In Patagonia (27 page)

At the cry ‘Man Overboard!' the whole of the ‘watch below' had come on deck. First into the accident boat was the apprentice Walter Paton. The Second Mate, Mr Spence, knew Paton couldn't swim much and told him to get out, and Philip Eddy, another apprentice, jumped into his place. Walter was not to be put off, though, and got in over the bows. The boat was in the water before Mr Spence saw him, and I heard a few remarks as they passed under the stern of the ship. Then we lost sight of them in the heavy sea that was running.

The boat left the ship at 10.15, all the crew with their lifebelts on. We were busy for some time getting the ship shortened down. The Captain was aloft on the mizzen cross-trees watching the boat. They had a long pull to windward and it was not till 11.30 that they were close to us coming back. But we couldn't see if they had the carpenter or not.

The Captain gave the order to ‘Up Helm' for the purpose of wearing ship, to bring the boat's davits on the lee side and so hoist it aboard, and we all saw Mr Spence stand up and wave his arms. Whether to say they'd got the carpenter, or whether he thought we hadn't seen them, will never be known. But in that one fatal second, his attention was off the boat, and she broached to and capsized. She was close to us, not more than two cables, and we saw them all swimming in the water.

We put the helm down again and brought the ship into the wind. We hurried to get out the second boat, but in a sailing ship this is a very different matter from getting out the first. One boat was always ready, but the others were all bottom up on the skids; and not only bottom up, but stuffed full of gear. The Captain's fowls were in one. All the cabbages for the voyage were in another, and firebuckets and stands were stowed there to prevent them being washed overboard.

The men turned over the port boat first. But just as they had her over, a big wave struck the ship and two of them slipped, and she came down heavily and was staved in the bilge. Meanwhile I was watching the men in the water with glasses. I saw some helping others on to the bottom of the overturned boat. Then I saw Eddy and one of the Able-Seamen leave and swim towards the ship. They swam so close we could see who they were without glasses. But we were drifting faster than they could swim and they had to go back.

After turning over the starboard boat, we had to put a tackle on the main royal backstay to lift it over the side. And I don't know whether the man who put the strop on the backstay was incapable or hurried, but, time after time, the strop slipped and each time the boat came down. And the ship was drifting, drifting to leeward, and we lost sight of the boat and the poor fellows clinging to the keel. But we knew where it was by the flights of birds wheeling round the spot—albatrosses, mollymauks, sooty petrels, stinkpots—all circling round and round.

The second boat, with Mr Flynn in charge, got away, but it was nearly 1 p.m. when she passed under the stern. She had a longer pull to windward and the men were hindered by their lifebelts. And she had a much longer pull back as the ship was drifting to leeward all the time.

We lost sight of her after twenty minutes and there began a weary wait for us, knowing five of our comrades were doing their level best to cling to the upturned keel. The Captain put the ship on one tack and then another, but finally decided to remain hove to and not lose ground. So we lay there straining our eyes for the return of the boat.

At 3.30 we saw her coming back. She came in under the stern but the wind and sea had risen and it was some time before she dared come alongside. By then we had realized the worst and locked the tackles on in silence and hoisted the boat inboard. Two or three of the men were bleeding about the head, those whose caps and sou' westers were not fastened. When the ship was back on course, we were able to ask questions and the gist of what we heard was this:

They had found the boat. They had brought back the lifebuoy I threw to the carpenter, and three of the five lifebelts, and had seen the other two in the sea, but not a sign of anyone. Then the birds attacked and they had to fight them off with stretchers. They swooped on their heads and took their caps off, and the men who were bleeding were struck by the cruel beaks of the albatrosses. When they examined the lifebelts and found all the strings untied, they knew what had happened. The birds had gone for the men in the water and gone for their eyes. And the poor chaps had willingly untied the strings and sunk when they saw that no help came, for they couldn't fight the birds with any hope of winning. The lifebuoy proved they had rescued the carpenter before the second accident occurred. It made us all the sadder to know that they had accomplished this mission.

After six and a half hours they relieved me from the wheel. It was the longest trick I ever experienced. I went down to the half-deck to get something to eat, but when I saw Walter's and Philip's bedclothes turned down and their pants lying on their chests, and their boots on the floor, just as they had left them at the cry ‘Man Overboardl', I lost control of myself, thought no more of being hungry and could do nothing but sob. Later the Skipper told the Third Mate to take me away and let me sleep in his cabin.

‘It's enough to drive the boy mad, in there with all those empty bunks.'

I
N 1877 Charley signed on as Second Mate on the
Childers,
a full-masted barque bound for Portland, Oregon. She was a lousy ship. The Captain foul-mouthed his mother; the crew mutinied; and the Aberdonian Mate came at Charley with an axe. One trip was enough. He left, joined the New Zealand Shipping Company and stayed twenty years, graduating from cargo to passenger ships and from sail to steam.

One evening in the late 1880s he was in the first steam room of the Aldgate Turkish Baths, alongside a big black-bearded man, who sat snoozing in a canvas chair. The face meant nothing but the tattoo on the arm had to be Daly's. Charley sneaked behind, capsized the chair and left the scarlet imprint of his hand on the man's back. Daly howled and chased Charley naked through the baths till the assistants overpowered them both. Charley managed to smooth the incident over and soon got talking about the ‘dear old
Conway'
. They left the baths together, went to a theatre and dined at the Criterion.

‘Verily,' Charley wrote, ‘we are as ships that pass in the night.'

Slowly—for he was not brilliant and his tongue did not always endear him to his superiors—he rose up the ranks of the service. In 1888 he was 2nd Officer on a mail steamer with a big freezing compartment. When she called in at Rio, the Emperor Dom Pedro II asked the agents if he could come aboard:

‘On arriving at the top of the ladder, the Emperor held out his imperial hand to be kissed by the various Portuguese and Brazilians present and then handed it to his secretary to be wiped. After each kiss the secretary produced a fresh handkerchief and wiped the hand before it was presented to the next kisser, no doubt a highly salubrious measure ... But the Captain was unaccustomed to “kiss hands”. He seized it with a warm grasp and shook it most heartily, saying: “I have great pleasure in welcoming Your Majesty aboard my ship.” To say the Emperor was surprised is to put it mildly. Probably his hand hadn't been shaken like that since he was a boy. He looked at it as much as to say: “Well, old chap, you were lucky to get out of that one”, and passed it to his secretary to be wiped.'

Charley took the Emperor down to the freezer and showed him his first deep-frozen pheasant. Dom Pedro said to his secretary: ‘We must have a freezer in Rio at once'; but before he got it, Charley said, he was deposed by ‘that awful ingrate, General Fonseca'.

C
HARLEY LOVED amateur theatricals, and, on rising to the Crank of Chief Officer, gave orders for plays, charades, tableaux, potato races—anything to relieve the boredom of ten weeks at sea.

Some of the entertainments were rather unusual:

‘I was Chief officer of R.M.S.
Tongariro
and when we called in at Capetown there came aboard a Professor with three Bushman Pygmies from the Kalahari Desert—an old couple and their son. They were very small, the tallest and youngest being about 4ft 6in. I don't know if they had names already but we called them Andrew Roundabout the Elder, Mrs Roundabout, and Young Andrew Roundabout.

‘The old pair were very old indeed. The doctor declared that, from the white ring round the pupil of his eye, the man must be over a hundred. He himself claimed to be 115, but this was a matter of conjecture. They couldn't speak one word of Dutch, or at least only Young Andrew could; the parents spoke no language anyone could understand.

‘The old man was a curious one to look at. He hadn't a hair on his head and his face was wizened and wrinkled like a monkey's. But he had his wife and son in complete subjection, so we guessed he'd been a bit of a Tartar in his time.

‘We asked the Professor to give a lecture on them, and he informed us they would dance first. We were all anxious to attend, and by 8.30 the saloon was well-filled with ladies and gentlemen in evening dress, and the Captain and officers in mess uniforms. The performance began with the old man twanging his bowstring and Mrs Roundabout and Young Andrew hopping about in a most grotesque fashion. Soon Old Roundabout got excited and banged and thumped the string in double-quick time; then he unstrung the bow and using it as a whip, started lashing his wife and son till they fairly skipped round. We imagined they hadn't danced fast enough for his liking. But after a minute or two the Professor stopped them and began.

‘He exhibited a lot of skulls of the various races—Europeans, Asiatics, American Indians, Chinese, Negroes, Australian Blacks and finally the skulls of Bushmen. He said that, by measurements and size of brainpan, the Bushmen Pygmies were not the lowest of the human race by many points and that the lowest were the Australian Blacks.

‘The lecture was very interesting, but I noticed Old Roundabout looking very uneasy. Then he slipped under the table and crawled among the audience's legs to the door. Once outside, he took to his legs and ran. I fetched him back but he struggled violently. I put him in his seat and had a lot of bother getting him to stay there.

‘Afterwards I asked Young Andrew, through an interpreter: “What did your father mean by running out of the lecture?” And this is what he said:

‘“My father has been to plenty of these meetings. He knew quite well when the ‘killing time' was coming. He was sure it was very near when he ran. He ran because he was the oldest person there. So, of course, he would be the first to be killed.” '

I
N 1890 Charley married a New Zealand girl, Jenetta Rutherford, and between voyages fathered two boys and a girl. She was a tragic figure, worn down by loneliness and the English climate. Her husband's attitude to marriage perhaps corresponded to the quotation I found in his scrap-book under the title
This Freedom
:

By 1896 Jenetta's health could take England no longer and she moved to Cape Town with the children. She died there on March 3rd 1897, of tuberculosis of the hip. Charley took the children back to live with his unmarried sister in Shrewsbury.

S
IX MONTHS later he got his first command. She was the
Mataura
, a single-screw cargo-passenger ship of 7,584 tons newly built on the Clyde. She carried 20,000 bales of wool and the same number of frozen carcasses. She ran a few sails aloft to steady her roll to make steerage in a crisis, but she had no radio.

The outbound voyage was uneventful and the company boisterous. His passengers were the New Zealand Shooting Team returning from the Kolapura Cup. On the night of their arrival in Wellington, the Mayor gave a soirée in the Drill Hall. Charley had diarrhoea, had lost his evening clothes and sat unnoticed at the back until his passengers called for a speech.

‘My Lords, Gentlemen,' he said. ‘I am grateful to have been the means under Providence of bringing these brave New Zealand warriors to their hearths and homes,' and sat down.

Nobody clapped but a tiny, wizened Frenchman, who said: ‘Capitaine, you 'ave make the best speech of the evening.'

‘Only if brevity be the soul of wit,' said Charley.

The Frenchman, whose name was Henri Grien, came aboard in the morning and asked for a free passage home in return for a half share in the patent diving dress he hoped to sell to the British Admiralty. He said it worked on the principle of the copper steam-hose. Anyone could go down to sixty fathoms in perfect safety, though the Danish diver, who first tried it out off Sydney Heads, was hauled up dead.

‘Why didn't you go down yourself?'

‘Fool,' said Henri. ‘If I go down in suit and he goes wrong, who is to say what is matter with?'

Charley signed him on, not so much for the suit, but as a source of entertainment.

“Ave been in communication with the spirit world,' Henri announced one morning. ‘This ship will sink but all crew will be save.'

‘Quite so, Henri. Thank you.'

About this time Charley had another communication from a woman onshore, who also dreamed the ship would go down.

Half an hour before sailing, his friend, Captain Croucher of the S.S.
Waikato,
came aboard and asked for a man to complete his articles.