Читать книгу Advance Australasia: A Day-to-Day Record of a Recent Visit to Australasia - Frank Thomas Bullen - Страница 4

Table of Contents

Thirty-four years ago, in a fine American ship chartered by Messrs. Anderson Anderson & Co., I paid my first visit to Australia, and the only one I ever made thither direct from the United Kingdom. Those were the palmy days of sailing ships to the Australasian Colonies, and a splendid fleet of regular liners, whose names were household words, made wonderful passages for equally wonderful freights with full cargoes each way for the great firms of Green, Wigram, Devitt & Moore, George Thompson, Anderson Anderson, and many others of less note, but of quite equal stability and repute. Passengers were carried, of course, in great numbers, and were, generally speaking, fairly comfortable, especially in the first class, or cuddy, although, of course, many of the necessities of ocean travel to-day were then its luxuries. It often happened, though, that through pressure of cargo or passengers, outside ships—that is, not owned by the regular lines—were chartered for a voyage, and passengers who had booked with a great firm upon the reputation of their ships for comfort and attention to the needs of the traveller, were sometimes badly disappointed. It was certainly so in the ship in which I paid my first visit. She was a splendid Boston-built vessel, but with very scanty accommodation for passengers. The captain was a very old Yankee, really past his work; but in one thing he was full of vigour, and that was in his hatred of and contempt for anything or anybody British; and he resented bitterly carrying British passengers in his saloon at all, telling them, as I well remember, upon an occasion when they approached him with a complaint, "I wish to have nothing to say to you. If I had been consulted, I would have paid big money rather than have carried you; but since you are here, make the best of it, and don't bring any complaints to me, for I won't hear you."

So, of course, they were none too comfortable, especially as they had to wait upon themselves entirely, and bribe the cook to prepare their food, which, as he was a perfect fraud of a cook—a most unusual thing in American ships—did not help them very much. And unfortunately, however smart the old skipper may have been in his prime—and I cannot imagine a Yankee skipper not being smart—he was now, as I have said, quite past his work, and consequently we made a very long passage for so fine a ship. We commenced badly. Although the weather was beautifully fine, we took a Channel pilot—an almost unheard-of thing for an outward-bounder to do—and when we got well down off Plymouth, the captain forbade him to stand in for the English shore so that he might get a chance to land. So we carried him, fretting terribly and exhausting his vocabulary of abuse, half-way across the Bay of Biscay, where, meeting a homeward-bound steamer, the captain condescended to signal, heave-to and release the unlawful prisoner. His farewell was copious, involved, and highly decorated with flowers of sea-speech, at which I did not wonder.

The weather all the way out was exceedingly favourable, but the time taken to Melbourne was 137 days, the average passage for such ships as she was being about 95. The only people who really enjoyed the passage, and, I believe, could have wished it longer, were the fellows forward who commenced broaching the valuable general cargo before the ship was out of the Channel, and lived always like the proverbial fighting-cocks, washing down their huge meals of various preserved foods, biscuits, &c., with copious draughts of all kinds of liquor from beer to champagne. The fact that to reach the spoil they often had to crawl amongst, over, and beneath a consignment of gun- and blasting-powder, amounting to over one hundred tons, and that with naked candles, never seemed to trouble them. Perhaps it is hardly necessary to add that they all deserted immediately upon the ship's arrival at Sandridge Pier, and, not to seem peculiar, I followed their example a day or two later.

The conditions obtaining on my present passage out present, I suppose, as complete a contrast to that long-ago journey as are possible at sea. The great steamship Omrah of the Orient Royal Mail Line, with a crew and passenger list of over seven hundred, gliding away from her berth in Tilbury Docks in majestic silence, and an utter absence of fuss or bother, the schedule of times of arrival and departure from each port called at on her twelve-thousand-mile journey calculated to the nearest hour, the minute attention paid to the comfort of each individual passenger of whatever class, and the extreme order and regularity of the working of the huge intricate machine—all these are commonplaces of the regular ocean traveller to-day, who indeed has grown so to consider them as a part of the scheme of things that he or she, especially she, is prone to regard any irregularity, however caused, as an infringement of chartered right, and without any consideration of circumstances to resent it accordingly. So easily do we grow accustomed to what, only two or three decades ago, was looked upon as a series of miracles.

To me, however, this passage was of the highest interest, because in all my meanderings on many seas for so long a period I had never yet sampled the wonders of the Suez Canal, very inelegantly dubbed the "Ditch" by veteran Eastern travellers. I had heard fearsome stories of the iniquities of Port Said, of the discomfort of passing through that furrow in the desert of eighty-seven miles, and especially of the terrible heat of the Red Sea. Consequently I took little heed of Gib, of Marseilles, or of Naples, except to note that we left the latter port about midnight, the cone of Vesuvius glowing fiercely against a background of lowering sky, and wonder whether a similar fate to that of St. Pierre (which I visited in 1904) was imminent for the crowded villages of Torre del Greco, Torre dell' Annunziata and Ottignano. For the mountain looked furiously angry, and it has ever been noted that this warning is given before a grand exhibition of Plutonic power. Stromboli, which we passed close to, lay basking in the glorious sunshine, an innocent-looking halo of light vapour crowning his august head, and evincing not the slightest sympathy with his fiery brother in the north. Etna, which was passed later, looked, if possible, even more peaceful, in that his vast flanks were robed in purest white almost to the summit, which, like Stromboli, had just a light wreath of vapour hovering about its lofty crest.

And then away under the same pleasant, placid conditions to the land of Egypt, not a cloud in the sky, hardly a ripple on the sea, and the climatic conditions as regards temperature nearly perfect. We arrived at Port Said in the early dawn, the weather being quite cool enough for an overcoat, picked up our pilot and steamed sedately in to the buoys off the town amidst an extraordinary hush, only broken presently by the hubbub of the coaling Arabs, who worked with an almost fiendish energy to get the six huge lighters of good Welsh fuel into the body of the ship through the side ports, thus producing the minimum of dust. To any one accustomed to disciplined work, the ways of these Arabs are mysterious beyond comprehension. Everybody seems to be in command, and to issue orders in a high yell of which nobody appears to take the slightest notice. The most insignificant, ragged varlet, who has apparently been dozing upon the coal, will suddenly start up and rend the atmosphere with his raucous cries, taking command of the whole flotilla. But nothing happens, except that by and by all the barges are in position and the coal passing begins, every man, as he empties his basket into the shoot and descends the plank, making some mystic passes in front of his face with his left hand, and intoning a few weird words of Arabic, probably an invocation or thanksgiving to Allah.

The police arrangements at Port Said appear to be well-nigh perfect. The boatmen do not pester for hire, because the fare is fixed at threepence per passenger during the daytime and sixpence at night, and it is paid into an office on shore—a penny of backsheesh making the boatman quite happy. On shore it is warm undoubtedly, but other discomforts there are none. No almost savage importunities to buy or go here or there; and as for vice, the unparalleled viciousness for which Port Said has long been a byword—well, if it exists, which I very much doubt, at least to any great extent, it must be deliberately sought for, and that at considerable expense. Certainly as far as I have been able to ascertain, viciousness is not nearly as flagrant in Port Said now as it is in any large city at home or on the Continent. No doubt it was, as a cosmopolitan acquaintance of mine put it, "a gay place once, but these infernal hypocrites of English have made it as tame as a London suburb on a Sunday afternoon." At midday we cast off from the buoys and entered the Canal, having, during our stay, shipped an extension of the rudder and a huge searchlight over the bows, the former because the slow rate of speed admissible in the Canal (about four knots) does not allow the vessel to answer her ordinary rudder quick enough, and the second to permit of the navigation of the Canal by night. At first the scene was quite impressive, especially the amazing contrast between the gigantic dredgers, which lie by the banks and scoop up the bed of the Canal, pouring it out through a huge tube on to the desert beyond, and the nuggars, or Nile boats, of a type dating back two thousand years or more, with their upward-flaring bows and their huge lateen sails. The wind was right aft, so that we were in an almost perfect calm; yet it was cool in the shade, and only over the desert, where an occasional mirage showed itself, did it appear to be hot. As evening came on, the desert scenes aroused strange memories, the unkempt encampments with their groups of couchant camels, the solitary figures engaged in prayer with their faces Mecca-wards, and then a sudden blaze of colour, a golden glory in the West, and the vivid day was done.

As in all such situations, night succeeds day with almost startling suddenness, but surely never did sweeter dark succeed glaring sunshine than now. There was no moon, and in the clear, deep violet of the heavens, from zenith to horizon, the stars glowed incandescently. The air was most invigoratingly cool—in fact, to the incautious ones coming up from the heated saloon after dinner in light evening dress, it was fraught with considerable danger. A solemn hush pervaded space—a silence which only seemed more profound for the gentle s-s-s-h of the returning water to the banks as we glided past—and the sense, hardly due to hearing, of the slow throb of the giant propellers below. Ahead the steep banks glowed white as snow from the touch of the 30,000 candle-power electric light at the bows; astern, a vast, dazzling eye showed where another ship was silently stealing along after us. Even the usual gay chat of passengers exchanging reminiscences was hushed as if by the mental burden of the countless centuries of history round about them. For slowly we were stealing through the world-old desert, almost every grain of whose sands could tell, if vocal, wondrous tales of immemorial civilisations; and it needed no great stretch of imagination to people those solemn breadths with legions of ghostly watchers, whose sphinx-like faces expressed neither anger nor surprise, envy nor contempt, but only deep-browed contemplation of the splendid insolence of the modern engineer who had thus invaded their secret solitudes. And I could not help projecting my mind forward a few thousands of years, passing as swiftly as the space between us and the Ancient Egypt, and wondering whether the ephemera of that day would not class us as contemporary with Sesostris or Assur-banipal, even as we are apt to lose our historical perspective, and to look upon all the early civilisations as practically coeval.

We emerged from the Canal into the Gulf of Suez on one of the most glorious mornings conceivable, a fresh breeze ruffling the dark blue of the Gulf into a myriad sparkling wavelets, the air sweet, cool, and heady as new wine, while the distant mountains lay enfolded in sombre purple. But all this beauty was lost upon our commander, who was loud in his objurgations against the abominable neglect, as he put it, of the authorities in allowing this roadstead at one end of the world's greatest highway to remain almost unnavigable for want of dredging, pointing, as he did so, to where our propellers were churning up the mud, and at the ship, which, by reason of her keel smelling the ground, was almost refusing to answer her helm. However, his annoyances were soon at an end, and in the splendid freshness of the new day, we sped joyously down the Gulf towards the much-dreaded and deeply historical Red Sea.