You will judge from this that I wasn't cut out for the life on the ocean wave. I can't deny it; if Captain Marryat had had to write about me he'd have burned his pen, signed on a Cardiff tramp, and been buried at sea. For one thing, in my first few days aboard I did not thrash the ship's bully, make friends with the nigger cook, or learn how to gammon a bosprit from a leathery old salt who called me a likely lad. No, I spent those days in my bunk, feeling d––d ill, and only crawling on deck occasionally to take the air and quickly scurry below again to my berth. I was a sea-green and corruptible Flashy in those days.
Nor did I make friends, for I saw only four people and disliked all of them. The first was the ship's doctor, a big-bellied lout of an Irishman who looked as though he'd be more at home with a bottle than a lancet, and had cold, clammy hands. He gave me a draught for my sea-sickness which made it worse, and then staggered away to be ill himself. He was followed by a queer, old-young creature with wispy hair who shuffled in carrying a bowl from which he slopped some evil-looking muck; when I asked him who the d—-l he was he jerked his head in a nervous tic and stammered:
"Please, sir, I'm Sammy."
"Sammy what?"
"Nossir, please sir, Sammy Snivels, cap'n calls me. But they calls me Looney, mostly."
"And what's that?"
"Please sir, it's gruel. The doctor sez for you to eat it, please, sir," and he lumbered forward and spilled half of it over my cot.
"D—n you!" cries I, and weak and all as I was I caught him a back-handed swipe on the face that sent him half across the cabin. "Take your filth and get out!"
He mowed at me, and tried to scrape some of the stuff off the floor back into the bowl. "Doctor'll thump me if you don't take it, please, sir," says he, pushing it at me again. "Please, sir, it's nice tack, an' all — please, sir," and then he squealed as I lunged out at him, dropped the bowl, and fairly ran for it. I was too weak to do more than curse after him, but I promised myself that when I was better I would put myself in a better frame of mind by giving the blundering half-wit a thumping on my own account, to keep the doctor's company.
Next man in was no half-wit, but a nimble little ferret of a ship's boy with a loose lip and a cast in one eye. He gave me a shifty grin and sniffed at the spilled gruel.
"Looney didn't 'ave no luck, did 'e?" says he. "I told 'im gruel wouldn't go down, no'ow."
I told him to go to blazes and leave me alone.
"Feelin' groggy, eh?" says he, moving towards the bunk. "Grub's no good ter you, mate. Tell yer wot; I'll get in bed wiv yer for a shillin'."
"Get out, you dirty little b d," says I, for I knew his kind; Rugby had been crawling with 'em. "I'd sooner have your great-grandmother."
"Snooks!" says he, putting out his tongue. "You'll sing a different tune after three months at sea an' not a wench in sight. It'll be two bob then!"
I flung a pot at him, but missed, and he let fly a stream of the richest filth I've ever listened to. "I'll get Mister Comber ter you, yer big black swine!" he finished up. "E'll give you what for! Ta-ta!" And with that he slipped out, thumbing his nose.
Mr Comber was the fourth of my new acquaintances. He was third mate, and shared the cabin with me, and I couldn't make him out. He was civil, although he said little enough, but the odd thing was, he was a gentleman, and had obviously been to a good school. What a playing-field beauty like this was doing on a merchantman I couldn't see, but I held my tongue and watched him. He was about my age, tall and fair haired, and too sure of himself for me to get on the wrong side of. I guessed he was as puzzled about me as I was about him, but I was feeling too poorly at first to give much heed to him. He didn't champion the cabin boy, by the way, so that worthy's threat had obviously been bluff.
It was four or five days before I got my sea legs, and by then I was heartily sick of the Balliol College. Nowadays you have no notion of what a sailing-ship was like in the forties; people who travel P.O.S.H. in a steam packet can't imagine, for one thing, the h—-ish continual din of a wooden vessel — the incessant creaking and groaning of timber and cordage, like a fiend's orchestra playing the same discordant notes, regular as clockwork, each time she rolled. And, by G-d, they rolled, far worse than iron boats, bucketing up and down, and stinking, too, with the musty stale smell of a floating cathedral, and the bilges plashing like a giant's innards. Oh, it was the life for a roaring boy, all rights and that was only the start of it. I didn't know it, but I was seeing the Balliol College at her best.
One morning, when I was sufficiently recovered to hold down the gruel that Looney brought me, and strong enough to kick his backside into the bargain, comes Captain Spring to tell me I'd lain long enough, and it was time for me to learn my duties.
"You'll stand your watch like everyone else," says he, "and in the meantime you can start on the work you're paid for — which is to go through every scrap of that cargo, privatim et seriatim, and see that those long-shore thieves haven't bilked me. So get up, and come along with me."
I followed him out on deck; we were scudding along like a flying duck with great billows of canvas spread, and a wind on the quarter deck fit to lift your hair off. There was plenty of shipping in sight, but no land, and I knew we must be well out of the Channel by now. Looking forward from the poop rail along the narrow flush deck, it seemed to me the Balliol College didn't carry much of a crew, for all her size, but I didn't have time to stop and stare, with Spring barking at me. He led me down the poop ladder, and then dropped through a scuttle by the mizzen mast.
"There you are," says he. "Take a good look."
Although I've done a deal more sailing than I care to remember, I'm no canvas-back, and while I know enough not to call the deck the floor, I'm no hand at nautical terms. We were in what seemed to be an enormous room stretching away forward to the foremast, where there was a bullthead; this room ran obviously the full breadth of the ship, and was well lighted by gratings in the deck about fifteen feet above our heads. But it was unlike the interior of any ship I'd ever seen, it was so big and roomy; on either side, about four feet above the deck on which we stood, there was a kind of half-deck, perhaps seven feet deep, like a gigantic shelf, and above that yet another shelf of the same size. The space down the centre of the deck, between the shelves, was piled high with cargo in a great mound — it must have been a good seventy feet long by twelve high.
"I'll send my clerk to you with the manifest," says Spring, "and a couple of hands to help shift and stow." I became aware that the pale eyes were watching me closely. "Well?"
"Is this the hold?" says I. "It's an odd-looking place for cargo."