Medical Life in the Navy

So you see, dear reader, a navy surgeon’s life hath its pleasures. Ah, indeed, it hath! and sorry I am to add, its sufferings too; for a few pages farther on the picture must change: if we get the lights we must needs take the shadows also.

Chapter Eight.

A Good Dinner. Enemy on the Port Bow. Man the Life-Boat

We will suppose that the reader still occupies the position of assistant-surgeon in a crack frigate or saucy line-of-battle ship. If you go on shore for a walk in the forenoon you may return to lunch at twelve; or if you have extended your ramble far into the country, or gone to visit a friend or lady-love – though for the latter the gloaming hour is to be preferred – you will in all probability have succeeded in establishing an appetite by half-past five, when the officers’ dinner-boat leaves the pier.

Now, I believe there are few people in the world to whom a good dinner does not prove an attraction, and this is what in a large ship one is always pretty sure of, more especially on guest-nights, which are evenings set apart – one every week – for the entertainment of the officers’ friends, one or more of whom any officer may invite, by previously letting the mess-caterer know of his intention. The mess-caterer is the officer who has been elected to superintend the victualling, as the wine-caterer does the liquor department, and a by-no-means-enviable position it is, and consequently it is for ever changing hands. Sailors are proverbial growlers, and, indeed, a certain amount of growling is, and ought to be, permitted in every mess; but it is scarcely fair for an officer, because his breakfast does not please him, or if he can’t get butter to his cheese after dinner, to launch forth his indignation at the poor mess-caterer, who most likely is doing all he can to please. These growlers too never speak right out or directly to the point. It is all under-the-table stabbing.

“Such and such a ship that I was in,” says growler first, “and such and such a mess – ”

“Oh, by George!” says growler second, “I knew that ship; that was a mess, and no mistake?”

“Why, yes,” replies number one, “the lunch we got there was better than the dinner we have in this old clothes-basket.”

On guest-nights your friend sits beside yourself, of course, and you attend to his corporeal wants. One of the nicest things about the service, in my opinion, is the having the band every day at dinner; then too everything is so orderly; with our president and vice-president, it is quite like a pleasure party every evening; so that altogether the dinner, while in harbour, comes to be the great event of the day. And after the cloth has been removed, and the president, with a preliminary rap on the table to draw attention, has given the only toast of the evening, the Queen, and due honour has been paid thereto, and the bandmaster, who has been keeking in at the door every minute for the last ten, that he might not make a mistake in the time, has played “God save the Queen,” and returned again to waltzes, quadrilles, or selections from operas, – then it is very pleasant and delightful to loll over our walnuts and wine, and half-dream away the half-hour till coffee is served. Then, to be sure, that little cigar in our canvas smoking-room outside the wardroom door, though the last, is by no means the least pleasant part of the déjeuner. For my own part, I enjoy the succeeding hour or so as much as any: when, reclining in an easy chair, in a quiet corner, I can sip my tea, and enjoy my favourite author to my heart’s content. You must spare half an hour, however, to pay your last visit to the sick; but this will only tend to make you appreciate your ease all the more when you have done. So the evening wears away, and by ten o’clock you will probably just be sufficiently tired to enjoy thoroughly your little swing-cot and your cool white sheets.

At sea, luncheon, or tiffin, is dispensed with, and you dine at half-past two. Not much difference in the quality of viands after all, for now-a-days everything worth eating can be procured, in hermetically sealed tins, capable of remaining fresh for any length of time.

There is one little bit of the routine of the service, which at first one may consider a hardship.

You are probably enjoying your deepest, sweetest sleep, rocked in the cradle of the deep, and gently swaying to and fro in your little cot; you had turned in with the delicious consciousness of safety, for well you knew that the ship was far away at sea, far from rock or reef or deadly shoal, and that the night was clear and collision very improbable, so you are slumbering like a babe on its mother’s breast – as you are for that matter – for the second night-watch is half spent; when, mingling confusedly with your dreams, comes the roll of the drum; you start and listen. There is a moment’s pause, when birr-r-r-r it goes again, and as you spring from your couch you hear it the third time. And now you can distinguish the shouts of officers and petty officers, high over the din of the trampling of many feet, of the battening down of hatches, of the unmooring of great guns, and of heavy ropes and bars falling on the deck: then succeeds a dead silence, soon broken by the voice of the commander thundering, “Enemy on the port bow;” and then, and not till then, do you know it is no real engagement, but the monthly night-quarters. And you can’t help feeling sorry there isn’t a real enemy on the port bow, or either bow, as you hurry away to the cockpit, with the guns rattling all the while overhead, as if a real live thunderstorm were being taken on board, and was objecting to be stowed away. So you lay out your instruments, your sponges, your bottles of wine, and your buckets of water, and, seating yourself in the midst, begin to read ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ ready at a moment’s notice to amputate the leg of any man on board, whether captain, cook, or cabin-boy.

Another nice little amusement the officer of the watch may give himself on fine clear nights is to set fire to and let go the lifebuoy, at the same time singing out at the top of his voice, “Man overboard.”

A boatswain’s mate at once repeats the call, and vociferates down the main hatchway, “Life-boat’s crew a-ho-oy!”

In our navy a few short but expressive moments of silence ever precede the battle, that both officers and men may hold communion with their God.

The men belonging to this boat, who have been lying here and there asleep but dressed, quickly tumble up the ladder pell-mell; there is a rattling of oars heard, and the creaking of pulleys, then a splash in the water alongside, the boat darts away from the ship like an arrow from a bow, and the crew, rowing towards the blazing buoy, save the life of the unhappy man, Cheeks the marine.

And thus do British sailors rule the waves and keep old Neptune in his own place.

Chapter Nine.

Containing – If not the Whole – Nothing but the Truth

If the disposing, in the service, of even a ship-load of assistant-surgeons, is considered a matter of small moment, my disposal, after reaching the Cape of Good Hope, needs but small comment. I was very soon appointed to take charge of a gunboat, in lieu of a gentleman who was sent to the Naval Hospital of Simon’s Town, to fill a death vacancy – for the navy as well as nature abhors a vacuum. I had seen the bright side of the service, I was now to have my turn of the dark; I had enjoyed life on board a crack frigate, I was now to rough it in a gunboat.

The east coast of Africa was to be our cruising ground, and our ship a pigmy steamer, with plenty fore-and-aft about her, but nothing else; in fact, she was Euclid’s definition of a line to a t, length without breadth, and small enough to have done “excellently well” as a Gravesend tug-boat. Her teeth were five: namely, one gigantic cannon, a 65-pounder, as front tooth; on each side a brass howitzer; and flanking these, two canine tusks in shape of a couple of 12-pounder Armstrongs. With this armament we were to lord it with a high hand over the Indian Ocean; carry fire and sword, or, failing sword, the cutlass, into the very heart of slavery’s dominions; the Arabs should tremble at the roar of our guns and the thunder of our bursting shells, while the slaves should clank their chains in joyful anticipation of our coming; and best of all, we – the officers – should fill our pockets with prize-money to spend when we again reached the shores of merry England. Unfortunately, this last premeditation was the only one which sustained disappointment, for, our little craft being tender to the flag-ship of the station, all our hard-earned prize-money had to be equally shared with her officers and crew, which reduced the shares to fewer pence each than they otherwise would have been pounds, and which was a burning shame.

It was the Cape winter when I joined the gunboat. The hills were covered with purple and green, the air was deliciously cool, and the far-away mountain-tops were clad in virgin snow. It was twelve o’clock noon when I took my traps on board, and found my new messmates seated around the table at tiffin. The gunroom, called the wardroom by courtesy – for the after cabin was occupied by the lieutenant commanding – was a little morsel of an apartment, which the table and five cane-bottomed chairs entirely filled. The officers were five – namely, a little round-faced, dimple-cheeked, good-natured fellow, who was our second-master; a tall and rather awkward-looking young gentleman, our midshipman; a lean, pert, and withal diminutive youth, brimful of his own importance, our assistant-paymaster; a fair-haired, bright-eyed, laughing boy from Cornwall, our sub-lieutenant; and a “wee wee man,” dapper, clean, and tidy, our engineer, admitted to this mess because he was so thorough an exception to his class, which is celebrated more for the unctuosity of its outer than for the smoothness of its inner man.

“Come along, old fellow,” said our navigator, addressing me as I entered the messroom, bobbing and bowing to evade fracture of the cranium by coming into collision with the transverse beams of the deck above – “come along and join us, we don’t dine till four.”

“And precious little to dine upon,” said the officer on his right.

“Steward, let us have the rum,”2 cried the first speaker.

And thus addressed, the steward shuffled in, bearing in his hand a black bottle, and apparently in imminent danger of choking himself on a large mouthful of bread and butter. This functionary’s dress was remarkable rather for its simplicity than its purity, consisting merely of a pair of dirty canvas pants, a pair of purser’s shoes – innocent as yet of blacking – and a greasy flannel shirt. But, indeed, uniform seemed to be the exception, and not the rule, of the mess, for, while one wore a blue serge jacket, another was arrayed in white linen, and the rest had neither jacket nor vest.

The table was guiltless of a cloth, and littered with beer-bottles, biscuits, onions, sardines, and pats of butter.

“Look out there, Waddles!” exclaimed the sub-lieutenant; “that beggar Dawson is having his own whack o’ grog and everybody else’s.”

“Dang it! I’ll have my tot to-day, I know,” said the assistant-paymaster, snatching the bottle from Dawson, and helping himself to a very liberal allowance of the ruby fluid.

“What a cheek the fellow’s got!” cried the midshipman, snatching the glass from the table and bolting the contents at a gulp, adding, with a gasp of satisfaction as he put down the empty tumbler, “The chap thinks nobody’s got a soul to be saved but himself.”

“Soul or no soul,” replied the youthful man of money as he gazed disconsolately at the empty glass, “my spirit’s gone.”

“Blessed,” said the engineer, shaking the black bottle, “if you devils have left me a drain! see if I don’t look out for A1 to-morrow.”

“Where’s the doctor’s grog?” cried the sub-lieutenant.

“Ay, where’s the doctor’s?” said another.

“Where is the doctor’s?” said a third.

And they all said “Where is the doctor’s?” and echo answered “Where?”

“Steward!” said the middy.

“Ay, ay, sir.”

“See if that beggarly bumboat-man is alongside, and get me another pat of butter and some soft tack; get the grub first, then tell him I’ll pay to-morrow.”

These and such like scraps of conversation began to give me a little insight into the kind of mess I had joined and the character of my future messmates. “Steward,” said I, “show me my cabin.” He did so; indeed, he hadn’t far to go. It was the aftermost, and consequently the smallest, although I ought to have had my choice. It was the most miserable little box I ever reposed in. Had I owned such a place on shore, I might have been induced to keep rabbits in it, or guinea-pigs, but certainly not pigeons. Its length was barely six feet, its width four above my cot and two below, and it was minus sufficient standing-room for any ordinary-sized sailor; it was, indeed, a cabin for a commodore – I mean Commodore Nutt – and was ventilated by a scuttle seven inches in diameter, which could only be removed in harbour, and below which, when we first went to sea, I was fain to hang a leather hat-box to catch the water; unfortunately the bottom rotted out, and I was then at the mercy of the waves.

My cabin, or rather – to stick to the plain unvarnished truth – my burrow, was alive with scorpions, cockroaches, ants, and other “crawlin’ ferlies.”

“That e’en to name would be unlawfu’.”

My dispensary was off the steerage, and sister-cabin to the pantry. To it I gained access by a species of crab-walking, squeezing myself past a large brass pump, and edging my body in sideways. The sick came one by one to the dispensary door, and there I saw and treated each case as it arrived, dressed the wounds and bruises and putrefying sores, and bandaged the bad legs. There was no sick-berth attendant; to be sure the lieutenant-in-command, at my request, told off “a little cabin-boy” for my especial use. I had no cause for delectation on such an acquisition, by no means; he was not a model cabin-boy like what you see in theatres, and I believe will never become an admiral. He managed at times to wash out the dispensary, or gather cockroaches, and make the poultices – only in doing the first he broke the bottles, and in performing the last duty he either let the poultice burn or put salt in it; and, finally, he smashed my pot, and I kicked him forward, and demanded another. He was slightly better, only he was seldom visible; and when I set him to do anything, he at once went off into a sweet slumber; so I kicked him forward too, and had in despair to become my own menial. In both dispensary and burrow it was quite a difficult business to prevent everything going to speedy destruction. The best portions of my uniform got eaten by cockroaches or moulded by damp, while my instruments required cleaning every morning, and even that did not keep rust at bay.

Imagine yourself dear reader, in any of the following interesting positions: —

Very thirsty, and nothing but boiling hot newly distilled water to drink; or wishing a cool bath of a morning, and finding the water in your can only a little short of 212 degrees Fahrenheit.

To find, when you awake, a couple of cockroaches, two inches in length, busy picking your teeth.

To find one in a state of decay in the mustard-pot.

To have to arrange all the droppings and eggs of these interesting creatures on the edge of your plate, previous to eating your soup.

To have to beat out the dust and weevils from every square inch of biscuit before putting it in your mouth.

To be looking for a book and put your hand on a full-grown scaly scorpion. Nice sensation – the animal twining round your finger, or running up your sleeve. Dénouement– cracking him under foot – full-flavoured bouquet – joy at escaping a sting.

You are enjoying your dinner, but have been for some time sensible of a strange titillating feeling about the region of your ankle; you look down at last to find a centipede on your sock, with his fifty hind-legs – you thank God not his fore fifty – abutting on to your shin. Tableau– green and red light from the eyes of the many-legged; horror of yourself as you wait till he thinks proper to “move on.”

To awake in the morning, and find a large and healthy-looking tarantula squatting on your pillow within ten inches of your nose, with his basilisk eyes fixed on yours, and apparently saying, “You’re only just awake, are you? I’ve been sitting here all the morning watching you.”

You know if you move he’ll bite you, somewhere; and if he does bite you, you’ll go mad and dance ad libitum; so you twist your mouth in the opposite direction and ejaculate —

“Steward!” but the steward does not come – in fact he is forward, seeing after the breakfast. Meanwhile the gentleman on the pillow is moving his horizontal mandibles in a most threatening manner, and just as he makes a rush for your nose you tumble out of bed with a shriek; and, if a very nervous person, probably run on deck in your shirt.

Or, to fall asleep under the following circumstances: The bulkheads, all around, black with cock-and-hen-roaches, a few of which are engaged cropping your toe-nails, or running off with little bits of the skin of your calves; bugs in the crevices of your cot, a flea tickling the sole of your foot, a troop of ants carrying a dead cockroach over your pillow, lively mosquitoes attacking you everywhere, hammer-legged flies occasionally settling on your nose, rats running in and rats running out, your lamp just going out, and the delicious certainty that an indefinite number of earwigs and scorpions, besides two centipedes and a tarantula, are hiding themselves somewhere in your cabin.

Chapter Ten.

Round the Cape and up the ’Bique. Slaver-Hunting

It was a dark-grey cloudy forenoon when we “up anchor” and sailed from Simon’s Bay. Frequent squalls whitened the water, and there was every indication of our being about to have dirty weather; and the tokens told no lies. To our little craft, however, the foul weather that followed seemed to be a matter of very little moment; for, when the wind or waves were in any way high, she kept snugly below water, evidently thinking more of her own convenience than our comfort, for such a procedure on her part necessitated our leading a sort of amphibious existence, better suited to the tastes of frogs than human beings. Our beds too, or matresses, became converted into gigantic poultices, in which we nightly steamed, like as many porkers newly shaven. Judging from the amount of salt which got encrusted on our skins, there was little need to fear danger, we were well preserved – so much so indeed, that, but for the constant use of the matutinal freshwater bath, we would doubtless have shared the fate of Lot’s wife and been turned into pillars of salt.

After being a few days at sea the wind began to moderate, and finally died away; and instead thereof we had thunderstorms and waves, which, if not so big as mountains, would certainly have made pretty large hills.

Many a night did we linger on deck till well nigh morning, entranced by the sublime beauty and terrible grandeur of those thunderstorms. The roar and rattle of heaven’s artillery; the incessant floods of lightning – crimson, blue, or white; our little craft hanging by the bows to the crest of each huge inky billow, or next moment buried in the valley of the waves, with a wall of black waters on every side; the wet deck, the slippery shrouds, and the faces of the men holding on to the ropes and appearing so strangely pale in the electric light; I see the whole picture even now as I write – a picture, indeed, that can never, never fade from my memory.

Our cruising “ground” lay between the island and town of Mozambique in the south, to about Magadoxa, some seven or eight degrees north of the Equator.

Nearly the whole of the slave-trade is carried on by the Arabs, one or two Spaniards sometimes engaging in it likewise. The slaves are brought from the far interior of South Africa, where they can be purchased for a small bag of rice each. They are taken down in chained gangs to the coast, and there in some secluded bay the dhows lie, waiting to take them on board and convey them to the slave-mart at Zanzibar, to which place Arab merchants come from the most distant parts of Arabia and Persia to buy them. Dhows are vessels with one or two masts, and a corresponding number of large sails, and of a very peculiar construction, being shaped somewhat like a short or Blucher boot, the high part of the boot representing the poop. They have a thatched roof over the deck, the projecting eaves of which render boarding exceedingly difficult to an enemy.

Sometimes, on rounding the corner of a lagoon island, we would quietly and unexpectedly steam into the midst of a fleet of thirty to forty of these queer-looking vessels, very much to our own satisfaction, and their intense consternation. Imagine a cat popping down among as many mice, and you will be able to form some idea of the scramble that followed. However, by dint of steaming here and there, and expending a great deal of shot and shell, we generally managed to keep them together as a dog would a flock of sheep, until we examined all their papers with the aid of our interpreter, and probably picked out a prize.

I wish I could say the prizes were anything like numerous; for perhaps one-half of all the vessels we board are illicit slaveholders, and yet we cannot lay a finger on them. One may well ask why? It has been said, and it is generally believed in England, that our cruisers are sweeping the Indian Ocean of slavers, and stamping out the curse. But the truth is very different, and all that we are doing, or able at present to do, is but to pull an occasional hair from the hoary locks of the fiend Slavery. This can be proved from the return-sheets, which every cruiser sends home, of the number of vessels boarded, generally averaging one thousand yearly to each man-o’-war, of which the half at least have slaves or slave-irons on board; but only two, or at most three, of these will become prizes. The reason of this will easily be understood, when the reader is informed, that the Sultan of Zanzibar has liberty to take any number of slaves from any one portion of his dominions to another: these are called household slaves; and, as his dominions stretch nearly all along the eastern shores of Africa, it is only necessary for the slave-dealer to get his sanction and seal to his papers in order to steer clear of British law. This, in almost every case, can be accomplished by means of a bribe. So slavery flourishes, the Sultan draws a good fat revenue from it, and the Portuguese – no great friends to us at any time – laugh and wink to see John Bull paying his thousands yearly for next to nothing. Supposing we liberate even two thousand slaves a year, which I am not sure we do however, there are on the lowest estimate six hundred slaves bought and sold daily in Zanzibar mart; two hundred and nineteen thousand in a twelvemonth; and, of our two thousand that are set free in Zanzibar, most, if not all, by-and-bye, become bondsmen again.

I am not an advocate for slavery, and would like to see a wholesale raid made against it, but I do not believe in the retail system; selling freedom in pennyworths, and spending millions in doing it, is very like burning a penny candle in seeking for a cent. Yet I sincerely believe, that there is more good done to the spread of civilisation and religion in one year, by the slave-traffic, than all our missionaries can do in a hundred. Don’t open your eyes and smile incredulously, intelligent reader; we live in an age when every question is looked at on both sides, and why should not this? What becomes of the hundreds of thousands of slaves that are taken from Africa? They are sold to the Arabs – that wonderful race, who have been second only to Christians in the good they have done to civilisation; they are taken from a state of degradation, bestiality, and wretchedness, worse by far than that of the wild beasts, and from a part of the country too that is almost unfit to live in, and carried to more favoured lands, spread over the sunny shores of fertile Persia and Arabia, fed and clothed and cared for; after a few years of faithful service they are even called sons and feed at their master’s table – taught all the trades and useful arts, besides the Mahommedan religion, which is certainly better than none – and, above all, have a better chance given them of one day hearing and learning the beautiful tenets of Christianity, the religion of love.