O'er Many Lands, on Many Seas

“‘Till the sea gives up its dead.’”

Chapter Ten

“Throned in his palace of cerulean ice,Here Winter holds his unrejoicing court.”Thomson’s “Seasons.”

“I don’t think,” said I, as Captain Ben Roberts and I sat at breakfast one day in a homely old hotel in Bala, North Wales, “I don’t think, Ben, my boy, I ever ate anything more delicious in the way of fish than these same lovely mountain trout.”

“Well, you see,” replied my friend, “we caught them ourselves, to begin with; then the people here know exactly how to cook them. But, Nie, lad, have you forgotten the delicious fries of flying-fish you used to have in the dear old Niobe?”

“Almost, Ben; almost.”

“Well, I can tell you that you did use to enjoy them, all the same.”

“Ay, and I’ve enjoyed them since many and many is the time in the tropics, and especially in the Indian Ocean.”

“So have I,” said Ben Roberts. “Funny way they used to have of catching them, though, in the old Sans Pareil. Of course you know they will always fly to a light if held over the ship’s side?”

“Yes.”

“Well, but the orders were not to have lights kicking about the deck at night, either naked or in a lantern; so some of our fellows – not that I at all approve of what they did – utilised a wild cat the doctor kept in a cage. When they came on deck to keep the middle watch – we were on a voyage from Seychelles to the Straits of Malacca – they would swing him, cage and all, over the stern. His eyes would be gleaming like bottled wildfire. ’Twasn’t long, I can tell you, before the flying-fish sprang up at the cage. Old Tom put out his claws and hooked some of them in; but lots flew on board, and they were being fried five minutes afterwards.”

“I quite believe you, Roberts,” I said; “though some would call that a traveller’s tale. But just look at that lovely pair of Persian cats in the corner there, Ben; it seems almost impossible to believe they can belong to the same family as the wild cat you’ve been speaking about.”

“Yes, Nie, civilisation is a wonderful thing when it can extend even to the lower animals. You were once a savage yourself too, Nie. Think of that.”

“I shan’t think about it,” I replied. “None of your sauce, my worthy friend. What were you doing at Seychelles, and what were you doing with a wild cat on board?”

“We had queerer things than wild cats on board, Nie; the fact is, we were what they call cruising on special service. We had a fine time of it, I can tell you. We seemed to go everywhere, and do nothing in particular. At the time we had that wild cat on board, Nie, we had already been three years in commission, and had sailed about and over almost every ocean and sea in the world.”

“What a lot of fun and adventure you must have had, Ben! Wish I had been with you.”

“You were in the Rocky Mountains then, I believe?”

“Yes, and in Australia, and the Cape. You see, I had a turn after gold and diamonds wherever I thought I could find them. But help yourself and me to some more of those glorious trout, and spin your yarn.”

“Let us get away out of doors first, Nie. On this lovely summer’s day we should be on the lake.”

So we were, reader, one hour afterwards; but the sun was too bright; there were neither clouds nor wind, and the fish wouldn’t bite; so we pulled on shore, drew up our boat, and seated ourselves at the shady side of a great rock on a charming bit of greensward, and there we stayed for hours, Ben lazily talking and smoking, I listening in a dreamy kind of way, but enjoying my friend’s yarn all the same.

“Yes,” said Ben, “we were on special service. One day we would be dredging the bottom of the sea, the next day taking soundings. One day we would be shivering under polar skies, the next roasting under a tropical sun.”

“Come, come, be easy, Ben; be easy,” I cried, half-rising from the grass. “If you were under polar skies one day, how, in the name of mystery, could you be in the tropics next, Captain Roberts? I shall imagine you are going to draw the long bow, as the Yankees call it.”

“Well, well, Nie; the fact is, we passed so pleasant an existence in the Sans Pareil, that time really glided away as if we had been in dreamland all the while. We sailed away to the far north in the early spring of the year. We didn’t go after either seals or whales; but we did have the sport for all that. Our captain was one of those real gentlemen that you do find now and then commanding ships in the Royal Navy. Easy-going and complacent, but a stickler for duty and service for all that. There wasn’t a man or officer in the ship who wouldn’t have risked his life at any moment to please him – ay, or laid it down in duty’s cause. Indeed, the men would any day do more for Captain Mann’s nod and smile, than they would do for any one else’s shouted word of command.

“We dredged our way up north to Greenland. It was a stormy spring. We often had to lie-to for a whole week together; but we were a jolly crew, and well-officered, and we had on board two civilians – Professor kind of chaps I think they were – and they were the life and soul of the whole ship. Whenever we could we took soundings, and hauled up mud and shingle and stuff from the bottom of the dark ocean, even when it was a mile deep and more. But when that mud was washed away, and the living specimens spread out and arranged on bits of jet-black paper, what wonders we did see, to be sure! Our Scotch doctor called them ‘ferlies’: he called everything wonderful a ‘ferlie.’ But these particular ferlies, Nie, took the shape of tiny wee shells of all the colours in the rainbow, and funny wee fishes, some not bigger than a pin-point. But, oh! the beauty, the more than loveliness of them! The roughest old son of a gun on board of us held up his hands in admiration when he saw them. We cruised all round Spitzbergen, and all down the edge of the eastern pack ice. We shot bears and foxes innumerable; walruses, narwhals, seals, and even whales fell to our guns; while the number of strange birds we bagged and set up would have filled a museum.

“Some of those walruses gave us fun, though. I remember once we fell amidst ice positively crowded with them. They seemed but little inclined to budge, either. Again and again we fought our way through them; but the number seemed to increase rather than diminish, till at last our fellows – we were two boats’ crews – were thoroughly exhausted, and fain to take to the boats. Was the battle ended then? I thought it was only just beginning, when I saw around us the water alive with fierce tusked heads evidently bent on avenging the slaughter of their comrades.

“Our good surgeon was as fond of sport as anyone ever I met, but he confessed that day he had quite enough of it. At one time the peril we were in was very great indeed. Several times the brutes had all but fastened their terrible tusks on the gunwale of our boat. Had they succeeded, we should have been capsized, and entirely at their mercy.

“The surgeon, with his great bone-crushing gun, loaded and fired as fast as ever fingers could; but still they kept coming.

“‘Ferlies’ll never cease,’ cried the worthy medico, blowing the brains clean out of one who had almost swamped the boat from the stern. Meanwhile it fared but badly with the other boat. The men were fighting with clubs and axes, their ammunition being entirely spent. One poor fellow was pierced through the arm by the tusk of a walrus and fairly dragged into the water, where he sank before he could be rescued.

“The ship herself bore down to our assistance at last, and such a rain of bullets was poured upon the devoted heads of those walruses that they were fain to dive below. The noise of this battle was something terrible; the shrieks of the cow walruses, and the grunting, groaning, and bellowing of the bulls, defy all attempts at description.

“What do you think,” continued Captain Roberts, “I have here in my pocket-book? Look; a sketch of a strangely fantastic little iceberg the doctor made half an hour after the battle. He was a strange man – partly sportsman, partly naturalist, poet, painter, all combined.”

“Is he dead?”

“No, not he; I’ll warrant he is busy sketching somewhere in the interior of Africa at this very moment. But I loved Greenland so, Nie, that old as I am I wouldn’t mind going back again. The beauty of some of the aurora scenes, and the moonlight scenes, can never be imagined by your stay-at-home folk. We went into winter quarters. Well, yes, it was a bit dreary at times; but what with fun and jollity, and games of every kind on board, and sledging parties and bear and fox hunts on shore on the ice around us, the time really didn’t seem so very long after all.”

“What say you to lunch, Ben, my boy?” I remarked.

“The very thing,” replied my friend; “but first and foremost, just shake that ferocious-looking stag-beetle off your shoulder; he’ll have you by the ear before you know where you are.”

“Ugh!” I cried, knocking the beast a yard away. The creature turned and shook his horrid mandibles threateningly at me, for a stag-beetle never runs away. Although admiring his pluck, I could not stand his impudence, so I flicked him away, and he fell into the lake.

“Ah! Nie,” Captain Roberts said, “if the wild beasts of the African jungle were only half as courageous and fierce as that beetle, not so many of our gay sportsmen would go after them. Only fancy that creature as big as an elephant!

“Well, Nie, in that cruise of ours, we had no sooner got back to England and been surveyed than off we were down south, across the Bay of Biscay. No storms then; we could have crossed it in the dinghy boat. Visited Madeira. You know, Nie, how grand the scenery is in that beautiful island.”

“And how delicious the turtle!” I said.

“True, O king!” said Ben; “the bigwigs in London think they know what turtle tastes like, but they’re mistaken; there is as much difference between the flavour of a turtle newly caught, and one that has been starved to death as your London turtles are, as there is between a bit of cork and a well-boiled cauliflower.”

“Bravo! Ben, you speak the truth.”

“Then we visited romantic Saint Helena. It used to be called ‘a rock in the middle of the ocean.’ How different now! A more fertile and luxuriant place there isn’t in all the wide, wide world. We called at Ascension next; well, that is a rock if you like, not a green thing except at the top o’ the hill (it has since been cultivated). But the birds’ eggs, Nie, and the turtle. It makes me hungry to think of them even now.

“We had whole months of sport at the Cape and in South Africa, and all up the coast as far as Zambesi. We visited Madagascar; more sport there, and a bit of honest fighting; then on to the Comoro islands – more romantic scenery, and more fighting; then to Zanzibar. Captured prizes, took soundings, dredged, and went on again. On, to Seychelles, then to Java, Sumatra, Penang, then back to India, and thence to Africa, the Red Sea, Mocha; why, it would be easier far to mention the places we did not visit. But the best of it was that we stayed for months at every new place where we cast anchor.”

“Visited Ceylon, I dare say?”

“Yes, hid, and had some rare sport elephant-shooting. I tell you what, Nie, there was some clanger attached to that sort of thing in those days, but now it is little better than shooting cows, unless you get away into the little-known regions of equatorial Africa; there you still find the elephant has his foot – and a big one it is – upon his native soil. But I remember once – I and my man Friday – being charged by two gigantic tuskers, and the whole herd rushing wildly down to their assistance. It was a supreme moment, Nie. I thought my time was come; I would have given anything and everything I possessed to get up into the top of the palm-tree close beside me.

“‘Now, Friday,’ I cried, ‘be steady if you value your own life and mine.’

“I fired, and my tusker dropped. But the terrible noise and trumpeting must have shaken Friday’s nerves a bit. He was usually a good shot, but on this occasion he missed. I loaded at once again, and as the great brute came down on us, let him have it point-blank. He reeled, but still came on. I felt rooted to the spot. My life in a moment more, I thought, would be crushed out of me. Ah! but there must have been a mist of blood before the tusker’s eyes; it was a tree he charged; his tusk snapped like a pipe-stalk, and the great elephant at once fell dead.”

“It was a narrow escape.”

“Well, it was, but for the matter of that, Nie, who knows but that our lives may be ever in danger, no matter where we are. A hundred times a day, perhaps, we are upheld by the kind hands of an unseen Providence, ‘our eyes are kept from tears, and our feet from falling.’

“Should we be grateful when our lives are spared? I think so, Nie, lad; only the reckless, and the braggart, and too often the coward, boast of the dangers they have come through, just as if their own strength alone had saved them.”

Chapter Eleven

“They are all, the meanest things that be.As free to live, and to enjoy that life,As God was free to form them at the first,Who in His sovereign wisdom made them all.”Cowper.

We had just finished lunch by the lake-side at Bala, my friend Ben Roberts and I, and were thinking of trying the fishing once more, for the clouds had banked up from the west and obscured the sun’s glare, a little breeze had rippled the water, and everything looked promising, when the Captain burst out laughing.

“Shiver my timbers! as sailors say on the stage, Nie,” cried he, “if there isn’t that same old stag-beetle making his way up your jacket again, intent on revenge.”

“Plague take it!” I exclaimed, shaking the brute off again; “I have flicked him away once; I shall have to kill him now.”

“No you won’t,” said Ben Roberts; “the world happens to be wide enough for the lot of us. Let him live. I’m a kind of Brahmin, Nie; I never take life unless there is dire necessity.

“We in England,” continued Captain Roberts, “have little to complain about in the matter of insects; our summer flies annoy us a little, the mountain midges tickle, and the gnats bite, and hornets sting. But think of what some of the natives of other countries suffer. I remember as if it were this moment a plague of locusts that fell upon a beautiful and fertile patch of country on the seaboard of South Africa. It extended only for some two hundred miles, but the destruction was complete.

“The scenes of grief and misery I witnessed in some of the villages I rode through, I shall remember till my dying day.

“‘All, all gone!’ cried one poor Caffre woman who could talk English, ‘no food for husband, self, or children, and we can’t eat the stones.’

“These poor wretches were positively reduced to eating the locusts themselves.”

“I shouldn’t like to be reduced to eating insects,” said I; “fancy eating a stag-beetle fried in oil.”

“And yet I doubt,” replied the Captain, “if it is a bit worse than eating shrimps or swallowing living oysters. You’ve seen monkeys eating cockroaches?”

“Yes, swallowing them down as fast as they possibly could, and when they couldn’t eat any more, stuffing their cheeks for a future feast.”

“On the old Sans Pareil we had fifteen apes and monkeys, besides the old cat and a pet bear. Ah! Nie, what fun we did use to have, to be sure!”

“Didn’t they fight?”

“No, they all knew their places, and settled down amiably enough. The very large ones were not so nimble, and some of them were very solemn fellows indeed; the smaller gentry used to gather round these for advice, we used to think, and apparently listened with great attention to everything told them, but in the end they always finished up by pulling their professors by their tails. If at any time they did happen to find that old cat’s tail sticking out of the cage, oh! woe betide it! they bent on to it half a dozen or more, and it was for all the world like a caricature of our sailors paying in the end of a rope. Meanwhile the howls of the cat would be audible in the moon, I should think. Then up would rush our old cook with the broom, and there would be a sudden dispersal. But they were never long out of mischief. The little bear came in for a fair share of attention. You see, he wasn’t so nimble as the monkeys; they would gather round him, roll him on deck, and scratch him all over. The little Bruin rather liked this, but when three or four of the biggest held his head and three or four others began to stuff cockroaches down his throat, he thought it was taking advantage of good nature; he clawed them then and sometimes squeezed them till they squeaked with pain or fright. They used to bathe Bruin, though. The men brought the bath up, then the monkeys teased the bear until he got on his hind-legs and began clawing the air; this was their chance. They would make a sudden rush on the poor little fellow, he would step back, trip, and go souse into the bath. Then the chattering and jumping and grinning of the monkeys, and the laughing and cheering of the men, made a fine row, I can tell you. We had two monkeys that didn’t brook much nonsense from the others – an orang, and a long-nosed monkey – we got her in Sumatra – who looked a very curious old customer. The best of it was that the sailors taught the long-nosed one to snuff, and the orang to drink a glass of rum.

“As soon as the old orang heard the hammering on the rum-cask to knock out the bung, he began to laugh, and he beamed all over when his basin of grog was brought. The other old monkey taking a pinch was a sight to see. She stack to the box at last, and when any of her friends came to see her would present it to them with a ‘hae! hae! hae!’ that spoke volumes.”

“Any other funny pets on the Sans Pareil?”

“Oh, yes, lots. We had an adjutant. Ah! Nie, we did use to laugh at that bird, too. Five feet tall he was, and a more conceited old fop of a fellow I never did see. He had a pouch that hung down in front. Well, he used to eat everything, from a cockroach to half a leg of mutton; and when he couldn’t hold any more he used to stuff his pouch.

“‘Comes in handy, you see,’ he seemed to say, alluding to this pouch of his. ‘But, dear me!’ he would continue, ‘ain’t I a pretty bird? Look at my pretty little head; there ain’t much hair on it; but never mind, look at my bill. There is a bill for you! Just see me eat a fish, or a frog, or a snake! And now, look at my legs. Pretty pair, ain’t they? See me walk!’

“Then he would set off to promenade up and down the deck till the ship gave a bit of a lurch, when down he would go, and the monkeys would all gather round to laugh and jibber, and Snooks, as we called him, would deal blows with his bill in all directions, which the monkeys, nimble though they were, had some difficulty in dodging.

“‘Can’t you see,’ he would say, ‘that I didn’t tumble at all – that I merely sat down to arrange my pretty feathers?’ And Snooks would retain his position for about half an hour, preening his wings, and scratching his pouch with the point of his bill, just to make the monkeys believe he really hadn’t fallen, and that his legs were really and truly serviceable sea-legs.

“I’ve lain concealed and watched the adjutants in an Indian marsh for hours; there they would be in scores, and in every conceivable idiotic position.

“Suddenly, perhaps, one would mount upon an old tree-stump, and spread wide his great wings. ‘Hullo, everybody!’ he would seem to cry, ‘look at me. I’m the king o’ the marsh! Hurrah!

“‘My foot’s upon my native heath,My name, Macgregor;’

“or words to that effect, Nie.”

“You were always fond of birds, and beasts, and fishes, weren’t you, Ben?”

“I was, Nie, lad, and never regretted it but once.”

“How was that?”

“I was down with that awful fever we call Yellow-Jack; and, oh! Nie, it seemed to me that at first all the awful creatures ever I had seen on earth or in the waters came back to haunt my dream; and often and often I awoke screaming with fright. Indeed, the dream had hardly faded when my eyes were opened, for I would see, perhaps, a weird-looking camel or dromedary’s head drawing away from the bed, or a sea-elephant, a bear, an ursine seal, or an old-fashioned-looking puffin.

“In my fever, thirst was terribly severe, and I used to dream I was diving in the blue pellucid water of the Indian Ocean, down – down – down to beds of snow-white coral sands, with submarine flowers of far more than earthly beauty blooming around me; suddenly I should perceive that I was being watched by the terrible and human-like eyes of a monk shark, or – I shudder even now, Nie, to think of it – I should see an awful head – the uranoscope’s – with extended jaws and glaring protruding eyes. Then I would awake in a fright, shivering with cold, yet bathed in perspiration. But, Nie, when I began to get well a change came o’er the spirit of my dreams. The terrible heads, the horrid fishes, and the slimy monsters of the deep appeared no more; in their place came beautiful birds, and scenery far more lovely than ever I had clapped a waking eye upon. So, in one way, Nie, I was rewarded for my love for natural history.”

“What a lovely day!” I remarked, looking around me.

“Yes,” replied Ben; “but do you know what this very spot where we are now standing puts me in mind of – lake and all, I mean?”

“I couldn’t guess, I’m sure,” I replied.

“Well, it is just like the place where I was nearly killed by a panther, and would have been, but for my man Friday.”

“He must have been a useful nigger, then,” I said, “that man Friday.”

“He came in precious handy that day, Nie. You see, it was like this: – Neither he nor I had ever been to South America before; so when we went away shooting together we weren’t much used to the cries of the birds or beasts of the woods. The birds seemed to mimic the beasts, and reptiles often made sounds like birds. We had been away through the forest, and such a forest – ah! Nie, you should have seen the foliage and the creepers. We had had pretty good sport for strangers. We shot and bagged everything, snakes and birds and beasts, for I was making up a bag for the doctor, who was a great man for stuffing and setting up. We had just sat down to rest, when suddenly the most awful cries that ever I heard began to echo through the woods.

“They came from a thicket not very far away, and at one moment were plaintive, at the next, discordant, harsh, dreadful.

“‘Friday,’ I cried, starting up and seizing my gun, ‘there is murder, and nothing less, being done in that thicket. Let’s run down and see.’

“‘It seems so, massa,’ said Friday; ‘it’s truly t’rific.’

“We ran on as we spoke, and soon came to the place, and peered cautiously in.

“It was only a howler monkey after all.”

“And was nothing the matter with him?” I asked.

“Nothing at all. It was merely this monkey’s way of amusing itself.”

“Did you shoot him?”

“I never shot a monkey in my life, and never will, Nie; it appears to me almost as bad as shooting a human being.

“‘We’ll go back to the lake-side now, Friday,’ I said, ‘and have dinner.’

“Alas! I had no dinner that day, Nie, nor for many a long day to come.

“There is no fiercer wild beast in all the forests or jungles than the cougar or puma, and none more treacherous. I have an idea myself that the darker in colour the more courageous and bloodthirsty they are; however that may be, I would any day as soon fight hand-to-hand with a man-eating tiger as I would with some of the monstrous pumas I have seen in South America. And yet I have heard sportsmen despise them, probably because they have never met one face to face as I have done, and as I did on the day in question.

“We were quietly returning, Friday and I, to the place where we had left our provisions and bags, when he suddenly cried, ‘Look, massa! look dere!’ We had disturbed one of the largest boa-constrictors I had ever seen, and it was moving off, strange to say, instead of boldly attacking us, but hissing and blowing with rage as it did so. It looked to me like the trunk of some mighty palm-tree in motion along the ground.

“‘Fire!’ I cried; ‘fire! Friday.’

“The crack of both of our rifles followed in a second, but though wounded, the terrible creature made good its escape.

“I hurried after him, loading as I went, and thus got parted for a short time from my faithful servant and body-guard.