All Afloat Part 4

The mistake was that the old injustices were repeated in a new way.

Formerly the law either sided with the officers and owners or left them alone; now it either sided with the men or left the officers and owners in the lurch. The true balance was not restored. Here is a thoroughly typical instance of the difference between a Britisher and a Bluenose under the new dispensation. The second mate of a Britisher asked for his discharge at Bombay because he could not manage the men, who had shirked disgracefully the whole way out. The skipper got a good Bluenose for his new second mate. The first day the Bluenose came aboard one of the worst shirkers slung a bucket carelessly, cut the deck, and then proceeded to curse the ship and all who sailed in her, as he had been accustomed to do under the Britisher. The Bluenose mate simply said, 'See here, just shut your head or I'll {100} shut it for you,' on which the skulker answered by threatening to 'cut his chicken liver out.' In a flash the Bluenose had him naped, slung, and flying across the rail. A second man rushed in, only to be landed neatly on the chin and knocked limp against the scuppers. The rest of the watch, roused by this unwonted a.s.sertion of authority, came on, but stopped short, snarling, when the Bluenose swung an iron bar from the windla.s.s in a way that showed he knew how to handle it effectively. The skipper and mate now appeared, and, seeing a clear case of actual fight, at once ranged themselves beside the capable Bluenose. The watch, a mixed lot, then slunk off; and, from that day out, the whole tone of the ship was changed, very much for the better.

It is pleasanter, however, to take our last look at a Bluenose vessel, under sail, with Bluenose skipper, mates, and crew, and a Bluenose cargo, all complete. But a word must first be said about other parts and other craft, lest the Maritime-Province Bluenose might be thought the only kind of any consequence. There were, and still are, swarms of small craft in Canada and Newfoundland which belong mostly or entirely to the fisheries, and which, therefore, will be noticed in another {101} chapter. The schooners along the different coasts, up the lower St Lawrence, and round the Lakes; the modern French-Canadian sailing bateaux; the transatlantic English brigs that still come out to Labrador; the many Britishers and Yankees that used to come to Bluenose harbours and to Quebec; the foreigners that come there still; and the host of various miscellaneous little vessels everywhere--all these are by no means forgotten. But only one main thread of the whole historic yarn can be followed here.

Before starting we might perhaps remember what a sailing vessel cannot do, as well as what she can, when the proper men are there and circ.u.mstances suit her. She is helpless in a calm. She needs a tow in crowded modern harbours or ca.n.a.ls. She can only work against the wind in a laborious zigzag, and a very bad gale generally puts her considerably off her course. But, on the other hand, she could beat all her best records under perfect modern conditions of canvas, scientific metal hull, and crew; and the historic records she actually has made are quite as surprising as they are little known. Few people realize that 'ocean records' are a very old affair, even in Canada, where they begin with Champlain's voyage of {102} eighteen days from Honfleur to Tadoussac and end with King George V's sixty-seven hours from land to land, when he speeded home in H.M.S. _Indomitable_ from Champlain's tercentenary at Quebec in 1908, handling his shovel in the stokehole by the way.

Here are some purely sailing records worth remembering. A Newfoundland schooner, the _Grace Carter_, has sailed across to Portugal, sold her fish there, gone to Cadiz for all the salt that she could carry, and then reported back in Newfoundland within the month. A Canadian schooner yacht, the _Lasca_, has crossed easterly, the harder way, in twelve days from the St Lawrence. In 1860 the Yankee _Dreadnought_ made the Atlantic record by going from Sandy Hook to Liverpool in nine days and seventeen hours, most of the time on the rim of a hurricane.

Six years later the most wonderful sea race in history was run when five famous clippers started, almost together, from the PaG.o.da Anchorage at Fu-chau for the East India Docks in London. This race was an all-British one, as the civil war, the progress of steam everywhere except in the China trade, and the stimulus of compet.i.tion, had now given Britishers the lead in the East, while putting them on an even footing with Yankees in the {103} West. The course was sixteen thousand miles; the prize was the world's championship in clipper-racing. Three ships dropped considerably astern. But the _Ariel_ and _Taeping_ raced up the Channel side by side, took in their pilots at the same time, and arrived within eight minutes of each other. The _Ariel_ arrived first; but the _Taeping_ won, as she had left twenty minutes later. The total time was ninety-nine days. A very different, but still more striking, record is the longest daily run ever made entirely under sail. This was, in one sense at least, an Anglo-American record; for the ship, appropriately called the _Lightning_, was built by that master craftsman, Donald M'Kay of Boston, and sailed by a British crew. She made no less than 436 sea miles, or 502 statute miles, within the twenty-four hours.

There are no individual Bluenose rivals of these mighty champions. But the Bluenoses more than held their own, all round, in any company and on any sea. So it is well worth our while to end this story of a thousand years--from the Vikings till to-day--by going aboard a Bluenose vessel with a Bluenose crew when both were at their prime.

The _Victoria_ is manned by the husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers of the place where {104} she was built. Her owners are the leaders of the little neighbourhood, and her cargo is home-grown. She carries no special carpenter and sailmaker, like a Britisher, because a Bluenose has an all-round crew, every man of which is smart enough, either with the tools or with the fid and palm and needle, for ordinary work, while some are sure to be equal to any special job. She of course carries two suits of canvas, her new best and older second best. Each sail has required more skill than tailors need to make a perfect fit in clothes, because there is a constant strain on sails, exceeding, if possible, the strains on every other part. But before sail is made her anchor is hove short, that is, the ship is drawn along by her cable till her bows are over it. 'Heave and she comes!' 'Heave and she must!' 'Heave and bust her!' are grunted from the men straining at the longbars of the capstan, which winds the tightening cable in. 'Click, click, clickety, click' go the pawls, which drop every few inches into cavities that, keeping them from slipping back, prevent the capstan from turning the wrong way when the men pause to take breath. 'Break out the mud-hook!'

and a tremendous combined effort ensues. Presently a sudden welcome slack {105} shows that the flukes have broken clear. The anchor is then hove up, catted, and fished.

'All hands make sail!' sings out the mate. The wind is nicely on the starboard quarter, that is, abaft the beam and forward of the stern, which gives the best chance to every sail. A wind dead aft, blanketing more than half the canvas, is called a lubber's wind. A soldier's wind is one which comes square on the beam, and so makes equally plain sailing out and back again. What sail a full-rigged ship can carry!

The Yankee _Great Republic_ could spread nearly one whole acre of canvas to the breeze. Another Yankee, the _R. C. Rickmers_, the largest sailing vessel in the world to-day, exceeds this. But her tonnage is much greater, more than eleven thousand gross, and her rig is entirely different. A full-rigged clipper ship might have twenty-two square sails, though it was rare to see so many. In addition she would have studding-sails to wing her square sails farther out. Then, there were the triangular jibs forward and the triangular staysails between the masts, with the quadrangular spanker like an aerial rudder on the lower mizzenmast. All the nine staysails would have the loose lower corner made fast to a handy place on deck by a sheet {106} (or rope) and the fore and aft points connected by the stays to the masts, the fore point low and the aft high. This is not the nautical way of saying it. But 'points' and 'corners' and other homely land terms sometimes save many explanations which, in their turn, lead on to other explanations.

The heads of square sails are made fast to yards, which are at right angles to the masts on which they pivot. Sails and yards are raised, lowered, swung at the proper angle to catch the wind, and held in place by halliards, lifts, braces, and sheets, which can be worked from the deck. Sheets are ropes running from the lower corners of sails. All upper sails have their sheets running through sheave-holes in the yardarms next below, then through quarter-blocks underneath these yards and beside the masts, and then down to the deck. Braces are the ropes which swing the yards to the proper angle. Halliards are those which hoist or lower both the yards and sails. The square sails themselves are controlled by drawlines called clew-garnets running up from the lower corners, leechlines running in diagonally from the middle of the outside edges, buntlines running up from the foot, and spilling lines, to spill the wind in heavy {107} weather. When the area of a sail has to be reduced, it is reefed by gathering up the head, if a square sail, or the foot, if triangular, and tying the gathered-up part securely by reef points, that is, by crossing and knotting the short lines on either side of this part. The square sails on the mainmast are called, when eight are carried, the mainsail, lower and upper maintopsails, lower and upper maintopgallants, main-royal, main-skysail, and the moonsail. The standing rigging is the whole a.s.semblage of ropes by which the masts are supported.

These few words are very far from being a technically full, or even quite precise, description. But, taken with what was previously said about the hull, they will give a better general idea than if the reader was asked to make a realizable whole out of a mazy bewilderment embracing every single one of all the mult.i.tudinous parts.

'All hands make sail!' Up go some to loose the sails aloft, while others stay on deck to haul the ropes that hoist the sails to the utmost limit of the canvas. The jibs and spanker generally go up at once, because they are useful as an aid to steering. The staysails generally wait. The jibs and staysails are triangular, the spanker a quadrangular {108} fore-and-after. The square sails made fast to wide-spreading yards are the ones that take most hauling. But setting the sails by no means ends the work at them. Tr.i.m.m.i.n.g is quite as important. Every time there is the slightest shift in the course or wind there ought to be a corresponding shift of trim so as to catch every breath the sail can hold. To effect this with the triangular sails a sheet must be slacked away or hauled more in; while, in the case of the square sails on the yards, a brace must be attended to.

Our Bluenose mate now thinks he can get more work from his canvas. His voice rings out: 'Weather crossjack brace!' which means hauling the lowest and aftermost square sail more to windward. 'Weather crossjack brace!' sings out the timekeeper, whose duty it is to rouse the watch as well as strike the bells that mark the hours and halves. The watch tramp off and lay on to the weather brace, the A.B.'s (or able-bodied seamen) leading and the O.S.'s (ordinary seamen) at the tail. Some one slacks off the lee braces and sings out 'Haul away!' Then the watch proceed to haul, with weird, wild cries in minor keys that rise and fall and rise again, like the long-drawn soughing of the wind itself.

{109} _Eh--heigh--o--az_! _Eh--heigh--ee_! _Eh--hugh_! In comes the brace till the trim suits the mate, when he calls out 'Turn the crossjack brace!' which means making it fast on a belaying pin. The other braces follow. By the time the topgallant braces are reached only two hands are needed, as the higher yards are naturally much lighter than the lower ones.

Sheets and braces are very dangerous things to handle in a gale of wind. Every movement of the rope must be closely watched with one vigilant eye, while the other must be looking out for washing seas.

The slightest inattention to the belaying of a mainsheet while men are hanging on may mean that it breaks loose just as the men expect it to be fast, when away it goes, with awful suddenness and force, dragging them clean overboard before their instinctive grip can be let go. The slightest inattention to the seas may mean an equally fatal result.

Not once, nor twice, but several times, a whole watch has been washed away from the fore-braces by some gigantic wave, and every single man in it been drowned.

Squalls need smart handling. Black squalls are nothing, even when the ship lays over till the lee rail's under a sluicing rush of broken water. But a really wicked white squall {110} requires luffing, that is, bringing her head so close to the wind that it will strike her at the acutest angle possible without losing its pressure in the right direction altogether. The officer of the watch keeps one eye to windward, makes up his mind what sail he'll shorten, and then yells an order that pierces the wind like a shot, 'Stand by your royal halliards!' As the squall swoops down and the ship heels over to it he yells again, 'Let go your royal halliards, clew 'em up and make 'em fast!' Down come the yards, with hoa.r.s.e roaring from the thrashing canvas. But then, if no second squall is coming, the mate will cut the clewing short with a stentorian 'Masthead the yards again!' on which the watch lay on to the halliards and haul--_Ahay_! _Aheigh_!

_Aho--oh_! Up she goes!

The labour is lightened, as hand labour always has been lightened, by singing to the rhythm of the work. The seaman's working songs are chanties, a kind of homespun poetry which, once heard to its rolling music and the sound of wind and wave, will always bring back the very savour of the sea wherever it is heard again. There are thousands of chanties in scores of languages, which, like the men who sing them, have met and mingled all round the {111} world. They are the folklore of a cla.s.s apart, which differs, as landsmen differ, in ways and speech and racial ambition, but which is also drawn together, as landsmen never have been, by that strange blend of strife and communing with man and nature which is only known at sea. They will not bear quotation in cold print, where they are as pitiably out of place as an albatross on deck. No mere reader can feel the stir of that grand old chanty

Hurrah! my boys, we're homeward bound!

unless he has heard it when all hands make sail on leaving port, and the deck begins pulsating with the first throb of the swell that sets in landward across the bar. And what can this chorus really mean to any one who has never heard it roared by strong male voices to the running accompaniment of seething water overside?

What ho, Piper! watch her how she goes!

Give her sheet and let her rip.

We're the boys to pull her through.

You ought to see her rolling home; For she's the gal to go In the pa.s.sage home in ninety days From Cal-i-for-ni-o!

But though you can no more wrest a chanty from its surroundings and then pa.s.s it off as a {112} seaman's folk-song than you can take the blue from the water or the crimson from the sunset, yet, as some chanties have become so well known ash.o.r.e, as others so richly deserve to be known there, and as all are now being threatened with extinction, perhaps a few may be mentioned in pa.s.sing. _Away for Rio_! with its wild, queer wail in the middle of its full-toned chorus, has always been a great favourite afloat:

For we're bound for Rio Grande, And away Rio! ay Rio!

Sing fare-ye-well, my bonny young girl, We're bound for Rio Grande.

The _Wide Missouri_ is a magnificent song for baritones and ba.s.ses on the water:

Oh, Shenando'h, I love your daughter, 'Way-ho, the rolling river!

Oh, Shenando'h, I long to hear you, 'Way-ho, we're bound away, Down the broad Missouri.

A famous capstan chanty is well known on land, whence, indeed, it originally came:

And it's hame, dearie, hame; oh! it's hame I want to be.

My topsails are hoisted and I must out to sea; But the oak and the ash and the bonnie birchen tree, They're all a-growin' green in the North Countree.

--which is quite as appropriate to the _Nova {113} Scotia_ as to the one beyond the North Atlantic. A favourite sail-setting chanty is

_Solo_. Haul on the bowlin', the fore and maintop bowlin'-- _Chorus_. Haul on the bowlin', the bowlin' haul!

A good pumping-out chanty after a storm is

_Solo_. Old Storm has heard the angel call.

_Chorus_. To my ay! Old Storm along!

_Reuben Ranzo_ is a grand one for a good long haul. The chorus comes after every line, striking like a squall, with a regular roar on the first word, Ranzo.

_Solo_. Hurrah for Reuben Ranzo!

_Chorus_. Ranzo, boys, Ranzo!

Ranzo's progress from a lubberly tailor to a good smart sailor is then related with infinite variations, but always with the same gusto.

_Ranzo_ is only really popular afloat. But _Blow the man down_ is a universal favourite.

_Solo_. Blow the man down, blow the man down, _Chorus_. 'Way-ho! Blow the man down.

_Solo_. Blow the man down from Liverpool town; _Chorus_. Give us some wind to blow the man down.

When every sail is set and every st.i.tch is drawing, there is no finer sight the sea can show. The towering masts; the canvas gleaming white, with its lines of curving {114} beauty drawn by the touch of the wind; the whole ship bounding forward as if just slipped from her leash--all this makes a scene to stir the beholder then and for ever after. The breeze pipes up. She's doing ten knots now; eleven, twelve; and later on, fifteen. This puts the lee rail under; for she lays over on her side so far that her deck is at a slope of forty-five. Her forefoot cuts through the water like the slash of a scimitar; while her bows throw out two seething waves, the windward one of which breaks into volleying spray a-top and rattles down like hailstones on the fore-deck.

But next day the wind has hauled ahead, and she has to make her way by tacking. She loses as little as possible on her zigzag course by sailing close to the wind, that is, by pointing as nearly into it as she can while still 'keeping a full on' every working sail. Presently the skipper, having gone as far to one side of his straight course as he thinks proper, gives the caution; whereupon the braces are taken off the pins and coiled down on deck, all clear for running, while the spanker-boom is hauled in amidships so that the spanker may feel the wind and press the stern a-lee, which helps the bow to windward. Then the 'old man' (called {115} so whatever his age may be) sings out at the top of his voice, 'Ready, oh!' The helm is eased down on his signal, so as not to lose way suddenly. When it is quite down he shouts again, 'Helm's a-lee!' on which the fore and head sheets (holding the sails attached to the foremast and bowsprit) are let go and overhauled. The vessel swings round, the spanker pressing her stern in one direction and the sails at the bows offering very little resistance now their sheets are let go. The skipper's eye is on the mainsail, which is the point of pivoting. Directly the wind is out of it and it begins to shiver he yells, 'Raise tacks and sheets!' when, except that the foretack is held a bit to prevent the foresail from bellying aback, all the remaining ropes that held the ship on her old tack are loosed. A roar of wind-waves rushes through the sails, and a tremor runs through the whole ship from stem to stern. The skipper waits for the first decided breath on her new tack and then shouts, 'Mainsail haul!' when the yards come swinging round so quickly that the men can hardly take in the slack of the braces fast enough. The scene of orderly confusion is now at its height. Every one hauling sings out at the very top of his pipes. The sails are struggling to find their {116} new set home; while the headsheets forward thrash about like mad and thump their blocks against the deck with force enough to dash your brains out.

Mates and boatswain work furiously, for the skipper's eye is searching everywhere, and the skipper's angry words cut the delinquent like the lash of a well-aimed whip. The boatswain forward has the worst of it, for the restive sheets and headsails won't come to trim without a fight when it's breezing up and seas are running. But presently all the yards get rightly trimmed, tacks boarded, and bowlines hauled out taut.

She's on a bowline taut enough to please the old man now; that is, the ropes leading forward from the middle of the forward edge of every square sail are so straight that she is sailing as near the wind as she can go and keep a full on. 'Go below, the watch!' and the men off duty tramp down, the cook and boatswain with their 'oilies' streaming from their scuffle with the flying spray and slapping dollops at the bows.

When a quartering trade wind is picked up sailing is at its easiest; for a well-balanced suit of canvas will keep her bowling along night and day with just the lightest of touches at the wheel. Then is the time to bend her old sails {117} on; for, unlike a man, a ship puts on her old suit for fair weather and her new suit for foul. Then, too, is the time for dog-watch yarning, when pipes are lit without any fear of their having to be crammed half-smoked into the nearest pocket because all hands are called. Landsmen generally think that most watches aboard a wind-jammer are pa.s.sed in yarns and smoking. But this is far from being the case. The mates and skipper keep everybody busy with the hundred-and-one things required to keep a vessel shipshape: painting, graining, brightening, overhauling the weak spots in the rigging, working the 'bear' to clean the deck with fine wet sand, helping whomever is acting as 'Chips' the carpenter, or the equally busy 'Sails'; or 'doing Peggy' for 'Slush' the cook, who much prefers wet grub to dry, slumgullion coffee to any kind of tea, ready-made hard bread to ship-baked soft, and any kind of stodge to the toothsome delights of dandyfunk and crackerhash. And all this is extra to the regular routine, with its lamp-lockers, binnacles, timekeeping, incessant look-out, and trick at the wheel. Besides, every man has to look after his own kit, which he has to buy with his own money, and his quarters, for which he alone is responsible. {118} So there is never much time to spare, with watch and watch about, all through the voyage; especially when all the ills that badly fed flesh is heir to on board a deepwaterman incapacitate some hands, while falls from aloft and various accidents knock out others.

The skipper, boatswain, cook, steward, Chips, and Sails keep no watches, and hence are called 'the idlers,' a most misleading term, for they work a good deal harder than their counterparts ash.o.r.e; though the mates and seamen often work harder still. There are seven watches in a day, reckoned from noon to noon: five of four hours each and two of two hours each. These two, the dog watches, are from four to six and six to eight each afternoon. The crew are divided into port and starboard watches, each under a mate. In Bluenose vessels the port watch was always called by the old name of larboard watch till only the other day. The starboard and larboard got their names because the starboard was the side on which the steering oar was hung before the rudder was invented, and the larboard was the side where the lading or cargo came in.

Bluenoses have no use for nippers, as Britishers call apprentices. But if they had, {119} and the reader was a green one, he would just about begin to know the ropes and find his sea legs by the time that our _Victoria_ had run her southing down to within another day's sail of the foul-weather zone in the roaring forties round the Horn, which seamen call 'Old Stiff.' Sails are shifted again, and the best new suit is bent; for the coming gales have a clear sweep from the Antarctic to the stormiest coast of all America, and the enormous, grey-backed Cape Horners are the biggest seas in the world.

The best helmsmen are on duty now. Not even every Bluenose can steer, any more than every Englishman can box or every Frenchman fence. There are a dozen different ways of mishandling a vessel under sail. Let your attention wander, and she'll run up into the wind and perhaps get in irons, so that she won't cast either way. Let her fall off when you're running free, and she'll broach to and get taken aback. Or simply let her yaw about a bit instead of holding true, and you'll lose a knot or two an hour. But do none of these careless things, observe all the rules as well, and even then you will never make a helmsman unless it's born in you. Steering is blown into you by the wind and soaked into you by the water. And you must also have {120} that inborn faculty of touch which tells you instinctively how to meet a vessel's vagaries--and no two vessels are alike--as well as how to make her fall in with all the humours of a wayward ocean.