On they came and rushed their canoes into the little cove, four abreast, and Tia prodded our buck in the back, and told him to stand up and talk to Baian, who was in one of the leadin canoes.
Up he jumps.
Oh, Baian, Baian, great Baian, he called, the two white men are dead in their house, and we have the woman bound hand and foot.
Good, said Baian with a fat chuckle, as he put one leg over the gunwale of his canoe to step out, and the next moment I put a bullet through him, and then Docky Mason lit the first charge o dynamite, and slings it down, right inter the middle of the crowded canoes, and before it went off he sent the second one after it.
Boss, I hev seen some dynamite explosions in my timeespecially when I hev hed to blow up wrecksbut I hev never seen anything like thet. The two shots killed over thirty niggers, wounded as many more, and stunned a lot, who were drowned. Those who were not hurt swam out of the cove, and neither Docky nor me had the heart to shoot any of emthough we might hev picked off a couple of dozen afore they got outer range.
Before we could stop him our prisoner jumped down among the dead and wounded, got a long knife, an in ten seconds he had Baians head off, and held it up to us, grinning like a cat, ony not so nice, ez he hed jet black, betel-nut stained teeth, and red lips like a piece ev raw beef.
We hed no more trouble with the niggers after thet turn-up, you can bet yer life.
The buck stayed with us until the luggers came back, and a few days after we landed him at his own villageez rich ez Jay Gould, for we gave him a musket with powder and ball, a cutlass, half a dozen pounds ev red beads, and two hundred sticks of terbacker. I guess thet thet nigger was able to buy himself all the wives he wanted, and be a big Injun fur the end of his days.
CHAPTER II ~ THE OLD SEA LIFE
One Sunday morningwhen I was about to leave the dear old city of Sydney for an unpremeditated and long, long absence in cold northern climes, I went for a farewell stroll around the Circular Quay, and, standing on some high ground on the east side, looked down on the mass of shipping below, flying the flags of all nations, and ranging from a few hundred to ten thousand tons. Mail steamers, deep sea tramps, freezers, colliersall crowded together, and among them but one single sailing vessela Liverpool barque of 1,000 tons, loading wool. She looked lost, abandoned, out of place, and my heart went out to her as my eyes travelled from her shapely lines and graceful sheer, to her lofty spars, tapering yards, and curving jibboom, the end of the latter almost touching the stern rail of an ugly bloated-looking German tramp steamer of 8,000 tons. On that very spot where I stood I, when a boy, had played at the foot of lofty treesnow covered by hideous ill-smelling wool storesand had seen lying at the Circular Quay fifty or sixty noble full-rigged ships and barques, many brigs and schooners, and but one steamer, a handsome brig-rigged craft, the Avoca, the monthly P. and O. boat, which ran from Sydney to Melbourne to connect with a larger ship.
Round the point were certainly a few other steamers, old-fashioned heavily-rigged men-of-war, generally paddle-wheel craft; and, out of sight, in Darling Harbour, a mile away, were otherscoastersnone of them reaching five hundred tons, and all either barque- or brig-rigged, as was then the fashion.
And they all, sailers as well as the few steamers, were manned by sailor-men, not by gangs of foreign paint-scrubbers, who generally form a steamers crew of the present daymen who could no more handle a bit of canvas than a cow could play the Wedding Marchin fact there are thousands of men nowadays earning wages on British ships as A.B.s who have never touched canvas except in the shape of tarpaulin hatch covers, and whom it would be highly dangerous to put at the wheel of a sailing shipthey would make a wreck of her in any kind of a breeze in a few minutes.
In my boyhood days, nearly all the ships that came into Sydney Harbour flying British colours were manned by men of British blood. Foreigners, as a rule, were not liked by shipmasters, and their British shipmates in the focstle resented their presence. One reason of this was that they would always ship at a lower rate of wage than Englishmen, and were clannish. I have known of captains of favourite clipper passenger ships, trading between London and the colonies, declining to ship a foreigner, even an English-speaking Dane or Scandinavian, who make good sailor-men, and are quiet, sober, and hardworking. Nowadays it is difficult to find any English deep-sea ship or steamer, in which half of the hands forard are not foreigners of some sort. And now practically the whole coasting mercantile marine of the Australian colonies is manned by Germans, Swedes, Danes, and Norwegians.
When I was a young man I sailed in ships in the South Sea trade which had carried the same crew, voyage after voyage, for years, and there was a distinct feeling of comradeship existing between officers and crew that does not now exist. I well remember one gallant ship, the All Serene (a happy name), which was for ten years in the Sydney-China trade. She was about the first colonial vessel to adopt double-top-gallant yards, and many wise-heads prophesied all sorts of dire mishaps from the innovation. On this ship (she was full rigged) was a crew of nineteen men, and the majority of them had sailed in her for eight years, although her captain was a bit of a driver. But they got good wages, good food, and had a good ship under their feeta ship with a crack record as a fast sailer.
In contrast to the All Serene, was a handsome barque I once sailed in as a passenger from Sydney to New Caledonia, where she was to load nickel ore for Liverpool. Her captain and three mates were Britishers, and smart sailor-men enough, the steward was a Chileno, the bosun a Swede; carpenter a Mecklenburger joiner (who, when told to repair the fore-scuttle, which had been damaged by a heavy sea, did not know where it was situated), the sailmaker a German, and of the twelve A.B.s and O.S.s only onea man of sixty-five years of age, was a Britisher; the rest were of all nationalities. Three of them were Scandinavians and were good sailor-men, the others were almost useless, and only fit to scrub paint-work, and hardly one could be trusted at the wheel. The cook was a Martinique nigger, and was not only a good cook, but a thorough seaman, and he had the utmost contempt for what he called dem mongrels forard, especially those who were Dagoes. The captain and officers certainly had reason to knock the crew about, for during an electrical storm one night the ship was visited by St. Elmos fire, and the Dagoes to a man refused duty, and would not go aloft, being terrified out of their wits at the dazzling globes of fire running along the yards, hissing and dancing, and illuminating the ocean for miles. They bolted below, rigged up an altar and cross with some stump ends of candles, and began to pray. Exasperated beyond endurance, the captain, officers, two Norwegians, the nigger cook and I, after having shortened canvas, went for them, knocked the religious paraphernalia to smithereens, and drove them on deck.
The nigger cook was really a devout Roman Catholic, but his seamans soul revolted at their cowardice, and he so far lost his temper as to seize a Portuguese by his black curly hair, throw him down, tear open his shirt, and seize a leaden effigy of St. Jago do Compostella, which he wore round his neck, and thrust it into his mouth. In after years I saw Captain Bully Hayes do the same thing, also with a Portuguese sailor; but Hayes made the man actually swallow the little imageafter he had rolled it into a rough ballsaying that if St James was so efficient to externally protect the wearer from dangers of the sea, that he could do it still better in the stomach, where he (the saint) would feel much warmer.
The barque, a month or so after I left her in Noumea, sailed from Tchio in New Caledonia, and was never heard of again. She was overmasted, and I have no doubt but that she capsized, and every one on board perished. Had she been manned by English sailors, she would have reached her destination in safety, for the captain and officers knew her faults and that she was a tricky ship to sail with an unreliable crew.
In many ships in which I have sailed, in my younger days, no officer considered it infra dig. for him, when not on watch, to go forard and listen to some of the hands spinning yarns, especially when the subject of their discourse turned upon matters of seamanship, the eccentricities either of a ship herself or of her builders, etc. This unbending from official dignity on the part of an officer was rarely abused by the menespecially by the better-class sailor-man. He knew that Mr. Smith the chief officer who was then listening to his yarns and perhaps afterwards spinning one himself, would in a few hours become a different man when it was his watch on deck, and probably ask Tom Jones, A.B., what the blazes he meant by crawling aft to relieve the wheel like an old woman with palsy. And Jones, A.B., would grin with respectful diffidence, hurry his steps and bear no malice towards his superior.
Such incidents never occur now. There is no feeling of comradeship between officer and Jack. Each distrusts the other.
I have not had much experience of steamers in the South Sea trade, except as a passengermost of my voyages having been made in sailing craft, but on one occasion my firm had to charter a steamer for six months, owing to the ship of which I was supercargo undergoing extensive repairs.
The steamer, in addition to a general cargo, also carried 500 tons of coal for the use of a British warship, engaged in patrolling the Solomon Islands, and I was told to hurry along. The ships company were all strangers to me, and I saw at once I should not have a pleasant time as supercargo. The crew were mostly alleged Englishmen, with a sprinkling of foreigners, and the latter were a useless, lazy lot of scamps. The engine-room staff were worse, and the captain and mate seemed too terrified of them to bring them to their bearings. They (the crew) were a bad type of wharf rats, and showed such insolence to the captain and mate that I urged both to put some of them in irons for a few days. The second mate was the only officer who showed any spirit, and he and I naturally stood together, agreeing to assist each other if matters became serious, for the skipper and mate were a thoroughly white-livered pair.
Just off San Cristoval, the firemen came to me, and asked me to sell them a case of Hollands gin. I refused, and said one bottle was enough at a time. They threatened to break into the trade-room, and help themselves. I said that they would do so at their own perilthe first man that stepped through the doorway would get hurt. They retired, cursing me as a mean hound. The skipper said nothing. He, I am glad to say, was not an Englishman, though he claimed to be. He was a Dane.
Arriving at a village on the coast of San Cristoval, where I had to land stores for a trader, we found a rather heavy surf on, and the crew refused to man a boat and take me on shore, on the plea that it was too dangerous; a native boats crew would have smiled at the idea of danger, and so also would any white sailor-man who was used to surf work.
Two days later, through their incapacity, they capsized a boat by letting her broach-to in crossing a reef, and a hundred pounds worth of trade goods were lost.
When we met the cruiser for whom the coals were destined, the second mate and I told the commander in the presence of our own skipper that we considered the latter unfit to have command of the steamer.
Then put the mate in charge, if you consider your captain is incapable, said the naval officer.
The mate is no better, I said, he is as incapable as the captain.
Then the second mate is the man.
I cannot navigate, sir, said the second mate.
The naval commander drew me aside, and we took sweet counsel together. Then he called our ruffianly scallywags of a crew on to the main deck, eyed them up and down, and ignoring our captain, asked me how many pairs of handcuffs were on board.
Two only, I replied.
Then Ill send you half a dozen more. Clap em on to some of these fellows for a week, until they come to their senses.
In half an hour the second mate and I had the satisfaction of seeing four firemen and four A.B.s in irons, which they wore for a week, living on biscuit and water.
A few weeks later I engaged, on my own responsibility, ten good native seamen, and for the rest of the voyage matters went fairly well, for the captain plucked up courage, and became valorous when I told him that my natives would make short work of their white shipmates, if the latter again became mutinous.
Against this experience I have had many pleasant ones. In one dear old brig, in which I sailed as supercargo for two years, we carried a double crewwhite men and natives of Rotumah Island, and a happier ship never spread her canvas to the winds of the Pacific. This was purely because the officers were good men, the handswhite and nativegood seamen, cheerful and obedientnot the lazy, dirty, paint-scrubbers one too often meets with nowadays, especially on cheaply run big four-masted sailing ships, flying the red ensign of Old England.
CHAPTER III ~ THE BLIND MAN OF ADMIRALTY ISLAND
We had had a strokeor rather a series of strokesof very bad luck. Our vessel, the Metaris, had been for two months cruising among the islands of what is now known as the Bismarck Archipelago, in the Northwestern Pacific. We had twice been on shore, once on the coast of New Ireland, and once on an unknown and uncharted reef between that island and St. Matthias Island. Then, on calling at one of our trading stations at New Hanover where we intended to beach the vessel for repairs, we found that the trader had been killed, and of the station house nothing remained but the charred centre-postit had been reduced to ashes. The place was situated on a little palm-clad islet not three hundred acres in extent, and situated a mile or two from the mainland, and abreast of a village containing about four hundred natives, under whose protection our trader and his three Solomon Island labourers were living, as the little island belonged to them, and we had placed the trader there on account of its suitability, and also because the man particularly wished to be quite apart from the village, fearing that his Solomon Islanders would get themselves into trouble with the people.
From the excited natives, who boarded us even before we had dropped anchor, we learned that about a month after we had left poor Chantrey on his little island a large party of marauding St. Matthias Island savages, in ten canoes, had suddenly appeared and swooped down upon the unfortunate white man and his labourers and slaughtered all four of them; then after loading their canoes with all the plunder they could carry, they set fire to the house and Chantreys boat, and made off again within a few hours.
This was a serious blow to us; for not only had we to deplore the cruel death of one of our best and most trusted traders, but Chantrey had a large stock of trade goods, a valuable boat, and had bought over five hundred pounds worth of coconut oil and pearl-shell from the New Hanover natives,all this had been consumed. However, it was of no use for us to grieve, we had work to do that was of pressing necessity, for the Metaris was leaking badly and had to be put on the beach as quickly as possible whilst we had fine weather. This, with the assistance of the natives, we at once set about and in the course of a few days had effected all the necessary repairs, and then steered westward for Admiralty Island, calling at various islands on our way, trading with the wild natives for coco-nut oil, copra, ivory nuts, pearl-shell and tortoise-shell, and doing very poorly; for a large American schooner, engaged in the same business, had been ahead of us, and at most of the islands we touched at we secured nothing more than a few hundredweight of black-edged pearl-shell. Then, to add to our troubles, two of our native crew were badly wounded in an attack made on a boats crew who were sent on shore to cut firewood on what the skipper and I thought to be a chain of small uninhabited islands. This was a rather serious matter, for not only were the captain and boatswain ill with fever, but three of the crew as well.