The Bonadventure Part 1

The Bonadventure.

by Edmund Blunden.

NOTE

A few facts are perhaps needed in this place. The autumn of 1921 found me in bad health, which seemed to me to be gaining ground. The Editors for whom it is my privilege to work were of that mind too, and suggested a sea voyage. I am one of that large cla.s.s who can afford little more than voyages in ships which are hauled over on chains; but this was allowed for in every possible way by my Editors, in consequence of whose active generosity and that of the owners to whom my case was made known, I suddenly found myself bound for the River Plate. I can but say that when my friends expressed their envy I was well able to understand their feelings and my good luck.

For the rest, this little book is not intended for anything beyond the statement on the t.i.tle page. I am sorry myself that there are no adventures of the blood-curdling sort in it; but I could not go out of my way, nor do tramps find time, it seems, for propitiating cannibals.

Of unrehea.r.s.ed effects on voyages, indeed, my belief is that it is possible sometimes to have too much. Eastward of Madagascar, we read, lies Tromelin Island--a sandbank a mile long. In 1761 the _Utile_ was wrecked there, and eighty blacks were left behind; all died except seven of the women, who clung to life for fifteen years, nourished on sh.e.l.l fish and brackish water, until Captain Tromelin landed and saved them. Now I cannot feel sorry that I was not one of that party.

There is, naturally, some slender disguise of names and so forth through my journal. There may be, it occurs, a S.S. _Bonadventure_ at the present day; if it is so, this is not the ship. My grateful recollections of Captain Hosea, his officers and crew apply to those gentlemen indeed, but they do not sign on by the names which I have for this occasion invented. Thus their own example leads me; how much oftener was I hailed as "Skylark" and "Jonah" than as

EDMUND BLUNDEN.

London, December 23, 1921.

Dear Blunden,--

There you are, outward bound and southward ho! Here am I, with the newsboys outside shouting the latest imbecility to the murk, trying to get warm and happy by considering a dull electric heater and the faded memory of another ship (she went downstairs in the war) which, years ago, on a December morning, pa.s.sed through the lock gates at Swansea for Para and all, while I stood by her rail sorry for the people who had not my luck. Now it is your turn. Make the most of it. It will do something to take away the taste of Stuff Trench. You will find me, when you come home, still over the electric stove listening to the newsboys. I shall call for wine, and you must tell me all about the Fortunate Isles. I am sure they are still there, and that you will see them.

O, a Cardiff ship sails down the river (Blow, boys, blow!) Her masts and yards they shine like silver (Blow, my bully boys, blow!)

Sing up, Blunden! And don't forget to take soap, towels and matches. Do you smoke a pipe? You'll wish presently you knew how to do it, if you have misspent your time and never learned. But I suppose eighteenth-century literature and the baby have absorbed all your energies. A pipe is only fit for the idle-minded.

There's another thing. Don't forget that the ship's master is a greater man than a colonel. You know colonels, don't you? (All right, all right!) Well, make no mistake about it, master mariners, as a rule, are different.

It is long odds that your new master will know his job. If you are nice to him, he may even confess to a taste for your poetry; ships' masters are like pie, I have found, to little lost children like ourselves who know nothing about ships, but they are perfectly frightful towards those who know all about ships, and know it all wrong.

A happy Christmas and a lucky New Year.

Yours ever, H. M. TOMLINSON.

I

On the eleventh of January my uncertainty was ended by the apparition (and in the village of Staizley it is no less) of a girl with a telegram. Her walk of three miles or thereabouts, from our nearest telegraph office, brought her to my gate at three in the afternoon; and with her customary awed speechlessness she gave me her message. It was from "Kingfisher," the decoded ent.i.ty of which was the great shipping owner to whom I owed my arrangements; and in response I hastily attempted to leave a semblance of order behind me and to seem unexcited. My luggage, no c.u.mbrous affair, had already been packed. By six, the trap of an ingenious neighbour, who lives by all sorts of traps, was heard at the gate, and Mary and myself got in. Determined protest, not at my departure, but at the apparent departure of her mother, was now raised by the youngest among us. My comforting promises were ignored, and the infant's cries redoubled. Nevertheless, off we went.

The evening had been pouring out, with the vigour of an elemental Whistler, sleet and hail, and now though the wind was down our drive lay through fields half whitened with the storm; and the air was livid with the clouded moon and as cold as the ebbing light. With its mult.i.tude of pollards, its desolate great fields, its chilling breaths, the countryside might have been Flanders. This aspect seemed incidentally to demonstrate the wisdom of going elsewhere for a month or two.

We now came into Slowe, discussing all the time our past, present and future; the chief result of the discussion was the placing of my unanswered letters at Mary's disposal. The town of Slowe was at peace.

Its station wore the familiar air of having nothing to do with the coa.r.s.e noise of traffic. Here Mary spent some moments in melancholy visions of my funeral at sea. She hoped these were wrong, and I, beginning to be affected also, hoped so equally.

"Good-bye" to Mary! The curve of the track carried her out of sight, and, imagining with resolution that the carriage was comfortably warm, I resigned myself to the journey to Liverpool Street. By way of pa.s.sing the time, I fell back upon my habit of considering how the Latin poets might render the words, upon which few Englishmen have not been reared:

"The use of this rack for heavy and bulky packages...."

But though the sentiment which they convey is salutary, and though such metrical gifts as "graviora" and "viatores" instantly suggested themselves, the task once again defeated me.

Some such deadening pastime (Tennyson advises it) was necessary. There are many stations between Slowe and Liverpool Street, and the train, the last of the day between those places, stopped at each one. Arrived in London, and shivering with cold, I sought out my relations; reported with a certain amount of pride, which evoked no corresponding admiration at such a late hour, my impending voyage, and was rewarded with a bed.

II

My instructions were to present myself next morning, without fail, at the shipping offices of Messrs. Wright, Style and Storey, in Cardiff.

Mary's double accordingly hurried me through my breakfast and led the way to Paddington. I urged myself to realize that I was going upon holiday; but, it cannot be withheld, the thought of this particular pleasure had a serious tinge. Paddington itself, to such an islander as I am, had some of the credit of this. To me, that large terminus is, as a jumping-off position, less human than, for example, Victoria. From Paddington, with its Western propaganda, it may well seem that humanity is travelling out into the round world's imagined corners; but Victoria, with its lesser range in sight, leaves a quieter speculation. From Brighton there is no such press of mammoth liners? Even when the destination was the B.E.F., it was comforting to me to set out from Victoria, whence the way led through a compact, placid, formerly uninternational, still un-Atlantic quarter. A Society for the Suppression of Astronomers has been mooted by the lazy-minded. I am not sure that geographers should not be included. Distances, no doubt, are as essential to romance as to Copley Fielding's water-colours; but they can rouse in some of us troubling thoughts, which, summed up, say "Leave us alone!"

Such thoughts had disturbed me when, with farewells from Bess, I retired to the sporting columns of my newspaper, and the train moved out.

In compensation for my experience of the previous evening, the journey went quickly by. A sunny morning, blue and still, lit up the country.

So fine was the day, and the country, with its ancient timber, its mole-hilled pastures, its feeding horses and cheerful rooks, appeared so mellow, that the wisdom of leaving it behind was not so conspicuous as, the night before, it had been. Cardiff. I knew nothing about it, except as "Cardiff." I entrusted myself, therefore, to a taxi-driver, who claimed to know more, even to the whereabouts of the shipping office to which I was bound. After meanderings and advice from the police and the public, he made amends for his inaccuracy by setting me down at the foot of a gloomy staircase leading to the rooms of Messrs. Wright, Style and Storey.

And now for a few moments I was in trouble. Thinking that the telegram which warranted my calling at this Cardiff office of the London Company would best explain my intrusion, I handed it over the fateful counter.

The clerk took it, a.s.sumed a serious air, avoided looking at me, and referred to a superior. I was puzzled. More so, the superior. A murderer, concerned in the atrocity at Bournemouth, was at that time untraced, and I fancy that the official had the mystery in his mind at this point.

At any rate, eyeing the wire with doubt for some time, he suddenly advanced towards me and put the question, in stern accents: "Who are you?"

Who are you?

I feel sure that my explanation was unbusinesslike, but he presently divined the truth. Word of my movement had not been sent him from London.

He withdrew to the telephone or time-table; then restoring to me my sibylline leaf, told me to go to Barry Docks, where I should find the _Bonadventure_, recognizable by a white S painted on the funnel, lying at Tip Eleven or Twelve, and to go aboard and report myself to the captain. I went, fearing lest the captain likewise might know as little in advance about the trembling suspect before him.

Urchins scrambled for my luggage at the Barry Docks Station, an hour or so later, and the two victors hurried it along to Tip Eleven. These coal-tips overhead and the shipping alongside, with knots of workmen pa.s.sing masked in coal-dust, engaged my mind as we went, and before I was fully aware of it we were aboard a vessel which the boys recognized as the _Bonadventure_. I paid the carriers, who went away at speed, and asked a wooden-faced seaman, who seemed to be alone, where I could find the captain. He at once cut short my search by the tone in which he observed, "The captain! He's having his dinner at the present." I was rebuked, and stood by. (I had still to witness the mult.i.tudes who want to find the captain of a ship in port.)

I took a look at the ship, but felt lost as I did so. She was large, and of vague shape. I could not determine where she began and where she left off. A pall of coal covered everything. Heaps of cinders, which a casual glance described as of some seniority, lay against the deck railing. I saw hut-like structures about me where I stood, amidships, as the boys had said; but I feared to explore. At times some one with a plate or a jug was seen stooping swiftly through their doorways--evidence indeed of the captain's dinner-hour. Inaction, nevertheless, grew unpromising; and at last I asked an officer, as I rightly thought him, who had come out to keep an eye on several blasphemous and strongly individual beings with large spades, whether I might see the captain. When he heard my business, he quickly took me to him. I found myself speaking to a quiet, smiling, and enviably robust man who, to my relief, was not mystified by my arrival. He set me at my ease, told me that I should sign on as a member of the crew to-morrow, and allowed me to stay on the ship meanwhile. I was glad of this, being weary of quests for the time being.

Not quite at home, as may be gathered, I went out on deck, and watched the tips in action; admired the mimic thunder--first the abrupt and rending, shattering crash, then the antistrophe of continued rollings--which each truckful of coal makes as it is tumbled into the shoot and thereby into the ship's holds. Truck after truck was drawn up, the pin knocked away from the end board and the coal hurled, its dusky clouds fuming out, into the ship: its atmosphere did not seem to strain or irritate the breathing organs of those worthies with the spades, and the pipes, whose vague labouring silhouettes enlivened the gloom. Engines plied constantly beside the docks with long trains of coal. As if expressing itself, one emitted a peculiar twofold groan. All this, of course, ancient history, but I was new to it. It seemed like the beginnings of wisdom.

But the world of iron and smoke could not warm my body as well as it did my mind, and while I was brooding over the increasing bite in the air of that January afternoon, the officer whom I was to know soon as the mate, a young man of clear-cut features and tranquil manner, told me to make use of the saloon. I sat there reading, when another introduction took place.

The steward, a weighty old man remarkable at first sight for his brown skull-cap, came in to say he had fitted me up with a cabin. Following him up a staircase, I took over this dugout-like dwelling with no small satisfaction. It was to be my home, he said, for three or four months on this South American run. I unpacked, and washed away the unearned, and unsuspected, film of coal-dust which was to characterize my home for the same length of time.

Tea came, and I was mildly puzzled again, when the steward's a.s.sistant asked me to choose between a bloater, cold meat, and so on. I was deciding on something slenderer, when I realized that tea included supper, and applied for a kipper. The captain's wife kept conversation alive. The topic, I remember, was the lamented custom which once permitted captains'

wives to make "the round trip" with their husbands.

The coal still rattled into the holds every moment or two, and the same process was going on all round us. The water was bright in the moon, and the reflections of the lamps fastened high over the ships swum like golden serpents in the ripples. In such a light, to such a watcher, there seemed no end to the serried framework and the cordage to the giant sea travellers of steel. The constant clanging and whistling and crash spoke to the work of the machines, an occasional shout to the guiding energies of the men.

III