Tramping on Life Part 32

As we swam by in the fading day, a pale ghost of a moon was already up.

Ghostly rows of knee-ing trees stood out like live things in the river....

Under the night, off at sea, what with the mooing and baaing through all the ship, it seemed like an absurd farmyard that had somehow got on the ocean.

There were two quarters for the men ... a place under the forecastle head, forward--as well as the after-quarters. Nippers and I had been separated--he staying aft, while I took up my bunk forward.

But the men on the boat, the few that stick in my memory as distinct personages:

There was the bloated, fat Scotch boy, whom we called just Fatty, a sheepherder by calling. He had signed on for the trip, to take care of the sheep on the upper deck;

There was a weak, pathetic c.o.c.kney, who died of sun-stroke;

The ex-jockey, a bit of a man with a withered left arm--made that way from an injury received in his last race, when his mount fell on him;

There was the West Indian Negro, a woolly, ebony wisp of a creature, a great believer in ghosts (he who thought we stowaways were ghosts when we hid under the bunk). The Irish cattle-boss gave him the job of night-watchman, "to break him of his superst.i.tious silliness";

There was the big, black Jamaica cook ... as black as if he was polished ebony ... a fine, big, polite chap, whom everyone liked. He had a white wife in Southampton (the sailors who had seen her said she was pretty ... that the cook was true to her ... that she came down to the boat the minute the _South Sea King_ reached an English port, they loved each other so deeply!) ...

Then there was the giant of an Irishman ... who, working side by side with me in the hold, shovelling out cattle-ordure there with me, informed me that I looked as if I had consumption ... that I would not be able to stand the terrific heat for many days without keeling over ... but, his prediction came true of himself, not of me.

One morning, not many days out, the little West Indian watchman, bringing down the before-daylight coffee and ships-biscuits and rousing the men, as was his duty,--found the big fellow, with whom he used to crack cheery jokes, apparently sound asleep. The watchman shook him by the foot to rouse him ... found his big friend stiff and cold.

The watchman let out a scream of horror that woke us right and proper, for _that_ day....

The next day was Sunday. It was a still, religious afternoon.

We men ranged in two rows aft. The body had been sewn up in coa.r.s.e canvas, the Union Jack draped over it.

The captain, dapper in his gold-braided uniform, stood over the body as it lay on the plank from which it was to descend into the sea. In a high, clear voice he read that beautiful burial-service for the dead ...

an upward tilt of the board in the hands of two brown-armed seamen, the body flashed over the side, to swing feet-down, laden with shot, for interminable days and nights, in the vast tides of the Pacific.

No one reached quickly enough. The Union Jack went off with the body, like a floral decoration flung after....

We drank the coffee brought to us before dawn, in grouchy, sleepy, monosyllabic silence. Immediately after, the cattle were to water and feed ... and a hungry lot they were ... but despite their appet.i.tes, with each day, because of the excessive heat of the tropics, and the confined existence that was theirs--such an abrupt transition from the open range--they waxed thinner and thinner, acquired more of large-eyed mournfulness and an aspect of almost human suffering in their piteous, pleading faces....

If the big chap who succ.u.mbed to heart failure that night had lived a few days longer, he would have wondered still more at me or anyone else surviving a day's work in the hold.

For the thermometer ran up incredibly ... hotter and hotter it grew ...

and down there in the hold we had to shovel out the excrement every morning after breakfast. It was too infernal for even the prudish Anglo-Saxon souls of us to wear clothes beyond a breechclout, and shoes, to protect our feet from the harder hoof.

Our eyes stung and watered from the reek of the ammonia in the cattle-urine. What with the crowding, the bad air (despite the canvas ventilators let down) and the sudden change from green pasturage to dry, baled food, most of the beasts contracted "the skitters." This mess was what we had to shovel out through the portholes ... an offensive-smelling, greenish, fluidic material, that spilled, the half of it, always, from the carefully-held scoop of the shovel.

Cursing, with the bitter sweat streaming off our bodies and into our eyes, and with an oblique eye to guard from heat-maddened, frantic steer-kicks,--each day, for several hours, we suffered through this h.e.l.l ... to emerge panting, like runners after a long race; befouled ... to throw ourselves down on the upper deck, under the blue, wind-free sky and feel as if we had come into paradise....

"I wish I had never come back to this h.e.l.l-ship, at Brisbane!"

"I wish I had never come aboard at all at Sydney!"

At such times, and at other odd ends of leisure, I brought my Westcott and Hort's Greek New Testament from my bunk, and with the nasty smell of sheep close-by, but unheeded through custom--I studied with greater pleasure than I ever did before or since.

As I said before, it was not long before these poor steers were broken-spirited things.

But there was one among them whose spirit kept its flag in the air, "The Black Devil," as the cook had named him fondly ... a steer, all glossy-black, excepting for a white spot in the center of his forehead.

He behaved, from the first, more like a turbulent little bull than a gelding. The cook fed him with tid-bits from the galley.

He had evidently been someone's pet before he had been sold for live meat, to be shipped to China.

When we took him on board by the horns he showed no fear as he rode in the air. And, once on his feet again, and loose on deck, he showed us h.e.l.l's own fight--out of sheer indignation--back there in Brisbane. He flashed after us, with the rapid motions of a bullfight in the movies.

Most of us climbed every available thing to get out of his reach. He smashed here and there through wooden supports as if they were of cardboard.

The agile little ex-jockey kept running in front of him, hitting him on the nose and nimbly escaping--in spite of his wing-like, wasted arm, quicker than his pursuer ... that smashed through, while he ducked and turned....

"I'll be G.o.d-d.a.m.ned," yelled the captain from the safe vantage of the bridge, "fetch me my pistol," to the cabin boy, "I'll have to shoot the beast!"

All this while the big black Jamaica cook had been calmly looking on, leaning fearlessly out over the half-door of the galley ... while the infuriated animal rushed back and forth.

The cook said nothing. He disappeared, and reappeared with a bunch of carrots which he held out toward "The Black Devil."...

In immediate transformation, the little beast stopped, forgot his anger, stretched forth his moist, black nuzzle, sniffing ... and walked up to the cook, accepting the carrots. The cook began to stroke the animal's nose....

"_You_ little black devil," he said, in a soft voice, "you're all right ... they don't understand you ... but we're going to be pals--us two--aren't we?"

Then he came out at the door to where the steer stood, took "The Black Devil," as we henceforth called him, gently by the under-jaw,--and led him into a standing-place right across from the galley.

As we struck further north under vast nights of stars, and days of furnace-hot sunshine, the heat, confinement, and dry, baled food told hideously on the animals ... the sheep seemed to endure better, partly because they were not halted stationary in one spot and could move about a little on the top deck.... But they suffered hardships that came of changing weather.

Especially the cattle in the lower hold suffered, grew weak and emaciated.... We were ever on the watch to keep them from going down ...

there was danger of their sprawling over each other and breaking legs in the scramble. So when one tried to lie down, his tail was twisted till the suffering made him rise to his feet ... sometimes a steer would be too weak to regain his feet ... in such a case, in a vain effort to make the beast rise, I have seen the Irish foreman twist the tail nearly off, while the animal at first bellowed, then moaned weakly, with anguish ...

a final boot at the victim in angry frustration....

Last, a milky glaze would settle over the beast's eyes ... and we would drag him out and up by donkey-engine, swing him over and out, and drop him, to float, a bobbing tan object, down our receding ocean-path.