side of that deck and leave the weather side the moment the duty was done. If sent for any article by an officer, it was our business to find it without further recourse to him.
Petted boys have little patience for hunting for thing’s. At home two minutes is about the limit of time spent in looking for a mislaid poker, and then “Ma!” “Pa!” or “Aunt!” is called on to turn to and do this disagreeable work. The second mate once ordered me to find a certain iron hook, wherewith to draw the pump boxes, and when, after a short search, I returned and asked him where it might be I was horrified by the expression of astonished indignation spreading over his face as he yelled: “Great Scott, he expects me to help him find it!” I saw the point and all it involved, and never so wounded an officer’s dignity again. It is a sailor’s, and especially a boy’s business on shipboard, to find whatever he is ordered to. It must be produced—no matter whether it’s in the ship or not. At all events that’s the sentiment regarding the matter. But it is good discipline for boys over-nursed at home and only physically weaned. The “cold, cold world” would not, in some cases, be so cold to the newly-fledged youth first trying his feeble wings outside the family nest, did parents judiciously establish a little of this maritime usage at home.
We soon learned on the Wizard how well we had lived at home. Our sea fare of hard tack and salt junk taught us how to appreciate at their true value the broiled streaks, hot cakes, and buttered toast of home tables. The quart of very common molasses served out to us weekly soon became a luxury, and when the steward occasionally brought us “Benavlins” (the nautical term for the broken fragments from the cabin table), we regarded it as very luxurious living, though a month previous we should have deemed such food fit only for the swill-tub.
In about two weeks we had settled down into the routine of life at sea. Sailors are apt to term theirs a “dog’s life.” I never did. It was a peculiar life, and in some respects an unpleasant one— like many others on land. But it was not a “dog’s life.” There was plenty to eat, and we relished our “lobscouse,” hard tack, salt junk, beans, codfish, potatoes and Sunday’s and Thursday’s duff. The hours for labor were not exhausting. It was “watch and watch, four hours off and four hours on.” Many a New York retail grocer’s clerk, who turns to at 5 in the morning and never leaves off until 11 at night, would revel on such regulation of time and labor. So would many a sewing-girl. We had plenty of time for sleep. If called up at 4 every alternate morning, and obliged to stand watch until 8 a. m., we could “turn in” at that hour after breakfast and sleep till noon. Apart from the alternate watches the work or “jobs” occupied about six hours per day. True, there was at times some heavy work, but it was only occasional. Sailor-work is not heavy as compared with the incessant fagging, wearing, never-ending character of some occupations on shore. Skill, agility, and quickness are in greater demand than mere brute strength.
Lobscouse is a preparation of hard bread, first soaked and then stewed with shredded salt-beef. It looks somewhat like rations for a delicate bear when served out by the panful. But it is very good. Salt beef is wonderfully improved by streaks of fat through it. These serve the foremast hands in place of butter. I know of no better relish than good pilot bread and sliced salt junk, with plenty of clean white fat. On shore that quart of boiling hot liquid, sweetened with molasses and called tea, would have been pitched into the gutter. At sea, after an afternoon’s work, it was good. With similar content and resignation, not to say happiness, we drank in the morning the hot quart of black fluid similarly sweetened and called coffee. It was not real coffee. I don’t know what it was. I cared not to know. Of course we grumbled at it. But we drank it. It was “filling,” and was far better than the cold, brackish water, impregnated thickly with iron rust, a gallon of which was served out daily. For the fresh water was kept below in an iron tank, and, as the deck leaked, a small portion of the Atlantic had somehow gained admission to it and slightly salted it. It resembled chocolate to the eye, but not to the palate.
CHAPTER IV.
MUCH WATER AND MUTINY.
On the fourth day out the Wizard was found to have four feet of water in her hold. The ship was pumped dry in about four hours, when she proceeded to fill up again. The Captain seemed a man of many minds for the next two or three days. First the ship was put back for New York. This course was altered and her bows pointed for Africa. Then the foremast hands became worried, and going aft one morning in a body, asked Captain S—— what he meant to do and where he meant to go, because they had shipped for San Francisco and they did not intend going anywhere else. The Captain answered that his own safety and that of the vessel were as dear to him as their lives were to them, and that he intended doing the best for the general good. This answer was not very satisfactory to the crew, who went grumbling back to their quarters. Ultimately it turned out that we were to take the leak with us to San Francisco. At the rate the water was running in it was judged that the bone, muscle, and sinews of the crew could manage to keep it down. So we pumped all the way round Cape Horn. We pumped during our respective watches every two hours. In good weather and on an even keel it took half an hour to “suck the pumps.” If the vessel was heeled to larboard or starboard, it took much longer. In very rough weather we pumped all the time that could be spared from other duties. There were two pumps at the foot of the mainmast worked by levers, and these were furnished with “bell ropes” to pull on. Half the watch worked at each lever, and these were located exactly where on stormy nights the wild waves were in the habit of flinging over the bulwarks a hogshead or two of water to drench us and wash us off our feet.
The Wizard was a very “wet ship.” She loved giving us moist surprises. Sometimes on a fine day she would gracefully, but suddenly, poke her nose under, and come up and out of the Atlantic or Pacific ocean with fifteen or twenty tons of pea-green sea water foaming over the t’gallant forecastle, cascading thence on the spar deck and washing everything movable slam bang up and sometimes into the cabin. This took place once on a washday Sailors’ washday is often regulated by the supply of water caught from the clouds. On this particular occasion the fore deck was full of old salts up to their bared elbows in suds, vigorously discoursing washtub and washboard. Then the flood came, and in a moment the deck was filled with a great surge bearing on its crest all these old salts struggling among their tubs, their washboards, their soap and partly-washed garments. The cabin bulkhead partly stopped some, but the door being open others were borne partly inside, and their woollen shirts were afterward found stranded on the carpeted cabin floor. One “duff day” we had gathered about our extra repast in the boys’ house. The duff and New Orleans molasses had just commenced to disappear. Then a shining, greenish, translucent cataract filled the doorway from top to bottom. It struck boys, beef, bread, duff, and dishes. It scattered them. It tumbled them in various heaps. It was a brief season of terror, spitting, and sputtering salt-water, and a scrambling for life, as we thought. It washed under bunks and in remote corners duff, bread, beef, plates, knives, forks, cups, spoons and molasses-bottles. The dinner was lost. Going on deck we found a couple of feet of water swashing from bulwark to bulwark with every roll, bearing with it, heavy blocks and everything movable which had been loosened by the shock, to the great risk of legs and bodies. But these were trifles. At least we call them trifles when they are over. I have noticed, however, that a man may swear as hard at a jammed finger as a broken leg, and the most efficacious means in the world to quickly develop a furious temper is to lose one’s dinner when hungry, get wet through, then abused by a Dutch mate for not stirring around quicker, and finally work all the afternoon setting things to rights on an empty stomach, robbed and disappointed of its duff. This is no trifle.
Learning the ropes isn’t all a boy’s first lessons at sea. He must learn also to wash and mend his own clothes. At least he must try to learn and go through the forms. I never could wash a flannel shirt, and how the extraneous matter called dirt, which the washing process is intended to disperse, is gotten rid of by soap and muscle at an equal average over the entire surface of the garment is for me to-day one of earth’s mysteries.
