“Yes,” said Peter, as we tumbled into our bunks, “there was a little something of a subscription ball and a dice-raffle – it was quite diverting after ship-board life but the women, oh, burst me, the women, they were like so many poll-parrots swathed in last year’s organdie. A sorry sight. No, I didn’t dance with Mrs Knatchbull; indeed, I don’t remember seeing her after the first few minutes. I have the impression that Lubbock carried her off to call on some friends in Ventnor, just down the coast.”
“Goodnight,” I said. He sat up.
“Have I said something to vex you?”
“Of course not, Peter. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight.”
If the wind in the English channel veers far enough to the west you may be sure that it will back again just so soon as the barometer rises. The Second Mate told me this while I nodded sagely, for, clearly, it meant something. What happened in the event was that the rain stopped the next day, the wind changed from the SW to the S and then to the SSE and soon we were battering our way down-Channel, close-hauled on the larboard tack, the sails booming and rigging screaming and sheets of spray knifing across the deck. It seemed a frightful storm to me, a very act of God; I did not want to drown like a rat in my cabin, I fled out. From the Second’s cabin, next door, came a noise of snoring – should I rouse him and give him time to make his peace with his Maker? The crash of a sea hitting our side made me selfish: I rushed on deck, looking wildly about me, threaded my way between thinly-clad sailors who, all oblivous of their peril, were heaving at various ropes, chanting strange words as they stamped the deck with their bare feet; and after many a drenching with spray fetched up in the shelter of the galley. Inside, the doctor was fisting out great lumps of salt pork from a keg and roughly slicing them into a pan full of frying onions. He was braced against the side or bulwark of his galley and deftly tilting the pan each time it threatened to spill over, singing a deep-voiced and barbarous song.
He rolled a kindly yellow eyeball at me.
“Hot roll in the oven, Mr Cleef, sah. Only jess the one, if yo please; rest’s fo’ the Captain’s table – Maz Lubbock’s supping in de Cabin tonight.”
This gave me two other things to think about beside a watery grave: Lubbock and a hot roll. Unwilling to offend the Doctor, I fished one out, dancing it between my fingers until I could split it open. As I did so the Doctor reached over and spooned some hot onion and pork gravy onto it; I clapped the roll together and, feeling like a schoolboy, crept out of the galley and braved the wild winds and the weather-oh until I was back in the cabin. Peter was there, towelling his naked body, some dry clothes ready beside him, the soaked ones dripping from a piece of cod-line he had rigged from the edge of my bunk to a nail in the bulkhead.
“How uncommonly thoughtful of you, my dear chap,” he said, twitching the roll from my fingers, “you are clearly learning the ways of the sea, for you know enough to greet a mess-mate coming off watch with a bite of something hot and tasty.” I did not rob him of his illusions; I fumbled in my tin box for a Thin Captain’s biscuit to gnaw while I asked him whether our frail barque would survive the dreadful tempest. He spluttered a little: I believe that, had his mouth not been full of hot bread crammed with fried onions and delicious pork gravy, he would have laughed.
“I think,” he said gravely, having swallowed the last exquisite morsel and pulled on a fresh pair of drawers, “I think that we have ridden out this particular Act of God. Indeed, for some twenty or thirty hours we may have little more than a fresh wind until we sight Ushant.”
“Ushant?” I quavered. “What is that? I supposed that we were bound for the Indies and the China Coast. Why are we going to this Ushant?”
“We are not going there, Karli, we are looking for it. So soon as we see it we shall know where we are and shall leave it, God willing, on our port quarter. It is merely a headland which we must weather, d’you see.”
“Ah,” I said in an intelligent way.
“After Ushant we shall drive sou’west across the skirts of the Bay, of course.”
“Of course, Peter. This Bay is …?”
“Biscay,” he said solemnly. “Biscay. The weather there is often calm, mild and a joy to sailors.”
“Capital!” I cried.
“But never at this time of the year,” he went on. “At just this season the seas are as high as mountains, the winds seem the bitter enemies of man and many a tall ship has sunk without trace, dragging all hands down with her to Davy Jones’s Locker.”
“But, surely …” I began.
“Yes, surely, our little ship is well-found, well-officered and well-manned: we shall probably cross Biscay with the loss of but a few of us – and we can replace the spars which will be carried away with a few weeks of labour.”
“I see,” I said nonchalantly, fumbling in the tin box for another Thin Captain’s. My voice was perfectly steady.
“That is, of course, unless we fall in with the Portuguese sardinho-fishers,” he said.
“And what might they be?” I asked, my voice still steady. He lowered his voice, leaned towards me, his eyes wide.
“Fiends incarnate!” he whispered. “Promise me, Karli, that you will put a bullet in my head rather than let me fall into the hands of those fiends!”
“I promise,” I quavered, a fragment of Thin Captain’s falling from my nerveless lips. He burst into laughter and staggered about the floor, incapacitated by mirth. Slowly I realised that this had been an English joke. I retrieved the piece of biscuit and munched it sternly. When Peter had recovered he saw my expression and was at once contrite, for he had a kindly nature, except in dealings with his own heart and health.
“Forgive me, Karli,” he cried, “we sailors reckon that we have a right to tweak the tails of landsmen: It helps us to endure our hardships, don’t you see, and it helps you to come to terms with the sea.”
“Of course,” I said stiffly. We Sephardim are proud people, you remember, we do not carney like the base Ashkenazim of the East. For my part, I have always been a supple man and slow to take offence, but I do not care to be made ridiculous. Except when I have chosen that rôle. There was a long silence, then Peter slipped out of the cabin. I remained standing up, anger and something else taking the place of my fear. My shoulders were braced against the edge of the upper bunk, for the ship was leaning over in that direction and was also pitching, rolling and yawing erratically. I no longer cared. A tear formed in my right eye; the room was smoky from the slush-lamp. I wiped it away with a corner of the blanket. I began to think of my mother, God knows why, and found that I needed the corner of the blanket again.
Peter came in, kicked the door shut and showed me the two hot rolls he had brought. They smelt ravishing. He proffered one but, like a fool, I jerked my head away and gazed in an absurd and dignified fashion at the ceiling.
“Karli,” said Peter, “I had to give the Doctor a shilling for these. Is it so hard to take one from your mess-mate, who meant no harm?” It became clear to me that I was being what an Englishman would call a silly ass. I took a roll with mumbled thanks and bit into its hot, crusty edge gratefully. My face I still kept turned away from him, for I did not wish him to see the traces of tears upon it; he might not have realised that they were caused by the smoke from the lamp. He said nothing more, he was that rare kind of man who knows when to keep his mouth shut.
Chapter Eight
What I found remarkable about the English Channel as we tacked lustily down it towards the fabled lights of Ushant, was that it was by no means a waste of cruel waters: it was more like the Strand on a warm Saturday night. Every kind of craft was running eastward or clawing westward as though the life of England depended upon them: wallowing colliers; big, fat, important Indiamen; slovenly hoys from Cornwall dripping China Clay; Breton crabbers; smacks and hovellers without number; the entire Brixham trawler fleet, hove-to and dancing on the green waves; a dangerous, rakish Excise cutter slashing along on some desperate errand and, a sight
I would give a hundred pounds to see again, the Channel Fleet majestically making its way to Spithead in line astern under all plain sail. The Second explained to me that the snowy whiteness of the sails was because, on entering the Channel, the old, brown sails would have been taken down and the best suits bent onto the yards. As I watched, entranced, a stream of signal flags rose to the main-truck of the flagship and, like magic, her yards swung – you could hear the rattling boom of the canvas from our distance of eight hundred yards – and she went about on the other tack, followed, with terrifying precision, by each ship in her wake: I swear that the stretch of water on which they went about, one after the other, was no greater than a tennis-court. That was, I think, the moment at which I stopped laughing at the English.
I had another lesson to learn, however. As we came abreast of the flagship our Captain Knatchbull grunted orders to the First Mate about dipping our ensign.
“To the flagship, Sir?”
“To each ship in turn, Mister.”
“Aye aye, Sir.”
I blushed with shame at this silly impertinence, for we were, surely, but a common trading vessel and these lordly ships the might of the British Queen. My blushes, however, turned to a blush at my own ignorance and, yes, a flush of pleasure, as the flagship’s ensign dipped gravely to us in return, followed by the same civility from each man of war as she came abreast. Our men cheered heartily, swarming up the ratlines and waving hats and kerchiefs, but our Captain stalked to the other side and gazed fixedly at the coast. He was, I suppose, regretting something, as every sensible man must from time to time.
Hour upon hour I watched, entranced, the changing pageant of this English Channel, asking a hundred questions of anyone who could pause and explain to me. Some of the more spanking merchant-craft had, like the Royal ships, already bent on their best suits of sails, all snowy-white, but most were still under working canvas, brown and weathered, patches and discoloration telling wordless tales of thousands upon thousands of perilous sea-miles. The Second Mate pointed out to me, in one of his rare moments of fellowship, a particularly foul-seeming craft, its sails of an inexplicable filthiness. He explained that it was a whaler, wallowing back from the furthest Southern seas, and that the greasy grime was from the smoke of the “trying-out” fires which rendered down the blubber from the great beasts.
“A horrid trade, young man,” he said in his lugubrious way. “Permit an older man to give you a word of advice. If ever you fall in with a whaler’s man, buy him a pot of beer but quit his company as soon as you safely can. He will be fearfully strong, easily roused to anger and possessed of a long, sharp knife. Eschew his company; he will not be sane. These words of mine are worth a guinea a box.” With that he turned away moodily. He was a strange man, not one of whom one could make a boon-companion. He was unflagging at his duties. I think that, when not on watch, he either slept or wept. Perhaps both. Certainly, I never saw him eat or smile.
The doctor respected him, which was strangely reassuring.
The lights of Ushant, when Peter dragged me out of my bunk to admire them, seemed no great thing – merely a distant twinkle on our port bow. The beauty of them, it seemed, the thing to be admired, was that we had sighted them at just the time the Captain had predicted and at just such a distance as enabled us to “weather them with plenty of sea-room” as Peter lucidly put it. After an hour or so – but it seemed longer – they were on our beam and, finally, they were but a remote glimmer on our quarter. We did not tack to port for, I was told, that would have driven us deep into the dreaded Biscay Bay itself. (I did not complain: I had no especial longing to tack to port and would have had less had I known what the phrase meant.)
We braced our yards so that we were sailing as close to the wind as our yare little ship could stand, every scrap of canvas and cordage and timber booming and shrieking and groaning as though intent on frightening the very guts out of me. Since there seemed to be little I could do to help, I retired to my bunk with an air of philosophical detachment. Biscay held no terrors for me: I was proud. There was some small difficulty attached to staying in my bunk because of the ship’s erratic and wanton motions: resourcefully, I fished out the absurd slabs of woollen underclothing from my chest and wedged them in such fashion that I could no longer fall out. I slept well.
In the dawn I was awakened by a curious dream in which I had been standing on my head. When I came to my senses I found that I was indeed doing so, although still flat on my back. My head was pressed firmly against the head-board of my bunk, taking the whole weight of my body. I realised that the ship was standing on its nose and that my last hour had come. Before I could decide what to do I found myself standing almost upright on the footboard of the bunk, although still flat upon my back. The ship was now, quite clearly, sitting on its stern. I was not to be seen at a disadvantage again and, in a few minutes, when Peter slid into the cabin, I was fully clothed and as nonchalant as any salted Jack Tar.
“Are we sinking yet?” I asked nonchalantly.
“Not yet,” he replied. “But have you heard of mountainous waves? And dismissed them as poetic extravagance?”
“Of course.”
“Then come on deck; I have a treat for you.” At his suggestion I forced my way into some stiff and crackling yellow oilskins before venturing out. I felt absurd in these but so soon as I had, with Peter’s help, fought my way like a drunken man onto deck, I was glad of them for the wind kicked me in the face, green water smashed at me from the whole length of the ship, compressed me against the bulwark of the quarter-deck and so overwhelmed me with its cold, fierce lust that I was ready to surrender my life. Peter had a firm grip of the left arm of my oilskins; he dragged me up and across the heeling deck to the weather side and fastened each of my hands around the rail. Then he took my head and rotated it towards the right, so that I was staring forrard.
My fingers clenched into the rail so hard that they must have scarred it: a mountain of a wave – I mean a mountain, there was no poetic licence about it – was reared dead ahead of us and our absurd little ship was aiming its bowsprit straight into the scend of it. It was no moment for terror: our extinction was inevitable. I watched as though mesmerised. Up and up went our bows until Peter and I were bent almost level with the deck and still the peak of the glassy green mountain was high above us. I prepared in my mind a few suitable words of gratitude and farewell to say to Peter but, before I could speak, I heard a great roar from the Captain, behind and above us on the quarter-deck.
“Mr Lubbock!” he bellowed, “Mister, I say! Your watch is idling; the lee-braces are as slack as a whore’s stays. When your men have done picking their noses, pray get them to work or they’ll suffer a fine of a shilling each. Yes, a shilling I say!”
I gazed aghast at Peter for, clearly, Captain Knatchbull was insane. Peter pursed his lips in a vexed way and, cupping his mouth, shouted in my ear “I know what you are thinking. A shilling is a little severe: the men were only sheltering in the lee of the main-mast bitts and yarning to pass the time away because there was no work on hand you see: it was Lubbock’s fault that he did not keep them busy.”
My gape of incomprehension was ill-timed for we had just then fought our way to the very top of the fearful mountain of water and its crest broke over us, sending a hundred tons of “green” the length of our deck, much of which I swallowed. When I had exuded it I glanced at Peter. His face was unnaturally straight and expressionless. Against the evidence of my senses I came to realise that these unspeakable demonstrations of Nature’s violence were neither rare nor considered perilous by those who went down to the sea in ships. We were, at that moment, pitching down the further slope of the watery mountain at such a rate and such an angle that it took all my manhood to speak casually.
“Do you have the watch, Peter?” I asked.
“No, not yet.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Fresh air, my boy, fresh air! Just fill your lungs, isn’t it splendid? Many a
n invalid would give a fortune for such stuff.”
I believe he said something else but it was smothered by another monstrous surge of water, bidding fair to sweep us overside. I noticed that he unobtrusively kept a firm grip of my oilskins: I appreciated this although I said nothing.
“Karli,” he said.
“Yes?”
“I have to speak seriously to you.”
“Yes, Peter?”
“We may never have the opportunity to speak in privacy again.”
“I understand,” I said fervently.
“D’you see, we shall soon be entering the Tropics, where the Lord’s writ doesn’t run, where the stars take on unfamiliar patterns and men can turn into beasts overnight. You will take my word for these things, will you not?”
“Indeed I shall, Peter,” I quavered.
“Now, more to the point, these strange Tropic manifestations work equally upon cooked meat.” He laid a friendly arm upon my shoulder. “What I am trying to say, my dear chap, is that the galley fire has been out for ten hours and that there will be but short commons for breakfast. You, however, have not one or two but, so you tell me, three salt ox-tongues in your tin shirt-box. Do you not think that you should broach one this morning, before the sands of time run out for us both?”
I boggled at this: I could not understand its relevance to our perilous state. His arm remained upon my shoulder in an avuncular fashion.
“First,” he continued, “a slice or two of delicious cold tongue will do you a power of good, d’you see. Second, to break out one of your delicious cold tongues and share it with your mess-mate would be a generous, comradely action. Third, since we are about to sink into the cold abyss of the sea …”
All the Tea in China Page 12