But to get back to my walking fish.
I had succeeded in collecting a good many specimens from the floating Gulf Weed when one of the watch below, lying around on the hot decks, pointed out a fish that I had missed lying hidden under the fluke of the starboard anchor. I picked it up and popped it in my aquarium, which consisted of an old five gallon kerosene tin. After a time, the peculiar action of the fish, caught my eye. It sort of sidled up alongside a piece of weed, and remained stationary, without moving its fins. My curiosity was aroused, so I got the cap off the end of a telescope and filled it with water, and examined the little beggar closely with a magnifying glass. Sure enough, it had tiny, but fully developed hands and feet. Actually, the fish was slightly flat, and swam on its edge. The arms out of each side consisted of a transparent fin-like substance. This formed the lower part of an arm and ended in a perfect little hand with five fingers. Little flat legs of a similar nature, but just from the knees down — folded up underneath the body, when it went to the bottom of the tin the legs came down and it stood on its feet, or it would rise alongside a branch of weed, and deliberately grip hold of it with its hands and hang on.
It dawned on me that this must be a very rare specimen, and I set out to try and find some methylated spirit or anything else in which to pickle it.
None to be got. “Try whisky,” said one humorist, and I even had the temerity to suggest to the Captain that he should give me some whisky, as there was no methylated spirits, but I, with the fish, was consigned to places even hotter than the Gulf of Mexico. “Fish with hands and feet,” snorted the autocrat of the sea. “Get out of this, or I’ll pickle you.” I fled back to my precious fish, to find that some crabs had solved the difficulty by eating it!
For many years I stood the jeers of all and sundry that listened to this fish yarn, but I got my own back when, in the usual scare headlines of a New York paper, they informed the world, that the “First known specimen of a fish with hands and feet had been discovered and brought home by the Captain of a steamer.” As far as I know the “only specimen” is still swimming round quite happily in the New York aquarium.
Within a hundred miles of the spot where I got my fish I also saw what is believed to be the biggest shark in the world.
I had the forenoon trick at the wheel. She was steering easy “By the wind,” just moving through the water.
I momentarily dropped my eyes from watching the weather leech of the mizzen royal, and glanced over the rail to leeward, and saw, what at first I took to be a blackfish. Still I knew it couldn’t be that from the fin and the colour, and then it dawned on me it was a shark. But, my godfathers, what a shark! I let out a yell, “Shark on the lee beam.”
The Captain was on the weather side of the poop at the time, and ran over to leeward and saw it.
There was certainly no shark hook or line in the whole wide world that would hold this chap, so the Captain dashed into the chart room for a rifle, and snatching one out of the rack, slipped in a cartridge, came out on deck and fired. I doubt if the bullet took any effect, but before he could reload, Tiger Jim had disappeared.
I believe to this day that it was Tiger Jim, a well-known shark that had been sighted by sailing ships again and again in those waters, and he never leaves them. He is nearly as well known as Pelorus Jack, the porpoise (and the only fish individually protected by Government!) that used to pilot ships through the Cook Straits.
Reports as to Tiger Jim’s size vary. Some went up as far as thirty-six feet but as luck would have it we got a first class opportunity of measuring him. When I saw him, and recovered from the shock, his tail was just abreast of the wheel. When the Captain ran across the forward end of the poop Tiger Jim’s nose was just level with the forward ‘thwartship rail. In this manner we arrived at a very accurate estimate, and it came out at exactly thirty-one feet, and he could have taken a full grown calf at a mouthful!
On our long passage home — 165 days from land to land — I came to seriously consider the advantages and disadvantages of “sail.”
If one ever could tear away from the never ending glamour and romance, the ever close and intimate association with those utterly absorbing, revelations of the deep sea, then common sense said “steam.” But the soul of any square rigged sailor in the ‘nineties revolted at the prosaic monotony one coupled with a steamboat. Still, anyone with an inch of foresight, knew well that sail was on the wane. Steam had come and come to stay.
One might as well make up one’s mind to stow away the hard — learned lore of sailing ship days and let it become just a treasured memory, and turn to the machinery of modern times.
It was a bitter pill, but I swallowed it with the best grace I could find and became a “steamboat sailor,” so that frequent term of ineffable contempt, would now apply to me! However, I stuck to my guns and said good-bye to the good old windjammers that I loved.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“BULLY” WATERS
I soon found myself third mate of a Western Ocean Packet, bound across the Pond. No more watching every vagary of the wind, no more luffing up to a squall and easing her away as she would bear it. Never again to hear the music of that gurgling hiss, as the water skirls in the scupper holes. How one was to miss that straining heel as she laid her lee rail down to the water, with the welcome sound of ropes surging and cracking, or even the well-known cry as the strain increases, “Stand by the royal halyards.”
Now, three watches, and when a squall is in the offing, “Quartermaster, pull the dodger up, please.” Nothing to do but keep a sharp look-out. All the driving done for one by the stokehold gang below. Just the steady plug and thud of the engines; into one sea, and through the next. No quick downward flick of the wheel, as she lifts her head to crash down into the trough, like the way one nursed a sailing ship. I tried it on a steamer, but it hadn’t the slightest effect; the only way with a steamer is to ease her engines. In fact, one seems wholly dependent on the engines.
We were bound up the St. Lawrence, and in those days ten knots was considered quite a good speed. In many places in the St. Lawrence, such as the Racine Rapids, and even up at Montreal, before the revetment was built, I have seen the ship doing her ten knots and barely making headway. Even alongside at Montreal, the engines had to be kept going at very nearly full speed whilst the ship was made fast, with the result that owing to the huge head of steam, the moment the engines were stopped, the safety valves lifted, and the row for the next half an hour or so was simply deafening.
I soon began to see that steam had its good points — lots of them. Better time, better food, better pay, and one did not lose touch so completely with the world.
Had I been of a steady disposition and stayed in Elder Dempsters, where I started in steam, no doubt I should have got to the top of the tree very quickly, but for one thing I was not steady, and for another, it was only the tallest tree that would satisfy me. Time and again I took to the beach on some hair-brained stunt or other, just wasting time; spending months shooting or fishing, until funds petered out. Then off to the sea again, in the first company that would take me. Get through an examination, and then have another glorious binge — not a boozing binge — for I’ve a whole-hearted contempt for the chap who takes more than he can hold.
It was after one of these little breaks that I found myself in the African Royal Mail s.s. Niagara, bound down the Coast of West Africa, under that notorious and well-known Captain who glorified in the name of Bully Waters, a man of such exceeding unpopularity that his life would not have been worth a minute’s purchase in the streets of Liverpool. To even cross the town he invariably took a cab for safety — and I’ll admit he needed it. He made an open boast that he had killed two men, though in point of fact, he didn’t actually kill them, but, owing to his perpetual bullying and driving, he was the moral cause of one man committing suicide, while the other chap just died, and though malaria went down in the log, that wasn’t the real cause.