A voyage to the Cape

Front matter

I

By W.Clark Russell.

A LOVELY SKIN,

Preface

The following chapters are reprinted from the London Daily Telegraph ; but there is much more of them in this collected form than room could be found for in that journal. At least a third, therefore, of the contents of the book sees the light for the first time. I made the voyage for my health, and embarked, as may be supposed, in no temper for literature. The utmost proposed was a sketch or two. But when, feeling better, I came to look into the inner life of the ship, there was so much to interest me that I could not but believe a description of the passage out and home, with references to the coastwise trip, might yield a little light pleasure to readers fond of the sea or who have journeyed by it. A few notes have been added, for the papers which form the volume were most of them dictated at sea, and I have therefore put at the bottom of the pages matter which should have been embodied in the text had books been within reach.

... 342

A VOYAGE TO THE CAPE.

Chapter I. To Plymouth

There are in these days few spectacles more familiar than the great ocean steamship. She is seen light, towering, picturesque, lying alongside the wharves of the docks. Her long, vast fabric is witnessed cautiously steaming down the river through the multitudinous craft that obstruct the navigation ; or, dwarfed indeed by distance, but nevertheless satisfying the eye with a sense of commanding and dominating proportions, she may be viewed from the sea-coast at very nearly the distance of the horizon, stretching her black length along with the white water flashing at her stem, rows of scuttles brilliantly burning to the blaze of the noontide sun, white awnings casting violet-tinted shadows upon decks in whose pleasant twilight you may, through the glass, witness the gleam of uniform buttons, the colours of feminine apparel, the fiery sparkle of polished brass under a beam of sunshine that penetrates an aperture of the cool covering. The sight is familiar ; hundreds and thousands of persons are annually making the passage of the great oceans in such vessels ; they are

B noted with interest and admiration from many points of the English sea-coast; excellently drawn and wellengraved pictures of them are constantly published in the illustrated journals. But what of their inner life ? What of the mysteries of the engine-room, of the discipline of the crew, of the cares and duties of the captain, of the provisioning of such ships, built to carry some hundreds of souls, who must be dealt with and fed, as though there were provision-markets on either beam to fill up the vessel's larders from at noon every day when the captain makes eight bells ? What of the life-saving appliances ? Of the manoeuvres under various conditions of weather according to the master's judgment ?

A man takes his passage in a steamer, he pays his money and embarks. The journey may last eight days, three weeks, a month and a half. Enough for him if he be duly landed with no bitterer memories than such as the first days of sea-sickness yield ; he may, indeed, have shown some interest in the daily runs, but as a rule he stops short at that ; enough for him, I say, that breakfast, lunch, and dinner are punctually served, that the food is well cooked and hospitably abundant. Walking the deck, blowing tobacco clouds in the smoking-room, "chaffing," telling stories, lounging in the saloon, flirting, grumbling, and the like, complete a routine that at the expiration of the voyage dismisses him from the ship with a mind empty of every point of interest deserving of attention in a structure illustrating one of the highest achievements of human skill, energy, and foresight.

I cannot but think that there must be many readers who would be glad to see deeper into the life of an ocean steamer than is commonly permitted to them in the contributions of those who relate their seafaring experiences ; and, this being my impression, I propose to give an account of a voyage I lately made to the Cape of Good Hope, taking the steamers I sailed in as typical of the many powerful iron sea palaces now afloat. The picture, I think, will in the main be found true of most passenger vessels. Discipline of course varies ; in the minuter details there may be differences; but of any one great ocean steamer, the cares of the captain, the duties and anxieties of the steward, the work of the engine-room, the victualling of the big structure, must in nearly all essentials correspond with those of the steamships of the principal great passenger lines.

It was a bittterly cold December morning at Southampton. I stood at one of the windows of the South- Western Hotel — a very spacious, comfortable, and liberally administered house — straining my eyes to penetrate the thickness that since four o'clock in the morning had been boiling down and over Southampton and her wide tract of waters. Now and again the phantasm of a little coaster, of a small steamer, or a cutter with her mainsail hoisted would loom out through a flaw in the smother, and vanish again like a reflection upon a looking-glass when you breathe upon it. The vessel in which I had taken my passage to the Cape was a three-masted schooner-rigged steamship, with a displacement of eight thousand tons, and a gross burden of four thousand three hundred tons. Her name was the Tartar* In 1812, when the Yankees were fighting Great Britain, they had an armed schooner that was used as a privateer, of over four hundred tons registered burden ; she was an immense vessel then for that rig, she would still be a very large vessel in this age, as a fore-and-aft

* Belonging to the Union Steamship Company.

i A VOYAGE TO THE CAPE.

sailing-craft ; * yet here was I bound to the Cape of Good Hope in a schooner with a gross tonnage of four thousand three hundred ! But steam makes all the difference between then and now ; and when Captain Travers, commander of the Tartar, afterwards told me that he had sent down his square yards and left them ashore as useless to the vessel, I could not help thinking, when I stood looking up at the absurd display of shoulder of mutton sails the steamer expanded to the wind whenever it came a point free, that, if the powerful steam sheers in the Southampton Docks had hoisted the iron poles out of the ship and placed them alongside her yards, she would have managed very well, though the nautical eye might indeed have found something wanting.

The misgivings I had felt at the hotel were increased when I boarded the tender that was to convey us bag and baggage to the steamer. Certainly I did not relish the notion of getting under weigh in a fog so thick that objects were undiscernible at a ship's length, and sneaking in it through the dangerous navigation of the Needles with the shadow of the early English December night already in the air. " Anything but a fog," cries the sailor, " when lights are obscured, objects ashore hidden, and when the most experienced attention is almost paralyzed by the conflict of whistles and steam horns and sirens in all imaginable keys ! "

A man may pass a happier time than sitting on the deck of a tender in bitter cold weather, in an atmosphere charged with the drizzle of a white fog, waiting to be carried to a ship. The quay-side was crowded with

* The Mammoth privateer schooner was 406 tons. The Yankees had two brigs on Lake Ontario, the Jones and the Jefferson, each 530 tons. Their schooners, Sylph and Triconderoga, were each 400 tons. These figures are Old Measurement ; the vessels would consequently be larger if meastired by the present rules.

labourers, officials, policemen, and others, many of them in a state of excitement and shouting at the top of their voices ; various sorts of people single or in groups : Dutchmen with flat faces and vacant eyes, ■with squab ladies, and still squabber children, returning to some of those Cape inland settlements with names which only a Dutchman can pronounce ; Portuguese, with coffee-coloured complexions and boots with long toes upwards bent, after the Elizabethan pattern ; pale-faced gentlemen bound to Madeira ; feebly-moving ladies making the passage of the ocean in quest of the sun ; unhappy rheumatics dragging their limbs after them like ostriches with broken legs; lively and gushing ladies wasting more tenderness upon the dogs in their arms than upon the mothers weeping by their side ; military gentlemen with the disciplined face and the capacity of rapid adaptation that springs from experience of travel ; foreigners, unable to speak a word of English, awaiting the arrival of their luggage with yearning looks and a wistful expression of eyes not a little moving. Meanwhile, babies are crying loudly ; children, running about, are hooking themselves on to the wrong people, and calling for their mothers; individuals in brass buttons spring on to the paddle-box and shout shorewards with a hundred signs in them of feeling certain that nothing can come of it. And all the while down the gangwayshoot, as it is called, I believe, rattle incessant volleys of luggage, boxes of all kinds and shapes, immense trunks, portmanteaux, covered with scores of labels, indicating that many of the people who are proceeding to the Cape in the Tartar are not travelling for the first time in their lives.

When I was writing about the Southampton Docks two or three years ago, I referred to the scene of the

6 A VOYAGE TO THE CAVE.

departure of one of the West India steamers. I little thought that I should become an actor on a stage before which I then sat as a spectator. I remember the farewells, the lingering flourishes of hats and handkerchiefs, the weeping postures of some who stood on the shore, and some who stood on the stern of the steamer, as the beautiful and majestic vessel slowly canted her head out for the open. There is no port fuller of the happy or the melancholy associations of leave-taking or returning than Southampton. Its traditions in this direction are written in the annals of the Peninsular and Oriental Company, and they are still abundantly and impressively perpetuated by the numberless fine steamers which are week after week sailing from these spacious and important docks to all parts of the world. Memory indeed kindles an emotion almost of affection for this fine old port, and seated on the deck of the tender it was with pleasure and interest that I listened to what a gentleman had to tell me of the prosperity of these docks, and their contemplated enlargement by the addition of a deep and very extensive area of water, at no very distant date. There was no one on board that tender, I dare say, who would not have been heartily glad if the deep water dock had had existence. It is certainly very much pleasanter to step from your hotel right on board the steamer you are going to sail away in than to sit on the deck of a tug, on a bitter, damp day, waiting for people and luggage to arrive to start for the vessel that lies veiled in the blankness a mile or two out upon the icy waters.

With our decks loaded with luggage, our seats filled with passengers and their friends who were accompanying them to the vessel, we got under weigh for the Tartar, an utterly invisible object and startlingly dreamlike, when you thought of her as a massive iron fabric that was to convey you six thousand miles, and then looked in the direction where she should have been plain, and found nothing there but a motionless pallid faintness. ' Was it possible, I asked, that the steamer would attempt to get away in such weather as this ? " Well," was the answer, " the vessel would lift her anchor, and drop down a little distance, and bring up again if the smother lingered; but she was bound to get under weigh anyhow." A light air blew, the fog thinned here and there, the loom of the shore came sullenly glooming up to starboard, in places the water gleamed in the flaws of the vapoury atmosphere with the keen, blue, ice-like tint of steel. Wreaths of the mist lifted and disclosed the hull of a ship at anchor, obscuring her masts, so that only ten or twenty feet of them, perhaps, were visible above the deck. We steamed cautiously, groping our way along, until presently we discerned three mastheads with vanes upon them that made them look like spires soaring out of a mass of solid folds of mist, luminous in whiteness. The sight was an extraordinary one : between the tender and that cloud dominated by the three mastheads the steel-coloured water lay clear ; and within that cloud floated a structure of eight thousand tons displacement, every sound aboard of her coming faintly through the thickness, unless it were the notes of her deep-throated bell, which rang solemn and sonorous out of the white, glistening mysterious envelopment.

We had forged ahead of the Tartar in order to manoeuvre, so as to get alongside of her, when a draught of air blowing lively smote the cloud in which the vessel lay and sent it swirling like steam. A beam of sunshine came down at that moment and struck the steamer full, kindling a hundred white fires in her, and submitting a picture full of soft lustre and ocean beauty. The vapour stood up behind in its silvery blankness and formed a background for the ship to show against ; and then, as though the wand of a magician had transformed the cloud into a majestic fabric, there stood before me the proportions of a great ocean steamship, with the light of the sun glorious on the royal coat of arms and the gilded splendours about it which embellished the head of her straight stem, her rows of windows reflecting every one of them a little luminary, with fibres of fire shooting out of it. Captain and mates in uniform looked down upon us from the bridge or over the side. A crowd of heads forward watched our approach with interest. An immense funnel towered past the saloon, and the three iron masts went straight up into the dim and misty blue overhead "like blasted pines," to use Tom Cringle's simile.

Embarkation by tender is usually accompanied with so much confusion as to leave little room for impressions. There is the creaking and straining of steam or hydraulic gear ; there is the hoarse bawling of sailors and others ; there is the shoving and pushing of people trying to form themselves into a procession to pass over a gangway that admits of but one or two at a time ; there is the crowd of excited people hanging about to point out their luggage to the stewards ; there is also the extreme novelty of a great ship's decks, with their structures and super-structures, their deck-cabins, ladders, high coamings, alley-ways, and the rest of the complications, little more than a maze to the unpractised eye. Long before the passengers and luggage were fairly aboard the fog had blown down again, and you heard in the far distance the dull, moaning noises of steamers endeavouring to denote their whereabouts with their whistles. I confess that it was not without surprise and very lively misgivings that, whilst in my cabin, I felt the vibration of the engines. This meant that we had started. I went into the alley-way alongside of the saloon and looked over the side. It was as thick as mud. The fog pressed close to the ship, and there was not a smudge in it to mark an outline of any kind. The water was slipping past in bubbles and small foaming eddies, but slowly indeed. Suddenly the vibration ceased ; and the curious sense of death-like stillness that seems to follow upon the abrupt cessation of the movement of great engines was rudely qualified by a hideous screeching noise at the head of the funnel. This was the steam-horn. The fog seemed to have affected its pipes, for its notes at first were horribly gasping and asthmatic ; but it cleared out presently into a wild screech, which hummed in the ear till one's very brains rattled to it, and when it ceased it found an echo in a most melancholy screaming on the starboard quarter, where, when the fog slightly thinned, we perceived a steamer heading our way, very unpleasantly close to us, and steering apparently so as to come dead into our* wake.

To appreciate the anxieties, worries, and responsibilities of the shipmaster, it is necessary to be on board a huge floating palace like the Tartar when there is an impenetrable thickness all around, and when the ship is in a channel crowded with a thousand difficulties of navigation. The engine-room alarum was for ever ringing out its hollow metallic tones, brimful of the significance which the dangers of the deep communicate to the directions of the mariner. For a few moments the engines would be travelling with a comparatively rapid pulsation, then to the metallic notes of the communicator the throbbing languished ; after a little it ceased, once more swiftly obedient to the striking of the bell, and then the sense of uncertainty that the sudden stillness inspired would be heightened into a feeling of almost painful uneasiness when the steam-horn gave forth its hoarse, penetrating note from the summit of the funnel, and when the eye, glancing forwards, found itself baffled and blinded by the fog that floated like a wall to the very stem of the steamer. The early night came down fast, and still found the Tartar stealthily sneaking along, often pausing and sounding her whistle, which seemed to find reverberations in the clouded atmosphere in the wailings and the moanings of fog signals ahead and astern. It was quite dark when the fog thinned, exposing a tolerably broad surface of water, when, looking over the rail, I saw a large German steamer passing at full speed, bound to Southampton from New York. She swept through the darkness like a stream of fire — every window, port-hole, and scuttle brilliant with the lustre of the electric light or the flames of oil lamps. She made a noble show, certainly; her trail of smoke full of spangles, the white water throbbing pallid from her stem, and rushing like a line of dim snow along her bends into her wake. The darkness swelled her up into giant proportions, and she passed away astern rapidly like a phantom ship full of fire.*

The story of this passage through the abominable thickness of the fog was told to me by Captain Travers, the commander of the ship, on our arrival at Plymouth. I repeat it for the edification of landsmen, for it has ever been my wish since I first took pen in hand to describe

* It was afterwards reported that a smack had been cut down and her crew drowned by this steamer.

the sea and those who navigate it for a living, to do justice to the masters and mates of the British merchant service by illustrating not so much the actual routine of their daily lives as the large, grave, and weighty responsibilities imposed upon them in discharge of their duties as men to whom are committed the safety and comfort of passengers and crews, and the secure conveyance of costly fabrics and valuable merchandise. But the mariner will also, I trust, find something to interest him in the following narrative :

"We left Netley," said Captain Travers to me, " at three p.m. ; the weather was very thick, and there was a light N.E. wind blowing. At 3.25 we passed the Calshot Spit Light-vessel, and the loom of the Isle of Wight was all that we could see in the shape of land. The Thorn and the Bramble buoys were scarcely visible. ' It is clearing a bit, sir,' said the pilot ; ' I can make out the guard-ship in Cowes Boads.' There, to be sure, was the Hector, showing up in a lumping shadow that made her look twice as big as the old Duke of Wellington. ' Sail on the port bow ! ' sung out the look-out. This was the Irish boat, a very short distance away, bound like ourselves to Plymouth. Just as we passed her the pilot sighted Lepe Middle Buoy. ' There's Lepe, sir,' he cried ; the loom of it was so large that I took it for a boat. We now passed the Irish steamer, and it then came down so thick that it was like steaming through a Dutch cheese. ' Ease down to dead slow and keep the horn going, please, sir,' said the pilot. This was done, the horn being answered by the Irish boat that was now, as I judged, about a ship's length astern, but out of sight. It was then 3.45 p.m., and the night darkening over us. ' I want to steer W. \ S. magnetic,' said the pilot : W I S. by the standard (i.e., a Sir William Thomson's, and having 2 deg. to 3 deg. easterly deviation on westerly course). I gave the order, and the ship was steered by that course down the Solent ; before long the fog lifted over the Island, and at 3.50 we proceeded half-speed. It was still, however, very thick. ' There's Yarmouth Pier ! ' cried the pilot, and we could just distinguish it under the fog. A bright light right ahead was reported ; this was Hurst Castle light. ' That's a capital course, sir,' said the pilot ; 'we couldn't have hit it better.' As he spoke we heard the sound of a deep horn ahead, and all of a sudden there seemed to leap right out of the fog one of the large four-masted steamers of the North German Lloyd. She passed us close on the port side, and soon afterwards we saw the Southampton pilot's cutter. So we stopped and made his dingy fast, and proceeded again quite^ slow, the Channel pilot declining to take charge till the ship was outside the Needles. On sighting the high and low lights of Hurst we discharged the Southampton pilot, and at five p.m. we passedthe Needles and set the course W J S. The weather was now clearing, and a light would have been visible at a distance of about three miles. Thus onwards past Anvil Point light, when the course was altered to W £ S., to close the Shamble Light Vessel, in order that we might see her. At 7.48 Portland High light was abeam, distant six miles, and at ten minutes past eleven we sighted the Start light, and passed it twentj r minutes later at a distance of three miles. At twenty minutes past one we stopped the engines and received the Plymouth pilot who took charge."

This reads like the plain deposition of a ship-master. Scores of little narratives of this description are week after week appearing in the newspapers. Their meaning is always understood by the sailor, but the landsman must go to sea and take part in the drama as it is acted and related to grasp the full meaning of all that happens and all that is told. As I listened to Captain Travers telling me of this run of his from Southampton Water to Plymouth through a dense fog, such portions of the picture as I had been able to catch as an eye-witness rose up again before me; once more I leaned over the side and saw the dim white water washing past into the wet mysterious gloom astern. I heard again the curious voices of the engines, sometimes sounds as of people quarrelling, then of people singing, then of the subdued cries of a mob, then a harsher wrangling as of giants, with a clashing as of leviathan fire-irons amid shouts of anger, with the stealthy hissing of the hydraulic steering-gear threading the echoes of the engine-room, and the clamour of revolving arms of steel, and the incessant shovelling of coals. Once again I looked around into the darkness, and saw no light nor beacon of any kind to indicate our whereabouts. The hoarse yelling of the steam horn resounded in my ears, and the startling noise found a wild accentuation in the seething sound of the water rushing from the discharge pipe. Meanwhile the captain, pilot, and mates, ceaselessly vigilant, are conveying this great ship with her numerous passengers and her valuable freight through the intricacies of a difficult and perilous channel. We go to bed, leaving our lives in the hands of the captain and pilot, and quitting a deck wet with a thickness that sometimes eclipses from our sight the rays of light breaking from the bright lantern high up on the stay forward ; and when we awake the sun is shining brightly over Plymouth Sound, on whose smooth breast our three-masted schooner lies to her anchor tranquilly resting, with Mount Edgecumbe in its winter beauty, sloping down to the pale blue surface, whilst a little barque past the breakwater hoists her main top-gallant sail to the faint off-shore wind, and passes away with the light upon her sails gleaming in silver in the water under the shadow of her hull.

Chapter II. To Madeira

After we left Plymouth a pleasant wind came on to blow, with a light swell from the same quarter that promised weight later on. The Americans had predicted a cyclone about this time, and you noticed a little uneasiness among some of the passengers as they cast their glances aloft at the cold greenish sky, along which some clouds of a hue resembling compacted smoke were journeying leisurely, and when they watched the quiet heave of the long ship to the swell lifting in low folds to her iron side. The pace was good, a full thirteen, as fast as a clipper sailing ship could run with a gale of wind blowing over her taffrail. Owing to the saloon being right amidships, it was difficult to realize that you were at sea. The December light, sifting through spacious skylights and numerous large windows, put a dull lustre into the polished woods, the bright mirrors, the many silvered lamps. The sea line rose and fell with rhythmic action through the windows, but not the least inconvenience was felt apparently by even those who, one might have sworn, would have succumbed to the faintest movement of the vessel. A saloon long enough to demand a roof of hurricane deck one hundred and seventy feet in length may, I think, be justly termed a spacious apartment. As an old Jack myself, I liked nothing so much as the breadth of this commodious structure. Outside, on either hand, went " alley-ways," as they are called ; gangways, probably, would have been the old term for them. The width of these alley-ways I do not know ; they were on either side, narrowing the breadth of the saloon to the extent of their dimensions ; and yet, when I looked at the beam of that saloon, it was like gazing at the main deck of a line-ofbattle-ship. The truth is the Tartar is only eight times as long as she is broad, a theory of proportions that demands, at all events, appreciative recognition at the hands of a sailor. We have to thank the late Mr. Froude for insisting upon width as a vital factor in the seaworthiness and speed of ships. It is, because when standing on the steamer's bridge I would look down upon and along her and mark in the fabric an outline that seemed fit to rear royal and even sky-sail poles to the heavens, that I salute the Tartar as a very admirable model, and a further triumphant example yet of the wisdom of building a ship to look like a ship and to behave like a ship.

But there is one point I am not sure about ; I refer to it in no controversial spirit, but merely because the Tartar happens to be typical in this respect of other large fine steamers in the passenger trade. All along the bottom of her she has tanks for water ballast. These tanks, it seems, are used merely when it is necessary to trim her. In other words, the ship, like many more of the vessels thus fitted, goes to sea with the tanks empty. Now, is not this idea of sending a ship afloat with a set of empty cylinders built at the bottom of her a complete subversion of all the notions concerning the art of safe and stable flotation? When you build a lifeboat you run air-tight cylinders along her gunwales. These cylinders, if they do not prevent her from capsizing help her to right swiftly, and greatly increase her buoyancy. But suppose, instead of fixing them alongside the boat, you secured them to her keel ? I had many an argument with my friend Captain Travers on this subject. He maintained that these empty ballast tanks improved the ship's seaworthiness. I, on the other hand, contended that by leaving them empty they contributed to the rolling of the ship, and decreased the angle of heel at which she could recover herself. The point is an interesting one. I do not profess to speak with scientific knowledge on the subject. But common sense is at the bottom of all such things ; and it seems to me that if you were to attach bladders to the feet of a swimmer instead of under his arms, he would have some difficulty in keeping his head up.