Читать книгу The Story Teller of the Desert—"Backsheesh!" or, Life and Adventures in the Orient - Thomas Wallace Knox - Страница 64

There was the usual crowd of friends to bid farewell to our passengers; and the parting cheer, as we steamed out from our dock, rang in our ears long after the spire of Trinity had disappeared, and the protruding front of Castle Garden had been lost in the distance. There was only the gentlest breeze to ruffle the water as we pushed oceanward and caught sight of the blue line of sea and sky that formed the eastern horizon. We watched the sun declining in the west, bringing the Highlands of Neversink into bold relief; our steady progress left the land each moment more and more indistinct, till, at last, day and land faded away together. We were out on the ocean, and the world was become to us small indeed.

An Atlantic trip is not considered in these days a very serious affair. There are persons who persist in speaking of the ocean as a ferry, with no more terror than the North or East River. It may be a good joke to call it a ferry, but it is rather a solemn joke when you have been at sea a couple of weeks and have experienced a few gales.

The day we sailed the water was as smooth as a mill-pond, and it remained so for about thirty-six hours. In the room next to me there was a judge from New Jersey; a jolly, good-natured old boy, whose face was a pleasure to contemplate. The first day out, he told me he was agreeably surprised with the ocean, and that he should have brought his wife along if he had supposed it would be so comfortable.

“People do exaggerate so,” said he, “that you never know what to believe. They have told me that the ocean was terribly rough, and that I should be very sick; but I see it was all a mistake Why, I have seen it worse than this going from New York to Staten Island.”

I assured the Judge that some of the passengers might have been lying to him, and that the ocean was very much slandered. Next day it came on to blow, and by midnight we were tossing as if a lot of giants had put the ship in a blanket and were having some first-class fun. She rocked and pitched magnificently, and a liberal portion of the passengers were laid out with mal-du-mer.

And the Judge! I paid him a visit when the storm was at its worst, and his condition was such as to rouse in my breast mingled sentiments of pleasure and sorrow. He was lying on the sofa, and his right hand convulsively clutched a basin into which he was pouring the contents of his stomach.

"What a fool a man is to come to sea,” he gasped in the intervals of his wretchedness. “I was an idiot not to have gone travelling in Pennsylvania, instead of coming out here. I would give a thousand dollars to be safe back in New York.”

I endeavored to console him, but he would not be comforted. While I poured soothing words into his ear, and brandy down his throat, the ship gave an extra lurch that brought a fresh discharge from the Judge’s mouth. Something dark and solid fell into the basin, and as the Judge contemplated it, his face assumed an expression of horror.

“I will be hanged,” said he, “if I have not thrown up a piece of my liver; just look at it; everything inside of me will be up next. In fifteen minutes you can look for my toe-nails.”

He sank back fainting, but brightened up a little when I told him that what he supposed to be his liver was nothing more than a piece of corned beef which he swallowed at dinner and his stomach had failed to digest.

He grew better next day, but persisted in declaring the ocean a humbug, and said that when he once got back, nothing should tempt him to come abroad again.

People are differently affected by the ocean. Some are never sea-sick, while others can never go on the water without being laid up. I have known persons who kept their rooms an entire voyage; they went below when leaving land on one side, and did not come out again till it was sighted on the other. Women are the weaker vessels, when it comes to an ocean experience, however strong they may be in domestic griefs and family jars. In sea-sickness, they fall much sooner than men, and are slower to recover their appetites. Children recover more quickly than adults, and sometimes they are well and running about long before their parents are able to get away with a cup of tea or a cracker.

To those who contemplate going to sea, I have a piece of advice to offer that may save them the pangs of the marine malady.

The night before you are to sail, take a blue pill—ten grains—just before going to bed, and when you get up in the morning take, the first thing, a dose of citrate of magnesia. Then eat your breakfast and go on board, and I will wager four to one, that you will not be sea-sick a moment, though the water may be as rough as an Arkansas traveller’s manners.

The above prescription was given to me several years ago, and I have rigidly followed it every time I have gone to sea since I received it. It has saved me from sea-sickness, and it has been of equal value to many others, to whom I have given it. I have published it several times for the benefit of the human race, and I think it worth giving again.

Sea-sickness is a dreadful feeling, and anything that can be expected to prevent it is worth trying. I remember the first time I was sea-sick, I wanted to be thrown overboard, and didn’t care what became of me. If the ship had sunk beneath me I should have been glad instead of sorry; and if the captain had threatened to tie me up and give me forty lashes, I should not have made the slightest opposition to the execution of his threat. If the Koh-i-noor diamond had been lying ten yards from me, and had been offered me on condition that I should pick it up, I couldn’t have stirred an inch to get it. The death of a maiden aunt, from whom I had great expectations, would have failed to elate me, and the refusal of my hand by an heiress to a million would have caused me no regret. Nothing can bring perfect despair so readily as sea-sickness, and make its victim ready and willing to die. Somebody has said that in the first hour of his sea-sickness he feared he should die; but in the second hour he was afraid he should not; and that is pretty nearly the experience of every sufferer.

You have heard of the man who wanted to thrash the fellow who wrote “A Life on the Ocean Wave.” I think there were several on board our ship who agreed with him, and would bear a hand to assist him. Somebody has written—and his head was not unlevel—

“The praises of the Ocean grand,

‘Tis very well to sing on land;

‘Tis very fine to hear them carolled

By Thomas Campbell or Childe Harold—

But sad indeed to see that Ocean,

From east to west, in wild commotion.”

Though I did not suffer from sea-sickness, I did not escape considerable annoyance and discomfort. Anybody who knows me can testify that I am not a dwarf, that I stand over six feet, and have a proportionate breadth of beam. My berth was about an inch shorter than its occupant, and when I tried to lie flat on my back I took up all the width of it. I couldn’t straighten out, because the berth was too short; I couldn’t lie on my side through fear of being rocked out; and I couldn’t lie face down, for the same reason that I couldn’t lie face up. Taken for all in all, the room was the most uncomfortable I ever slept in on board ship. When I went into my “little bed,” I felt as though I was in a second-hand coffin, originally made for a smaller man, and I dreamed of this state of things so often that I considered the night had gone wrong without such a slumbering fancy. The rolling of the ship made it awkward to put on my clothes and perform other toilet duties; and if I went through preparations for breakfast without a tumble or two, I considered myself lucky.

One morning the steward brought me a lemon. It is a very good practice at sea to swallow the juice of a lemon half an hour before breakfast, in order to clear the stomach and remove any tendencies to biliousness. He put the lemon on my sofa, and I crawled out of bed just as he retreated and closed the door.

Well; the ship made a lurch and sent me head foremost upon the sofa, as though I had been shot from a mortar. With some difficulty I picked myself up, and braced long enough to get a tumbler and make ready to squeeze the lemon. Just as I reached for it the ship went the other way, and the lemon rolled from the sofa and under the berth. I went on hands and knees in a humble attitude to reach for it; over went the ship just as I extended my arm under the berth; my body followed my arm, and my legs followed my body, and it was no easy matter to get up again. While I was getting to rights, the old craft lurched the other way, and my lemon shot across the floor like a rat pursued by a terrier, and took up a hiding-place again under the sofa.

Then I went for it with the same result as before. Just as I put my hand upon it there was a movement in the lemon-market, and the article I was pursuing traversed the floor and sought the farthest corner under the berth once more.

About five minutes we kept up that circus; sometimes I was ahead, and sometimes the lemon, and both were pretty well exhausted by the time the race was over.

At last I took him on the fly, and made a short stop; lost my balance and went down in a corner among my clothes. Then I gathered myself together and managed to cut the lemon open and to squeeze it. I lost half the juice in a lurch of the ship, just as I raised the glass to my lips; and in my hurry to save what was left I swallowed seeds enough to start a respectable lemon orchard. I think an artist could have made a series of interesting sketches had he witnessed the race between the lemon and me.

Dinner has a good deal of fear in it if the ship happens to be rolling nicely. Racks are put on the tables to keep things from falling off, and sometimes the rocking is so bad that even the racks are not altogether satisfactory. In front of you is a rack just wide enough to hold your plate, and, when you are taking soup, the edge of it is just even with the rack. If the ship makes up her mind she can tip your plate so that the soup will flow out into your lap, and after doing that she will tilt the other way and leave the side next to you quite dry. Your tumbler will assert the correctness of its name in more ways than one, unless it is very firmly placed and wedged in where it cannot fetch away.

The best way at such times is to hold your soup-plate in your hand and fasten your tumbler in the rack where the glasses are kept. Sometimes a joint of meat or a boiled turkey will leap from its plate and go off the table as easily as a live turkey could make the same movement. My friend, the Judge, caught a turkey in his lap one day, and his trowsers were so covered with oyster sauce that they might have been served up without serious trouble.

A New York matron was likewise honored with a visit of a leg of mutton, and I narrowly escaped from a dish of blanc mange that seemed determined to pay me a complimentary call. The desk where I used to write had a remarkable tendency to change its angle at every moment, and if my old desk in New York were to conduct itself thus, I should ask what it had been drinking.

Day after day we steamed along, sometimes getting a little assistance from our sails, but more frequently depending upon steam alone. Out of New York we were accompanied by a German steamer, but we soon lost sight of her in consequence of a divergence in our courses. Almost every day we saw steamers and sailing-ships, and sometimes we had three or four of them in sight. We were directly ports of England and America, and the wonder is, not that we saw so many vessels, but that so few of them came in sight. Our engines were not stopped after we left New York till we arrived at Queenstown, where our mails and some of our passengers were landed.

Time hangs heavily on one’s hands at sea. The first day out you are uneasy, if you are not sea-sick; you try to read and you can’t; you sit in one place awhile, then in another, then in another; and then you go somewhere else. You get over a page at a time; you shut and open your book a dozen times in an hour, and are as discontented as a weaning calf. You sit down to games of cards, but don’t feel like playing; you go forward and aft, and aft and forward, and really don’t know what to do on the track between the great with yourself. If the weather is fair you go on deck, and then you go below; and then on deck again. You wish yourself on shore, and you fall to counting the hours that must elapse before the voyage will end. You don’t feel like making the acquaintance of anybody, and nobody wants to make yours; and so the day goes on till you turn into your bunk and try to sleep. In the morning you rise feeling about as amiable as a bear with a sore head, though your nerves are more quiet than they were. Then you begin to make acquaintances, and in a couple of days the passengers know each other pretty fairly; enough, at any rate, for all practical purposes.

By the fourth day you have the peculiarities of everybody down to a dot; and about this time the spirit of mischief prevails. There are sure to be some waggish passengers ready for any kind of fun, and sometimes they are rather merciless in it. If there is a timid man on board they talk accident to him, and if there is a credulous man on board they fill him with yarns of the most frightful character. There was a youth on board from one of the eastern states, and he was constantly in fear lest the ship should sink. Two of the wags talked of accident till his hair stood on end and he dared not go to bed at night. At the table where the Judge and I were seated, there were two superannuated Englishmen who had been to New-York to visit some friends, and were going home without seeing anything in America outside Manhattan Island. I fear they had strange opinions of our country before they got back.

They listened to the talk, and were evidently taking notes of what they heard. Their information may be known by the following sample.

While we were at lunch one day the conversation happened to turn on petroleum. The Judge addressing one of the jokers who was known as “the Major,” said very gravely: “That was a singular practice during the war, giving each man a pint of crude petroleum to drink before going into battle.”

“Yes;” the Major replied, “but it paid very well at first, as the men fought like tigers in consequence. But we had to abandon it before the end of the war.”

“Really now, you don’t mean that your soldiers drank that abominable stuff?” said one of the astonished Britons. "Oh, yes,” said the Judge, his solemnity increasing, “they grew very fond of it, and many of them deserted when they were deprived of it.”

“Why was it given up?” asked Briton number two.

“It was found’,” the Major explained, “that many of the men died of spontaneous combustion in consequence of drinking this stuff. In the case of smokers it was specially dangerous, as a man’s breath might take fire while he was lighting his pipe. One of our best regiments—the 49th Buffaloes—was almost annihilated by petroleum. It was during the ‘Seven Days’ Fight’ near Richmond. They had been in action continuously, and, for more than a week, quadruple rations of petroleum were served to them, so that they were saturated with it. On the last day of the battle, as they were drawn up in line for inspection, one of the men struck a match just for fun. His breath caught, and so did that of the man on each side of him. In half a minute the flame ran along the line, and in less time than it takes me to tell it, half the regiment were on fire. Some had presence of mind to fall on their faces when they saw the flash, and these were the only ones that were saved.”

“Dear me! how strange!”

“Yes;” the Major added, “and sometimes prisoners in the hands of the enemy were set on fire by the inhuman officers who wished to witness their terrible sufferings. We found the use of petroleum as a beverage was in various ways an injury to the army, so we gave it up.”

This wonderful story was heard with apparent confidence by our fellow travellers, and I have no doubt that it was told round British firesides in perfect good faith. The Judge and his friends talked of snow-storms a hundred feet deep, of potatoes in South Carolina as large as flour-barrels, of oysters in Texas that sing and play the piano, and of a horse in Cincinnati that could swear and chew tobacco. Wonderful adventures in all parts of the land were minutely described, and if the voyage had lasted a week longer, and the stories could all be collected and published, they could give Baron Munchausen several points and beat him. The wags described bloody encounters of men in the West, and left the impression that anywhere beyond the Hudson River a person who by accident brushes against the elbow of another is shot down immediately.

In the same spirit of mischief they tortured the timid youth till he did not know what he was about. He was not so good a subject as one with whom I crossed the Atlantic some years before; but he did very well. The principal joke played upon him was to talk of accidents when he was at hand.

The other man of whom I speak—the one of several years ago—was the victim of a regular conspiracy. Some of the passengers arranged to talk in his presence of nothing but accidents; no matter what topic they were discussing, when he came near they shifted to accidents at once. When they ran out of true stories they resorted to fiction, and the fiction was worse by far than the fact.

He—the victim—used to remain up until sent down below by the officers, and he generally slept with a life preserver beside him. One day when some boxes and cans were being thrown overboard, his tormentors got up a story that the barometer had been falling about an inch an hour, and that a terrible gale was expected. The Captain feared that we could not live through it, and had thrown out these sealed boxes, containing duplicates of the government dispatches and other important papers, in the hope that some more fortunate vessel might find them, in case we were destroyed.

Jack, as we called him, was in the greatest terror. He went below, and remained shut in his cabin for the rest of the day and evening. As no gale came, it was explained that we passed it and just avoided its track, and they pointed out a line of dark clouds on the horizon as the probable course of the gale. He was satisfied and became more cheerful, though his general terror did not cease.

When we approached the end of our voyage it was night, and it became necessary to throw up a rocket. The officer then in charge of the deck said to the jokers:

“If you want some fun with your friend, get him forward near the smoke-stack, and as close as possible to the steam-pipe. When the engine stops they will instantly let off steam, and just as it starts I will send up a couple of rockets.” They got Jack forward and engaged him in conversation. His back was about two feet from the pipe, and the same distance from the rockets. The steam was shut off from the engine and turned into the pipe with a tremendous roar. At the same instant the rockets let go with a tremendous crash that anybody who has stood near a flying rocket can appreciate, and the crowd gave a yell that would have excited the envy of a band of Indians.

Jack made one bound aft, and his friends had to run after him lest he would jump overboard.

He went into his cabin and did not come out for an hour or more. But when he did reappear, he was freshly alarmed. The steamer had been stopped for a sounding, and that noisy piece of machinery—the donkey engine—was put in operation to haul in the lead-line. All was still, until suddenly the donkey engine started with its clatter. Jack was dozing at the time, and the noise roused him. He knew that something was wrong, and with nothing on but his shirt he darted to the deck. It took some time to quiet him and persuade him to go where his scanty costume would be more appropriate. Necessarily the space on an ocean-steamer is very much restricted. The ordinary sleeping-rooms are about six feet square, or at most six feet by seven; and in this space two, or sometimes three or four, persons are expected to spend their nights and keep their superfluous garments and light baggage.

When there are few passengers each can have a room to himself; but when there is anything like a “rush,” there must be more or less doubling up. Steamship agents will give you a room to yourself on payment of half an extra fare, and many persons avail themselves of the opportunity. Others who desire seclusion, but suffer from shallowness of purse, prefer to make friends with the purser or chief steward, and thereby secure what they wish for. No general rule can be laid down for this, and I leave each man to act for himself.

Once, when I crossed the Atlantic, I exulted in finding myself alone in a room well situated in the middle of the ship. While I was rejoicing about the matter, I was thrown into consternation by the steward, who entered and said:

“There is a young man in the room close by the screw, and he doesn’t like it, and is going to ask the captain to put him in with you.”

“William,” said I solemnly—for his name was William—“William, you know how delighted I should be to have him here. But, William, do you know that I have fits, nightmare, delirium tremens, small-pox and several other maladies, and that I am the most ill-natured man on board the ship? And do you know, William, that I have half a sovereign for you if that adolescent gentleman stays away?”

William smiled, said nothing, stuck his tongue in his cheek and departed. Ten minutes later he returned, bringing a broad grin on his face as a prefix to the information:

“The young feller will stay where he is, sir, and I hope you’ll remember the half-sov’ at the end of the voyage.”

What William said about me to the occupant of the room near the screw, I am unable to say; but I observed that the youth shunned my society, and consequently fear that he had formed an unfavorable opinion. But I gave the promised money to the steward “sans peur et sans reproche.”

The dangers of the Atlantic voyage are of little moment, and no more to be dreaded than those of a journey by rail from New York to San Francisco. I refer to the unavoidable dangers, such as gales, collisions with wrecks and similar accidents that human foresight cannot prevent. Accidents like the loss of the Atlantic and the Schiller, and similar disasters, are to be attributed to the bad management, either of the company, or of the ship’s officers, or of both, and do not come under the head of unavoidable calamities. With good management on all sides, and proper inspection of ships, a journey across the ocean is as safe as a rail journey of the same length, and in some respects more so. I have been assured by men familiar with the history of steam navigation that the casualties are not more numerous in proportion to the numbers travelling, than on American railways.

The reason why an accident on the water is more dreadful than on land is twofold. In the first place, the number of persons killed or wounded in a railway accident is always a small percentage of those on the train. Take Carr’s Rock, Angola, Richmond Switch, or any other terrible disaster by rail, and the number killed was a great deal smaller than the number of those who escaped unhurt. But a marine accident may destroy the life of every one on board the ship. This has been the case on several occasions. The steamers President, City of Glasgow, Pacific, City of Boston, Tempest, United Kingdom, Ismailia, and Trojan were lost at sea, and never heard from. Two steamers on the American, and one, I believe, on the English coast, were wrecked with all on board; and one steamer was wrecked near Moville, from which only a single man escaped. Most of these steamers were lost on their eastward trips, when their passenger lists were much smaller than if they had been going westward.

Another thing that makes an ocean accident terrible, is the difficulty of escape. If you are overturned in a railway car, you fall upon solid earth, but in an accident on the ocean, you have nothing but water to stand upon—a very poor support indeed. The boats of a steamship are not sufficient to hold her passengers and crew, as a general thing, and in case of an accident on a westward trip, when the steerage is crowded with emigrants, the loss of life may be enormous. On board the steamer which carried me over the Atlantic there were eight boats, with a capacity altogether of not more than four hundred persons, under the most favorable circumstances, supposing all of them launched and the weather fine. On her westward trips she frequently carries twelve hundred steerage passengers, and her crew and cabin passenger list would probably bring the complement up to very nearly fourteen hundred. In case the steamer sinks at sea, there would be a thousand persons who could not possibly find places in the boats! There is not a ship carrying emigrants that has boat room enough for half her passengers on a westward trip, and I doubt if any of them could even carry away a fourth of their complement. When your ship goes down at sea you may consider yourself fortunate if you do not go down with her.

It is a burning shame that nearly all the steam lines crossing the Atlantic, are in the hands of other nationalities than ours. It is not generally known that two of the English lines are mainly owned in New York, only enough of the stock being held abroad to enable the ships to sail under the British flag. The reason of this is that our laws discriminate against our own people, and in favor of other nations; the taxes and other restrictions are such, that an American line cannot be run so as to compete successfully with a foreign one, and consequently, American capital seeking investment in steamships for the Atlantic service, is very likely to go under a foreign flag! Isn’t this pitiful?

There are occasional spasmodic efforts for the establishment of an American line between New York and Liverpool, but they have never lasted long. As I write these pages there is an American line from Philadelphia that seems to promise well. It has good ships and is said to be well equipped and managed. I sincerely hope it will have a long and successful career, but if it does it will be different from any of the numerous “lines” that have had their headquarters in New York.