WHEN I returned to consciousness I could not at first imagine where I was, but the creaking and groaning of the ship as she labored in the heavy seaway and the abominable smell of bilge water soon brought me to a realizing sense of the fact that I was in my hammock in the steerage. After some mental effort I recollected that I had been thrown from the tub in which I had been sitting on deck, though how or why this had happened I could not understand. But I was too deathly seasick just then to care to follow out this train of thought, and I languidly dozed and wondered whether we should all go to the bottom together in this gale. I fancy I rather hoped we might thus end the matter with the least personal exertion, and that death under existing circumstances would prove a happy release.
But I was recalled to myself by the cook, coming softly up to my hammock with a shaded light and gazing down at me with evident interest.
“Robert,” said he, for the first and last time calling me by my full name, “is you come to yo’se’f, honey, sure enough?”
I moaned, as a reply.
“Oh, I reckon you’se all right now, Bob! De ole man says dere’s no bones broke, and ef dat is so I specs you come out first-rate soon’s yo’ stummick’s done settle down. But you certainly did have a mighty narrer squeak! Whatever put it into yo’ head, boy, to squat down into dat topsail halyard tub? It’s a clean wonder you didn’t get carried chock up to de main-top! Well, I don’t reckon you ever try dat seat again in a hurry. Now, honey, you drink dis ’ere pot of cabin tea, and den go to sleep, and by ter-morrow you’ll be as bright as a button.”
Any one who remembers a first voyage can imagine what I suffered in that abominable hole, alone and uncared for, save for the friendly ministrations of that poor negro cook, during the next three days. I really believe I should have died from mere exhaustion if it had not been for the little delicacies he smuggled down to me. But fortunately there is an end to seasickness, and on the third day the captain condescended to remember that I was on board, and that he had not seen me since he had examined me after my involuntary feat of ground and lofty tumbling. So down he came into the steerage, and by his order I was carried up on deck into the pure, fresh air, where I soon rallied; and before another day I was myself again, or nearly so, at any rate.
During my illness the ship had been prepared for sea by work that is always done by the crew the first few days out from port. This consists in securing the anchors in board, lashing the spare spars on deck, and clearing away all rubbish that has accumulated in port. Then there is “chafing gear” to be put on aloft and a thousand odd jobs to be done that no one but a sailor can understand, all of them very necessary on a long voyage, however.
The Bombay was, for those days, a good sized ship of about six hundred tons register, but she would seem a mere tender by the side of the marine monsters of the present time. Her crew included twelve men and two boys, with captain, two mates, carpenter, cook, and steward. The men had been, as usual, divided into two watches, and I had fallen into the mate’s, or port watch. “It was Hobson’s choice” in my case, as Mr. Bowker delicately remarked in informing me of my station. It was very evident that I was not, as yet, considered a very valuable acquisition to his force.
“Now look here, you Bob,” said the mate one fine afternoon when I was barely convalescent, “you’ve been playing seasick passenger about long enough. It’s time you began to be of some use on board and to earn your grub. I’m going to be doctor myself! Look up aloft there, my lad; do you see that royal yard?”
I looked up, as he bade me, at the royal masthead, where the yard seemed to me to be about five hundred feet above the deck where we stood.
“Yes sir, I see it.”
“Very well, now suppose you waltz up there and take a closer look at it! It’s going to be a very familiar road for you this voyage, and you had better make yourself acquainted with the way at once;” and he smiled at his wit, which I failed to appreciate just then.
The ship was on the wind, with all sail set and drawing well, and she was reasonably steady; but as I gazed aloft the mast was sweeping about in a very dazing manner, and the rigging away up there seemed to me about the size of a fishing line. Remember, I had never been aloft in my life! I hesitated.
“Well, Bob, I am waiting for you, but I shan’t wait very long, my son;” and he picked up a piece of rattling stuff, a cord about the thickness of one’s finger, and ostentatiously swayed it to and fro.
I saw that he meant business, and I started on the trip at once. I have been aloft, since that beautiful afternoon, many times in howling gales of wind to close-reef topsails. I have crawled out to storm furl a sail in a typhoon in the Straits of Sunda when the force of the wind pinned me to the yard and I felt that every moment might be my last. I went through that hell of fire in the old Richmond, astern of Farragut in the Hartford, when we passed Forts Jackson and St. Philip below New Orleans, but I am sure that I have never since experienced the abject fear I endured that day before I reached the Bombay’s royal yard!
But I stuck to it and I accomplished the task at last, and my first lesson in seamanship, and the severest one, was past. Perhaps some of my readers may think that I magnify the undertaking, but, as I have said, I was a country lad, and in those days boys did not have gymnasiums, as they have now, to prepare them for such tests.
“Very well done, Bob, for a first attempt,” said the mate laughingly, as I reached the deck and busied myself in getting my trousers pulled down my legs after my frantic struggle aloft; “but I thought you would have squeezed all the tar out of the royal backstay, you gripped it so savagely. Oh, you’ll make a sailor yet, lad, or I’ll know the reason why. Now go forward and turn the grindstone for the carpenter.”
From that day on I was kept constantly in practice in going aloft, and was soon given the main royal to loose and furl; so that in my watch on deck no other person was ever sent aloft for that purpose, and what had been but a few weeks before such a terrible task, became mere play to me.
Meanwhile we were making our southing all the time, and in due course we approached the equator. Here both Jim and I were subjected to the usual horse-play that in those days marked the event of “crossing the line,” a custom now almost obsolete.
Neptune, represented by one of the men, came on board over the bows rigged out in a wig of tow, with a long beard, carrying as a trident a pair of grains, a kind of four-pronged fish spear. He asked us neophytes if we would promise never to eat brown bread when we could get white, unless we liked it better; never to kiss the maid when we could kiss the mistress, unless she were the prettier, and a lot more of such nonsense. As we attempted to reply one of the attendants forced a brush dipped in tar and ashes into our mouths, and they ended up by pulling away the board on which we were seated, thus giving us a ducking in a large tub of salt water.
However, the mate would not permit the men to go too far with us; so we at last escaped from our tormentors, and from that time were forever “free of the line” and at liberty to exercise our ingenuity in torturing other greenhorns when we had the opportunity.
I have failed to mention that our only passenger was a young passed-midshipman going out to join the Brazil squadron. His name was Clemson, and he was a general favorite fore and aft. Some years later he was drowned while striving to rescue one of his brother officers at the time of the loss of the United States brig Somers, capsized in the Gulf of Mexico. A handsome monument was afterward erected to his memory in the grounds of the Naval Academy at Annapolis.
As the days slipped along I was steadily gaining in the knowledge of my profession. On fine days, when there was little wind, I was sent to the wheel and taught to steer; at odd times I learned the mystery of making short and long splices and the various knots and “bends.” From the drudgery of turning the winch I was gradually promoted to making spun yarn myself, as well as plain and French sennit and other stuffs used in such quantities on board ship. Sometimes I was set at work ripping up old sails with the sailmaker’s gang; again at cleaning out paint pots and brushes in the paint-room, and I was taught how to handle a brush and lay on paint evenly. A boy at sea thus really serves an apprenticeship at several trades, and a good sailor is, or should be, a seaman, a rigger, a sailmaker, and a painter; he is in reality a “Jack of all trades.”
Kept busily engaged in this way, it was not strange that the time slipped by so quickly, and it did not seem long when, on the fifty-eighth day from New York, we made the land on the starboard bow, which proved to be Pernambuco, and five days afterward we sighted the Sugar Loaf, which rises abruptly twelve hundred feet from the sea at the entrance to the bay of Rio de Janeiro, one of the finest and most picturesque harbors in the world.
As soon as our anchor was dropped in the lower bay, we were surrounded by a fleet of boats of curious construction filled with jabbering negroes and native Brazilians, but none were permitted to come on board until after we had been inspected by the customs officer. He was a very great man indeed, who came alongside in a barge, with a wooden awning over the stern, flying a large Brazilian flag. This boat was pulled by twelve coal-black Congo negroes, naked from the waist up, who rose to their feet at every stroke, and fell back on the thwarts with a kind of rhythmic grunt that they gave in unison.
The officer was a shriveled-up little Brazilian, looking like a cross between a chimpanzee and a parrot, with his wizened face and gorgeous uniform of green and yellow—the bilious colors of the Brazilian Empire. After satisfying all the formalities, we were permitted to have the natives on board, and they came with great bunches of bananas, bags of luscious oranges and fragrant pineapples, and other tropical fruits in bewildering variety, and at what seemed absurdly low prices.
Every one on board, fore and aft, invested in fruit, and we sat up late into the night to devour it, for it seemed that we could never be satisfied. Fifty years ago tropical fruits were not hawked about the streets of Boston as they are to-day, and I do not think that I had ever seen a banana before. So that after two months of salt-beef diet these delicacies were thoroughly appreciated.
The day after our arrival was Sunday; and after washing down decks in the morning and cleaning all the brass-work about the ship, a duty that especially devolved upon Jim and myself, we were informed by the mate that the port watch was to have liberty on shore for the day.
How I did crow over Jim when this order was promulgated, for Jim was in the starboard watch, who were to remain on board, while we fortunate “larbowlins” were to pass the day amid the wonders of the strange city that looked so attractive from our deck.
Jim took occasion to upset some dirty water over my newly cleaned shoes while I was getting dressed, and then laughed spitefully at my discomfiture. This was by no means the first unpleasant trick Jim had served me since we left New York, and I had heretofore borne everything patiently; but this was the last straw that broke the camel’s back. So we decided, after considerable mutual recrimination, to settle the feud then and there comfortably in the retirement of the steerage.
I had gained immensely in physical strength during the past two months, yet Jim was still rather the larger boy of the two; but I sailed in and succeeded, at last, in giving him about the most thorough trouncing he had ever had in his life. When he cried “enough” and I hauled off to repair damages, I caught a glimpse of the old cook gazing in an interested manner down the hatchway at the affray. He grinned and shook his head approvingly. “Didn’t I tole you so?” he said as he vanished.
After re-cleaning my shoes and effacing all evidences of the passage at arms from my face, I arrayed myself, for the first time since I came on board, in my best blue suit, and, topping it off with a new white sennit hat, I took my seat in the boat and was rowed on shore with the others of the port watch.
We passed through a great fleet of ships of all nations at anchor, gayly dressed in flags, among which the bright American ensign largely predominated,—for in those days our flag was found in every foreign port,—and were speedily deposited upon the landing stage, and made our way on shore.
Here a strange scene was presented. The plaza was filled with people of all shades of color, from the Congo African to the pure white Europeans, scattered here and there. All were in their Sunday best, and with the fondness of the negroes for the most brilliant colors, the brightest reds and yellows were everywhere seen. All were chattering in Portuguese in the most animated manner; and as every one seemed to be talking at once it was indeed a very babel.
While I looked about me a tall, willowy mestizo girl came along carrying a tray upon her head, which at first I supposed contained some very elaborate confectionery; but to my astonishment, upon closer inspection I found she was bearing a little dead infant, dressed in white and covered with flowers. She was on her way to the Campo Santo, as I learned, to have it buried, and carried it, as they carried everything, very naturally upon her head. At the cemetery the bodies of the poor were piled each day in a long pit, which at night was filled with quicklime and closed up.
Strolling about, I came to a square with a large cathedral, near the Imperial Palace. While I looked around me a gay carriage, with six horses and outriders and a brilliant cavalry escort, came dashing up, and the youthful Emperor, Dom Pedro II., then scarce twenty years old, alighted and passed into the church. This was the same Dom Pedro who a few years since visited the United States so unostentatiously and who was such an admirer of our country and of our countrymen and countrywomen. He died in exile a year or two ago, poor fellow!
As this was my first glimpse of royalty, it was, of course, very interesting, and I deemed myself quite fortunate at having seen this spectacle on my first day ashore. After the grandees had passed into the church, I continued on my tour of inspection, and soon came to the Rua de Ouvidor, where the jewelers had their shops. Here the show of diamonds so lavishly displayed recalled to my mind the stories I had read in the Arabian Nights; and as I passed into the adjoining Rua Direta I was equally charmed with the wondrous feather flowers, for which Brazil was then so noted.
But by this time, boylike, my appetite was asserting itself, and I began to look about for something more satisfying than diamonds and feather flowers. I had been eating oranges and bananas in the market-place, but these trifles didn’t count for much, and I felt an overpowering desire for a good square meal. But I could not speak a single word of Portuguese, and those now about me evidently spoke no English, so I was in rather a bad way.
I walked on and on; but as I had passed into the residential quarter of the city I could see nothing looking at all like a restaurant, and I became a little uneasy for fear I might lose my way. At this juncture I saw a very sweet-looking old lady standing in a doorway watching me as I approached her. I hesitated, half paused, and she spoke to me in Portuguese.
I shook my head to indicate that I could not understand, and, in despair resorting to pantomime, pointed to my mouth to show that I was hungry.
“Poor little fellow!” said she in English to a little girl by her side; “he must be dumb!”
Oh, what a relief it was to hear those words! Did my own language ever before sound so sweet! I hastened to convince the lady of her error, and to ask her where I could find a restaurant.
“Why, bless your soul, you dear little midget, come in and dine with me! Whatever brought such a wee fellow as you all alone to Brazil?”
I attempted to decline this hearty invitation of my countrywoman, as she proved to be, but it was of no avail, and I was taken in and dined; and later, when it turned out that Mrs. —— was an old friend of my uncle in Boston, I was given a very charming drive in the suburbs, and finally returned in great state, soon after sunset, to the landing stage with my new friends. Before leaving the kind lady made me promise to call upon her again when I next came ashore.