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- CHAPTER III.
FURTHER ACCOUNT OF THE JULIA
Owing to the absence of anything like regular discipline, the vessel
was in a state of the greatest uproar. The captain, having for some
time past been more or less confined to the cabin from sickness, was
seldom seen. The mate, however, was as hearty as a young lion, and ran
about the decks making himself heard at all hours. Bembo, the New
Zealand harpooner, held little intercourse with anybody but the mate,
who could talk to him freely in his own lingo. Part of his time he
spent out on the bowsprit, fishing for albicores with a bone hook; and
occasionally he waked all hands up of a dark night dancing some
cannibal fandango all by himself on the forecastle. But, upon the
whole, he was remarkably quiet, though something in his eye showed he
was far from being harmless.
Doctor Long Ghost, having sent in a written resignation as the ship’s
doctor, gave himself out as a passenger for Sydney, and took the world
quite easy. As for the crew, those who were sick seemed marvellously
contented for men in their condition; and the rest, not displeased with
the general licence, gave themselves little thought of the morrow.
The Julia’s provisions were very poor. When opened, the barrels of pork
looked as if preserved in iron rust, and diffused an odour like a stale
ragout. The beef was worse yet; a mahogany-coloured fibrous substance,
so tough and tasteless, that I almost believed the cook’s story of a
horse’s hoof with the shoe on having been fished up out of the pickle
of one of the casks. Nor was the biscuit much better; nearly all of it
was broken into hard, little gunflints, honeycombed through and
through, as if the worms usually infesting this article in long
tropical voyages had, in boring after nutriment, come out at the
antipodes without finding anything.
Of what sailors call “small stores,” we had but little. “Tea,” however,
we had in abundance; though, I dare say, the Hong merchants never had
the shipping of it. Beside this, every other day we had what English
seamen call “shot soup”—great round peas, polishing themselves like
pebbles by rolling about in tepid water.
It was afterward told me, that all our provisions had been purchased by
the owners at an auction sale of condemned navy stores in Sydney.
But notwithstanding the wateriness of the first course of soup, and the
saline flavour of the beef and pork, a sailor might have made a
satisfactory meal aboard of the Julia had there been any side dishes—a
potato or two, a yam, or a plantain. But there was nothing of the kind.
Still, there was something else, which, in the estimation of the men,
made up for all deficiencies; and that was the regular allowance of
Pisco.
It may seem strange that in such a state of affairs the captain should
be willing to keep the sea with his ship. But the truth was, that by
lying in harbour, he ran the risk of losing the remainder of his men by
desertion; and as it was, he still feared that, in some outlandish bay
or other, he might one day find his anchor down, and no crew to weigh
it.
With judicious officers the most unruly seamen can at sea be kept in
some sort of subjection; but once get them within a cable’s length of
the land, and it is hard restraining them. It is for this reason that
many South Sea whalemen do not come to anchor for eighteen or twenty
months on a stretch. When fresh provisions are needed, they run for the
nearest land—heave to eight or ten miles off, and send a boat ashore to
trade. The crews manning vessels like these are for the most part
villains of all nations and dyes; picked up in the lawless ports of the
Spanish Main, and among the savages of the islands. Like galley-slaves,
they are only to be governed by scourges and chains. Their officers go
among them with dirk and pistol—concealed, but ready at a grasp.
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