CHAPTER FOUR
FLYING FISH WEATHER
We left the Golden Gates behind us homeward bound, with a cargo of grain. About half way down to the Horn we discovered that she had sprung a leak somewhere. We could tell this by the frightful stink coming up from below. Rotting grain has worse contemporaries, but they are not so easy to find. Evidently there was water getting in somewhere on the starboard side, for that was obviously where the stench came from.
There was nothing for it but to open up the hatches, and break down. Fortunately we were still in fine weather so we could pile the decks with sacks of grain and loose wet grain laid out drying. The leak was located and found due to a bit of flint getting into the red lead packing around one of the side ports!
Poor old Chips, he was for the carpet all right. A few thousand pounds worth of damage done, all on account of a little stone! All the same, it was lucky it happened where it did. Ships are known to have had their sides burst out by the swelling grain, when the leak could not be got at.
It was shortly after we had the grain stowed again that Olsen, the Swede got moonstruck, through sleeping out on deck in the full rays of the tropic moon. He woke up, one middle watch, to muster with the rest, and at the sight of him, with his face all twisted on one side, everyone burst out laughing. Poor devil, he didn't know what was the matter. It was full moon, and as light as day; one could easily see to read a book by the light, yet old Olsen went stumbling about the decks, as if it were pitch dark. As it turned out, he thought that it was dark, and that gave us the first inkling that something had gone wrong. We heard him say, half to himself, "Gosh! it's dark," and then someone asked him what he meant, and it came out that not only was his face all twisted up, but he could not see his hand in front of him. When daylight came he was all right, but as soon as it got a bit dusk, he was finished. He got over it to a certain extent before we arrived home, but he never fully recovered his sight at night time.
Most sailors have a hobby of some sort — making mats, carving models out of wood, with beautifully cut sails, thin as a wafer, and bellying out in the most natural way. Olsen's strong point was making planes for planing wood — Spoon planes, Jack planes, and all sorts of planes. It was just marvellous to sit and watch him fashioning them out of pieces of hard wood he brought away with him, fitting the irons and polishing them off. Most Swedes are good carpenters, and, though an A.B. he was a jolly good chippy man. After he got twisted up, he just moped, and would do nothing. It was pitiful to see him feeling his way round the decks when it was light enough for the rest of us to pick up a pin.
On a long sailing ship voyage, each man knows the other better than he knows himself. Funny little characteristics develop. He tells a bit here, and a bit there, until, whether he likes it or not, you can piece his life story together, like fitting a jig-saw puzzle.
Knut, the Dane, had been a whaler in Nova Scotia, and had killed a man with a harpoon. He never told us in so many words, and of course, his secret was quite safe.
If it had happened in a Yankee whaler, he would not have had to bother — always supposing no one else had caught him out. It would merely have resolved into a matter of paying so many dollars in to the right quarter, and nothing more would have been heard of it. But, as he came under British law, it was a different matter, and he was lucky to change over at sea, as he did, and eventually work his way back to Denmark. Knut wasn't his name, we all knew that. He hadn't meant to kill the man; in fact, the man went for Knut with the steering oar, just when Knut was going to make his strike, and, as he turned suddenly away from the whale to defend himself, the boat gave a lurch, and he drove the harpoon into the steersman's stomach. It might have washed in a Court of Law, but for the bad blood that was known to exist between the two. Wisely, or unwisely, he took the chance when it was offered of getting right back home.
It wasn't until the passage home that we could get him to even take a shot with the harpoon. He certainly was an artist with it, and three out of four times he would hit a chip of wood thrown from the bowsprit end. In fact, I saw him put the harpoon through a three-inch rope grummet, three times in succession, and this with the ship laying over, and doing a good seven knots. He could pick up a porpoise every time, and that is not easy, for there is only one place where you can harpoon a porpoise and be certain that it is going to hold.
Lying becalmed one day, a whole shoal of these greybellies came thundering over the horizon; each one anything up to ten feet long, all leaping straight up and flinging themselves sideways, landing flat on to the surface, with a report like a 4.7 gun. There were thousands and tens of thousands of them. Thunder was mild compared with the row. They covered, at a rough guess, a rectangle, about half a mile long, and five hundred yards wide. The sea was like glass, and when they were first sighted, we could just see a patch of foam, growing rapidly bigger and bigger: then bodies shooting up in the air, the roar growing louder and louder, until we couldn't hear each other speak.
The average weight must have been well over a ton and a half. The one Knut nailed was purposely a small one, otherwise the line would not have held him. Of course it would have been a different matter if Knut had been in a small boat and so could have let the porpoise tow him before the line ran out. As it was, the 2 1/2 inch rope was taxed pretty severly when hauling it up by sheer brute force, tail first, to the cat-head.
I was told the wind always came from the direction where a shoal of porpoises was heading. But first voyagers are fair game for all sorts of yarns; one remembers some, and if wise, believes about half of what one remembers. All the same, sailors do believe the wind will come from the direction indicated by porpoises. Personally I think they gather together from far and wide at certain times, simply to migrate; going thousands of miles to fresh hunting grounds.
They jump out of the water and drop smack on to it again partly for sheer sport, and partly in an endeavour to knock off suckers, Anyhow, they're good eating, and a mighty welcome change from sailing-ship salt horse where the fat is often going, or gone, green — and that's no exaggeration.
The Crofton Hall had cholera break out through eating some such junk and lost half her crew before she could get back to Calcutta. Admittedly the stuff had been slowly going rotten lying in the harness cask for two months under a tropical sun. Still, they had the usual sailor's choice; eat it or leave it.
Fish hung up in the light of the moon will go the same way and must on no account be touched. If the moon does get at it you see the whole fish, or what may be left of it, become phosphorescent. That is the danger signal, and I've never seen enyone hardy enough, even amongst sailing-ship men, to tackle it after that.
Neither will sailors touch a fish that has come out of what is called "Blood Water." This is a case when the sea turns deep red, often crimson, in the sun. Really it's nothing but countless millions of animalculae like cochineal. You will be slipping though beautifully blue water (never seen within two hundred miles of our English coast)when suddenly you will run into this Blood Water (it does look just like blood) and may so continue for a couple of days.
As for the yarn about never eating fish out of it; well I've never seen fish in it, and that's a pretty sound reason to my mind.
Sailing ship life, even on one's first voyage is cram full of incidents, but they are irrelevant, and would fill a good sized book in themselves.
At long last we arrived in Liverpool, just a few days short of a year from the time we left; and such was my first voyage in sail.