Seven Frozen Sailors

“You ought to know me in time,” said I.

“I should be proud to!” he answered, readily. “I should take it as a favour if you’d allow me to make your acquaintance – to become friendly with you!”

“Well,” said I, still with the detective idea strong on me, “you see, I like to know whom it is I’m making friends with. What port do you hail from, pray?”

The strange man made a plunge at me, and shook my hand heartily, shaking also the slice of bread and butter I was holding in it.

“Did you take me for a seafaring man?” he asked, in a joyful voice. “You really don’t mean that? That’s capital!”

“Well,” said I, “aren’t you?”

“No,” he answered, in great excitement; “of course not. I’m going to be very shortly, if I’ve any luck, but I’ve not taken to the line yet. See here, sir, that’s who I am.”

And, so saying, he produced a large illustrated play-bill from his pocket, such as you may find stuck about the walls at the East-end, or on the Surrey side, and on which I read, “The Death Struggle. Enormous success!” in large letters.

“Oh!” I said; “that’s you, is it?”

I thought he was, probably, rather cracked.

But he tapped his finger-end emphatically upon one particular spot, and indicated half a line of very small type, and stooping my head so as to bring my eyes down close to it I made out, “Count Randolph, a gambler and a roué, Mr Jones.”

When I had read it, he appeared to look at me, expecting that I should say something appropriate, or, at any rate, look awe-stricken. But it was very funny to look at this long-faced, hungry-looking fellow, pitching into his buttered toast, and associate him with the wickedness set down to his account, so “Bless me!” was as much as I could possibly manage.

“Yes, it is,” said he; “but that’s nothing. It’s a dirty shame of them to put a fellow in that type, and leave his initial out, too! But that’s all jealousy, you know. That’s Barkins, that is! It’s Barkins’s house, and Barkins’s bill, and, hang it! it’s all Barkins’s!”

On referring a second time to the picture-bill, there, sure enough, I found the name of Barkins flourishing in all sorts of type and in all manner of places.

“Ah!” cried Mr Jones, finishing his coffee with one gulp, “it won’t always be so, that’s one comfort! I’ve a chance here, sir, – one of a thousand; and you’ll see then whether I’m equal to it or not!”

“I’m sure you will be,” I replied, not exactly knowing what else to say. “You find your business rather hard work sometimes, don’t you? and the pay sometimes a little doubtful?” I added, after a pause.

“I wish it was only a little,” Mr Jones replied, with a woeful grin; “but I get along, somehow – I keep alive, somehow; and it won’t always be so – not when I get my chance, you know!”

I really thought I ought to say something now, so I asked when he expected the chance, and what it was.

“Ah, that’s it!” said he. “Do you know you could be a good deal of service to me, if you’d the time?”

“I’ve more time than money, worse luck!” I said. “I should be glad to earn a trifle anyhow, and should be much obliged if you could point out the how; but as to being of service to you, I’d gladly be that for nothing.”

You see, I had taken a good look at Mr Jones’s ragged edges and glazed elbows by this time, and had come to the conclusion that, even gambler and roué as he was, he must have had about as much as he could do to look after himself.

I was mistaken. Mr Jones had influence, though he might be short of cash.

“If you’re really hard up,” he said, “I can put you onto a kind of job – if you like it. They are doing ‘The Battle of Blenheim’ at our place. It’ll be eighteenpence a night. You’ll have to double the armies, and be shot down at the end of every act. But it’s all easy enough.”

I thought this would suit me very well for the time, and most likely shooting down wasn’t permanently injurious to the system any more than being a gambler and a roué; so I thanked him very much.

“But how can I help you in return?” I asked.

“Well, it’s to that chance I spoke of,” he said, confidentially. “Look here – I’ve an engagement for a tour down to the Midland counties. The pay isn’t very wonderful, to start with; but I’m to have more if we do good business, you know; and I’ve stipulated that we do a nautical drama, and I play Jack Brine– that’s the sailor hero, you know – myself.”

“What makes you want to play a sailor? I suppose you’ve done it before, and made a hit?”

“Well – no; I can’t say I’ve ever tried it. But nautical pieces used to be a tremendous go once, and are so still down in some parts of the country, and – There! I’ve got it in me, I’m certain – I feel it here!”

And he tapped the breast of a dilapidated sham sealskin waistcoat as he spoke, and knit his brows with determination.

“But you haven’t told me yet how I can be of service to you,” said I.

“Well,” he said, “look here! This is one of the acts of the piece I’m going to do. I’ve done it myself – faked it up, you know, pulling in the best bits from one or two others; but that’s nothing – and it’ll go immense! It’s cram-full of business, and the situations are tremendous!”

“It ought to go, if that’s the case.”

“It’s a certainty, dear boy! It can’t help it! But there’s just one thing about it, do you know, that makes me uncomfortable, and that’s where you can help me.”

“And that is – ”

“You see, I’m not a nautical man myself. It was very odd of you to take me for one right off! Of course, I can put it on pretty well when I like; but if you want the real honest truth, I never even saw the sea in all my life – never been nearer to it than Rosherville; and as I don’t happen to be personally acquainted with any nautical men, the fact is I’m not quite certain there is not a screw loose up and down in the words. Of course I’m all right in the shiver my timbers and douse my pig-tails parts; but it’s when you get reefing your jib-boom and hugging the shore with your lee-scupper that you don’t feel altogether as if you’d got your sea-legs on. Look here, I’d like to go through the thing with you quietly, and you can tell me where it isn’t quite right.”

I gladly agreed to render him all the assistance in my power. I thought if there was very much more of the same style he had been quoting there ought to have been a shipwreck or two up and down in that piece of his, and that I should be something like a Captain Boyton’s swimming-dress to this poor struggling author over head and ears in a tempestuous ocean of his own manufacture.

I met him by appointment, therefore, next day at the stage-door of the theatre where he was acting, and where he had promised to procure me an opening as extra or supernumerary. He got me on easily enough, and my duties, though they made me precious hot, did not require very much genius. I was on my mettle, and wanted to reflect as much credit as possible upon my new friend for the introduction, so I fought away and took forlorn hopes like one o’clock; and the prompter was good enough to say that I evidently had something in me, and would do better presently, if I stuck to it.

After a night or two they found I was an active kind of fellow, and had the full use of my arms and legs, so they introduced a bit of rope climbing on my account, and worked in another bit specially, where I was shot down from among the rigging, with a round of applause every night.

In the daytime, Mr Jones and I talked the nautical drama, and I set his “lee-scuppers” right for him, and got him to make things generally a little bit more like the right thing.

At the end of a fortnight, however, I was able to get at my friends, and through them to stop the mouths of the angry coffin-ship owners; and so I had no more occasion to fight shy of the seaports, and resolved to go to sea again.

If it had not been for that, Mr Jones would have tried to get me into the company he was just then joining, and I should have figured in one or two small parts in the great drama.

However, instead of that, I bid him good-by, and thanked him, and wished him every success, and went my way, leaving him to go his.

I only went for a short cruise round the coast of Spain, but I met with the pleasantest mates – bar present company, of course – I ever remember sailing with. We all of us got to be like brothers before the ship touched land again in England, and as another vessel was in want of hands, and about to sail in two or three days for the China Sea, I and five others agreed to stick together and join. I took two days just to drop down and see my friends, and the next day we met together and had a bit of a spree, agreeing to spend our last night at the play. I had told my messmates about Jones, and how I had been on the stage myself, so they looked up to me as rather an authority, as you may suppose, and passing me over the play-bill the waiter had brought us, asked if I knew anything of the piece they were playing.

Know anything, indeed!

Ha! ha! That was not bad.

Why, it was Jones’s piece, and Atlantic Jones, in great letters, was to appear in his great character of Jack Brine, the Bo’s’en of the Bay of Biscay.

Of course we went. We were there for that matter a good hour before there was any absolute necessity, and stood waiting at the doors. There weren’t many other people waiting there, by the way. There was one small boy, if I remember right. Not another soul; and at first we weren’t quite sure we had not mistaken the night. However, that was not so. The doors did open a few minutes late, and then we made a rush in all at once, paying a shilling and sixpence each all round for seats in the dress circle.

After we’d been there some little time, and the small boy had been the same time in the last seat in the pit, from which he stared up at us with his eyes and mouth wide open, we caught sight of some one peeping in a frightened kind of way round the curtain. It was Jones, and we all gave him a cheer to encourage him, and let him know we had rallied round.

He didn’t seem encouraged, but ran away again; and the money-taker, having plenty of spare time on his hands, as it seemed, came and told us to keep steady if we wanted to stop where we were.

My mates were, some of them, inclined to run rusty at the advice, for we’d done no more than make things look a bit cheerful under rather depressing circumstances, only we would not have a row with him, for Jones’s sake. After a while, one or two more people dropped in, up and down, and we were, maybe, thirty in all, when the curtain went up at last, and business began in earnest.

I’ve spent a good many roughish nights, and suffered a tidy lot in ’em, but I wouldn’t engage under a trifle for another such night as that was. I pitied poor Jones from the bottom of my heart.

You see, he was a well-meaning kind of fellow, but there wasn’t a great deal of him, and he hadn’t all the voice he might have had: and when he sang out as loud as he could, but rather squeaky, “Avast there, you land-lubbers, or I’ll let daylight into you!” someone said, “Don’t hurt ’em, sir; they mightn’t like it!”

About the end of the second act he began to show signs of being dead beat, and I sent him round a pot of stout to help him on, for I regularly felt for him. We applauded all we could, too. The pit ceiling was a sufferer that night, so I don’t deceive you; but it was no good. No one else applauded a bit. Some of them hissed. Indeed, if it had not been for my mates being my mates, and sticking to me and Jones, as in duty bound, I believe they’d have hissed, too. As it was, when the act-drop fell, and we all went out for a liquor, they weren’t over-anxious to come back again, only they did, of course.

The last act was very cruel. I think the stout had got into Jones’s head, and into his legs, too; for he was all over the stage, and, we fancied, half his time, didn’t know what he was up to. Then came the great situation, where he was to board the pirate schooner single-handed, and rescue his lady-love – and, in the name of everything that is awfully dreadful, what do you think happened to Jones then?

It might have been something wrong in the scenery, or it might have been something wrong with Jones, but he appeared on the upper deck of the pirate boat, and was going to jump down on the lower deck, flourishing a cutlass, when he somehow slipped, and caught behind.

I shall never forget it. He caught somehow by the trousers, and hung there, dangling like an old coat on a peg. Then he tore himself loose with a great wrench, while every one in the house was screaming with laughter, and rushed off the stage.

We took poor Jones away that night, and we liquored him up a lot, and he wept as he told us what he had gone through, and somehow we couldn’t, laugh much as we listened to him.

I don’t know how it happened. I think he said he would go on board with us, and have a final glass, and he was to come back in a boat that had taken some goods on board from the shore. I don’t know how it was, I say; but six hours after we had got fairly out to sea, some one found a pair of legs sticking out from behind something, and at the end of these legs were Jones’s head and body.

When we had shaken him out of a dead sleep, he asked to be put on shore at once, and talked wildly of bringing an action against the skipper. But the skipper put it to Jones in a jocular kind of way, that the general practice was to keel-haul stowaways, when you felt inclined to treat them kindly, or heave them overboard with a shot tied to their heels, if you didn’t; so Jones calmed down after a while, and made up his mind to go to China with us quietly, and make no more fuss about it.

I don’t think a man on board wanted to act unkindly to poor Jones; and, ’pon my soul, I’d not have sat by quietly and seen it. But Jones tempted Providence, as it were, and was the unluckiest beggar alive.

To begin with, I never knew a man so sea-sick that it didn’t kill right off. I never knew a man with more unreliable legs on him; so that there was no saying where he’d be to a dozen yards or so when he once started. And he fell overboard twice. So all this made him rather a laughingstock among the regular hands. But he was so good-natured, and stood the chaff so good-humouredly, that we got all of us to take a mighty fancy to his company.

Poking fun upon one subject only he did not take to kindly, and that was the famous Jack Brine impersonation, which we presently found out, very much to our surprise, he looked upon as little short of perfection.

“I don’t regret this affair altogether,” said he, one day. “You see, all I want is actual experience of the perils of the ocean.”

Before long he had them, too.

The reason why we had been required to join in such a hurry was that several of the foreign sailors had run at the last moment, and there was a great difficulty in obtaining any Englishmen willing to sail with them. With the exception of the skipper, we six sailors, and Atlantic Jones, the rest were all Lascars – savage, sneaking, bloodthirsty wretches, that there was no trusting a moment out of your sight. I had never before made a voyage with that kind of company, and, if I can help it, never will again. However, we felt no particular uneasiness about them. Any one of us, we simply consoled ourselves by reflecting, could quite easily thrash half a dozen of the foreign beggars in a fair fight. The worst of it was, though, when the fight did come, it was not a fair one.

I began by telling you that I was a bad storyteller; I must finish by telling you so again. And after all, what story have I left to tell, which would not be to you, sailors like myself, a thrice-told tale? It came about, in the usual way, with a night surprise. I woke up with a man’s hand tightening on my throat, with a gleaming knife before my eyes. Then – thud! thud! – it came down on me, through the thick blankets I had twisted round me. Lucky for me they were so thick!

This was all I saw; then the light was knocked out, and I heard the black wretch’s naked feet pattering on the steps, as he went up swiftly to the deck above, then a deep groan from the bunk of one of my old messmates – it was one called Adams.

I was horribly cut about, and bleeding fast; but I managed to creep out, and feel through the darkness. I came, just within a few feet, upon a man’s body, stretched out, lying on its face. Though it was dark as pitch, I had no need to touch it twice to know that it was a dead body. Then I got to Adams, and called him by name.

He answered faintly, “Yes!”

I asked him where the crew were, and whether he knew what had happened.

They were all killed, he thought, and the Lascars had got the vessel in their hands.

We were doubtless supposed to be murdered, too. It must have all been done very quickly. Adams had heard no sound from the deck above, and I had heard none.

The crippled condition in which we were, and the darkness, rendered us almost entirely helpless; but I managed somehow – partly on my feet, partly on my hands and knees – to crawl up the ladder. The hatchway was closed above me. We were prisoners.

I could from this place make out that a wild debauch was going on on the after-deck, and I heard one of the scoundrels shrieking out a song, in a wild, discordant voice. They had broken open the stores, and were getting mad drunk with rum.

I crawled back to tell the news, and to think what could be done.

Adams was almost fainting from loss of blood. For myself, I was scarcely good for anything – not for a struggle, that was certain. I might defend myself for a time. I would try, anyhow. I could only die.

All at once we heard the hatchway opening stealthily.

“Whist!” said Jones’s voice. “Who’s alive down there?”

“Two!” I answered. “Adams and I – Tom Watson. We are both badly wounded.”

“Thank heaven you are not dead!” he said. “You can save yourselves, if you’ve strength enough to lower yourselves into a boat. I’ve got it down into the water. Will you try?”

We went at once, and gained the deck. Only one of the villains was on the watch forward. We could see the dark figures of the rest sprawling about in the semi-darkness far aft, and we went down on our hands and knees, and crawled in the shadow to the side. But just as we reached it, the moon came out from behind a cloud, and the man fired, and shouted loudly.

Adams went down, and we two only were left.

“Save yourself! Jump!” cried Jones. “I’ll keep ’em back! Avast there, you black-hearted swabs, or I’ll chop you to pieces!” And as five of them, the soberest of the lot, came rushing on us in a body, he laid about him right and left with a large cutlass, much heavier than I should have believed he could use, and the beggars rolled over, slashed and mangled beneath his strokes.

I never before or since have seen a man fight like Atlantic Jones did then. Stripped to the waist, his long hair flying in the wind, his hands red with blood, his body bespattered, too, he looked more like a fiend than a human being, much less a very bad play-actor; but all the while he fought he never once ceased yelling out the silly gibberish he thought was sailors’ talk.

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