They began to come before I was up, but my mother would not suffer that I should be waked. And I, who had not slept in a Christian bed for years, slept like a top, and slept it out.

I was sitting at my breakfast of cutlets, omelette, and white wine, when Cécile knocked at the door of the cottage.

“Enter!” said my mother.

“Ah, Cécile!” I cried; “but not the Cécile I left at Bénévent when I went away.”

For she was altered. She had grown more matronly. The loveliness of her girlhood had gone. It had given place to the more mature beauty of womanhood. What a difference four years makes to a girl!

“Pierre,” she cries, “we are so glad to see you back! You bring us news – the news we all want that I want.”

She looked impatiently toward me. Perhaps her eyes expressed more to me than her words; for her mother was Spanish, and Cécile had her mother’s great, black, saucer eyes, with their long fringe of jet lashes. Still, her look was not what I had expected to see. She wore sad-coloured draperies, but she was not in mourning. Her dress was rich, of Lyons silk, and this surprised me; for her people were poor, and a sailor’s widow is not always too well off at Bénévent. Seamen are, not uncommonly, judges of merchandise. Do we not trade with the Indies, and a thousand other outlandish places? In this way it came about that I involuntarily counted up the cost of Cécile’s costly habit and rich lace. But this mental inventory took hardly a second – certainly, less time than it takes me to tell.

“Cécile,” I said, “my poor girl, I wish that I could tell you good news. Your husband sailed with me. It was his lot to be one of the less lucky ones. Marc – ”

“Is dead!” said Cécile, calmly. “I knew it all along – these three years. I felt it. Something told me long ago Marc was dead!”

She said this so quietly that I was astonished – perhaps a little shocked. Sailors’ widows in Bénévent mourn their husbands’ loss for years. My mother was a sailor’s widow ever since I knew her. No offer of a new ring could ever tempt her to throw aside the old one. She was true as Love.

I replied, with something of choking in my throat, but with hardness in my face, “Marc is dead, Cécile! He was drowned!” – for I could not bring myself to tell this beautiful woman, whom he had loved as only an honest sailor can love, the story of his fate, as I had told it to the comrades in the kitchen of “The Three Magpies” the night before. I desired to spare her this.