- end_line
- 1949
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:15.149Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 1880
- text
- moody and miserable is naturally enough an utter neglect of his toilet.
The sailors perhaps ought to make allowances; but heartless as they
are, they do not. No sooner is his cleanliness questioned than they
rise upon him like a mob of the Middle Ages upon a Jew; drag him into
the lee-scuppers, and strip him to the buff. In vain he bawls for
mercy; in vain calls upon the captain to save him.
Alas! I say again, for the land-lubber at sea. He is the veriest wretch
the watery world over. And such was Rope Tarn; of all landlubbers, the
most lubberly and most miserable. A forlorn, stunted, hook-visaged
mortal he was too; one of those whom you know at a glance to have been
tried hard and long in the furnace of affliction. His face was an
absolute puzzle; though sharp and sallow, it had neither the wrinkles
of age nor the smoothness of youth; so that for the soul of me, I could
hardly tell whether he was twenty-five or fifty.
But to his history. In his better days, it seems he had been a
journeyman baker in London, somewhere about Holborn; and on Sundays
wore a Hue coat and metal buttons, and spent his afternoons in a
tavern, smoking his pipe and drinking his ale like a free and easy
journeyman baker that he was. But this did not last long; for an
intermeddling old fool was the ruin of him. He was told that London
might do very well for elderly gentlemen and invalids; but for a lad of
spirit, Australia was the Land of Promise. In a dark day Ropey wound up
his affairs and embarked.
Arriving in Sydney with a small capital, and after a while waxing snug
and comfortable by dint of hard kneading, he took unto himself a wife;
and so far as she was concerned, might then have gone into the country
and retired; for she effectually did his business. In short, the lady
worked him woe in heart and pocket; and in the end, ran off with his
till and his foreman. Ropey went to the sign of the Pipe and Tankard;
got fuddled; and over his fifth pot meditated suicide—an intention
carried out; for the next day he shipped as landsman aboard the Julia,
South Seaman.
The ex-baker would have fared far better, had it not been for his
heart, which was soft and underdone. A kind word made a fool of him;
and hence most of the scrapes he got into. Two or three wags, aware of
his infirmity, used to “draw him out” in conversation whenever the most
crabbed and choleric old seamen were present.
To give an instance. The watch below, just waked from their sleep, are
all at breakfast; and Ropey, in one corner, is disconsolately partaking
of its delicacies. “Now, sailors newly waked are no cherubs; and
therefore not a word is spoken, everybody munching his biscuit, grim
and unshaven. At this juncture an affable-looking scamp—Flash
Jack—crosses the forecastle, tin can in hand, and seats himself beside
the land-lubber.
“Hard fare this, Ropey,” he begins; “hard enough, too, for them that’s
known better and lived in Lun’nun. I say now, Ropey, s’posing you were
back to Holborn this morning, what would you have for breakfast, eh?”
“Have for breakfast!” cried Ropey in a rapture. “Don’t speak of it!”
“What ails that fellow?” here growled an old sea-bear, turning round
savagely.
“Oh, nothing, nothing,” said Jack; and then, leaning over to Rope Yarn,
he bade him go on, but speak lower.
“Well, then,” said he, in a smuggled tone, his eyes lighting up like
two lanterns, “well, then, I’d go to Mother Moll’s that makes the great
muffins: I’d go there, you know, and cock my foot on the ’ob, and call
for a noggin o’ somethink to begin with.”
“What then, Ropey?”
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