The Preparation
Chapter II Concerning Preparations in General, and Personnel in Particular
Our separate excursions into the field of commerce resulted in a healthier financial outlook at the next general meeting of dream merchants. Plans developed apace. Lists were made, schedules drawn up. An actual sailing date began to emerge out of a welter of conjecture.
On paper, the dream ship was converted from a work-worn fishing-smack into a cruiser yacht of comfort and elegance within a month, and a trifle under the estimated cost.
On paper, the art of navigation was acquired in our spare time, after the airy fashion of a Correspondence-School advertisement.
And again on paper—a map of the world outspread on the cabin table, to be exact—we actually decided on our route. At the point of an indomitable lead pencil we traversed vast tracts of ocean in the winking of an eye, and explored the furthermost corners of the earth; and if there is a more fascinating evening’s entertainment, I should like to hear of it.
Spain should be touched at, for the sake of her wine, if nothing else; perhaps Madeira, and most certainly the Canary Islands. After that, there was the little matter of the Atlantic Ocean, ending in the West Indies. Then came the Caribbean Sea, the Panama Canal, and so down into the milky way of the Pacific. It looked a long way; it was a long way, but we had a ship, and we had a crew, and what was the sea if not the highway of the earth? The enthusiasm of ignorance? Perhaps; yet I am convinced that without the enthusiasm, and most certainly without the ignorance, we should never have set sail, much less won through to our goal.
The transition from fancy to fact was effected the following morning, when Steve and I commenced the soul-racking task of transferring twelve tons of rusty pig-iron from the dream ship’s bilge to the quay alongside which we lay. This mass of obstinate metal had to be chipped and painted, and ultimately replaced so that we might disport ourselves on our beam ends, if the elements so willed, without shifting it. It was one of the dream ship’s strong points, that her ballast was all “inside.” There was no “fin” of lead hanging from her keel, that might come adrift from a multitude of causes, and leave us a tottering hulk. I told Steve this, as we wrestled with two hundredweight pigs, that had a knack of slipping their moorings in mid-air, and crashing through the cabin floor boards, or on to our anatomies with striking impartiality. I told it to him again, as we sat in the rain on the quay, chipping rust into each other’s eyes, but received no satisfactory reply on either occasion.
“By the way,” was all he said that evening, when, weary and bruised and rusty, we flung ourselves on our bunks, “according to schedule, this is where we study navigation, isn’t it?” And for three mortal hours he gave his undivided attention to a nautical epitome. That is the kind of man Steve is.
There is no undertaking that requires a more careful selection of personnel than a cruise such as we contemplated, and no better opportunity of taking a man’s measure than when fitting out! By the time it is done, one has either come to the conclusion that the other fellow has his points, or that to remain in his company another hour is beyond endurance. Naturally, his feelings are similar, and that we of the dream ship stood the mutual test seemed to me to augur well for the future.
It was during this trying period that we encountered a peculiarly pernicious type of the genus yachtsman on his native heath. He was owner of a pretty little six-tonner across the creek, and was “fitting out” also—had been for two months, as far as we could gather. The thing was evidently a hobby with him that he infinitely preferred to getting to sea. With a paint pot in one hand, and a camel’s hair brush in the other, he advanced on his craft in the manner of an artist attacking a master canvas, applied the pigment, and stood back with his head at an angle to view the effect. In itself there was nothing against this form of amusement, provided that it interfered with no one else; but, evidently tiring of his own company, at which I am not surprised, our yachtsman strolled in the direction of the dream ship to offer unsolicited criticism.
“Fine craft you have there,” was his introductory remark, and my heart warmed to him. Here, at all events, was a judge. “But too much beam for her length, and too much flaire. She’ll break your heart going to wind’ard,” he added, judicially, and I confess to loathing him on the instant. Imagine a stranger approaching you in the street and saying: “Fine wife you have there, but I don’t like her face—or her action.” Well, that is how I felt. For you must be told, unless you are an “owner” and know already, that the simile of the ship and the wife is not so far-fetched as may appear. Yet, with superhuman restraint, I continued to chip iron while it was pointed out to me that lead was better, that to paint spars instead of varnishing them was a crime, and to paint decks was worse; in short, that most things about the dream ship met with this yachtsman’s hearty disapproval. To which I was constrained to make answer that with all her defects the dream ship happened to satisfy me because I was an ex-fisherman and not a yachtsman; that for one thing I could not afford to be a yachtsman, and for another I had no wish to be a yachtsman, being rather too fond of the sea. So we parted the best of enemies, and had not done with each other, as will transpire later.
The moral of this somewhat hectic interlude is: when fitting out for a cruise, get the advice of a deep-water man, and find a place where there are no yachtsmen. This last is difficult, but it is worth while.
Much the same thing applies to the study of navigation. If the beginner lends an ear to the horde of amateur cranks who dabble in the subject, and who seem obsessed with a desire to impart their half-baked theories to others, he will know as much about the practical business of finding a ship’s position at sea as he does about the origin of life. There is the long lean man, usually with a drooping moustache, who demonstrates on an instrument of his own invention that can do anything but talk—this last deficiency being amply atoned for by the inventor himself. There is the man with “short cuts” and “clean cuts.” There is even the man who still persists in the belief that the world is “flat with rounded edges,” and produces reams of his own screed, printed at enormous expense, in support of his theories; but he is easily disposed of. After admitting that the shape of the world is not a burning question with you anyway, because after all it is not a bad old world and certainly the best we can expect in this life, you confess to a sneaking suspicion that it is a rhomboid.
No, there is only one way of learning to find a ship’s position at sea if you are unable to spend three months or more at a school of navigation, and that is to find a retired master mariner who, for a stipulated sum, will teach you exactly what he did himself probably three hundred and sixty-five times in the year for thirty years. Hearken unto him, in spite of all lures to the contrary, and in three weeks or less the miracle will cease to be a miracle.
We of the dream ship were fortunate in running such a mentor to earth in his charming cottage on the hillside, overlooking the harbour. The Skipper, as he shall henceforth be called, was of the old school, and so, if it is permissible to say such things of a lady, was his wife! This remarkable woman followed the sea with her husband on every ocean-going schooner he commanded, and once, when the entire crew was down with beri-beri, and a voracious tug hovered alongside like a bird of prey, she brought the ship to port single-handed, thus saving the owners a stupendous sum for salvage. They rewarded her with a presentation piano, and she wept. She could not play. So a cheque for a hundred guineas was substituted, and her husband alleges that she bought three new hats and a galley range in which she cooks the acme in figgy dough to this day.
The Skipper, a man of monumental and very necessary patience, received us each day in a torture chamber of his own, replete with thumb screw and rack in the form of nautical epitomes, and model craft at variance on the placid surface of a deal table. That small room was the scene of strange and tragic happenings. Gales, fogs, collisions, lee shores, and shipwreck followed one another in rapid succession, and invariably terminated in the short, sharp query: “What do you do now?”
But these things constituted seamanship, which is essentially a matter of experience, not of rote. It was after our first, second, and even third day of attempting to find longitude that we reeled from the classroom, our heads a whirling chaos of logarithms, traverse tables, and despair. At no time that I can recall did our dream come so near to dissolution.
“Have you,” muttered Steve, as we paused during our descent to the town, and the strongest cup of tea procurable, “have you the foggiest idea of what we are driving at?”
I admitted that I had not, and the funereal procession proceeded on its way.
There are two methods of attacking the problem of navigation: one is by intelligent understanding, and the other by rule of thumb. If yours is the type of mind that revels in mathematics, then the first is obviously your course, and a pleasant one at that. If, upon the other hand, you are cursed, as I am, with a mind that reels at the mere sight of a timetable, then the second has its points, for you get there just the same, and in spite of experts’ warnings to the contrary. Without knowing the why or wherefore of your figurative acrobatics, provided you follow the rule of thumb implicitly, and can add, subtract, multiply, and divide correctly, there is nothing to prevent you from finding a ship’s position at sea day in and day out, identically with the greatest experts on earth. I have done it, and I have a shrewd suspicion, backed by the opinion of the Skipper, that more than one master mariner does it in precisely the same way. All hail to logarithms, and the obscure but miraculous gentleman who invented them!
At long last there came a day when the shipwright’s hammer ceased to resound aboard the dream ship, and save for provisions and water, and a snowdrift of unpaid bills, we were ready to take leave of the yards.
With an ebb tide and the faithful Skipper aboard, we dropped down the river, and as cleanly as may be on to a mud bank! I am not going to say how it happened, because I do not know. All we were acutely conscious of at the time was that our yachtsman, in his pretty little six-tonner, had chosen the same date of departure as ourselves, and was rapidly approaching down the channel that we should have followed, and had not, and that somehow the secret of our dream must have reached his protruding ears, for as he came abreast of us he reared his hideous form out of the cockpit.
“Hullo,” he cried. “Have you made your South Sea Islands already?”
We did not answer, there was nothing to be said; but when a tug hauled us free on the next tide, and rounding a bend in the river, we came upon our adversary in precisely the same predicament, we passed him in silence, the most satisfying silence I have ever indulged in.
Without a dissentient voice, the task of choosing and stowing the provisions was relegated to Peter—— “A woman is so much better at that sort of thing.” Steve and I admitted as much, with touching magnanimity.
In due course a cart backed up to the quayside, and an active little grocer proceeded to heap the dream ship’s deck with comestibles—tinned, boxed, and jarred. These we passed through the skylights, before an admiring audience of fisher-folk, and Peter, being ambidextrous, contrived to stow them in the lockers with one hand and make a list of them with the other.
I have my own notions about provisioning a dream ship in the future—if for me there is a future in dream ships. During the following year we proved, to our own dissatisfaction, that although tinned food is mighty handy, it is not a healthy continuous diet... No, I see myself laying in salt junk of the windjammer variety, plenty of waterglassed eggs and condensed milk, good ship’s biscuits, a “crock” of hand-salted butter, dried fruits, jam or marmalade to taste, pickled beetroot for the blood, flour, raisins, and baking powder, Scotch oatmeal, sugar, tea, coffee, cocoa, and lard, and nothing else whatsoever. It may be asked: “What else could there possibly be?”—to which I make answer: “A hundred and one canned atrocities, such as Somebody’s curried giblets, or Somebody Else’s evaporated tripe, that it were better if one consigned to the deep than ate.” It is extraordinary the number of useless things one can be lured into acquiring while “fitting out,” and we of the dream ship bought most of them.
“Barter” was Peter’s idea. In her mind the word was inalienably associated with the South Sea Islands, and were we not bound thither? It was only another example of her boundless optimism. Steve and I might furtively discuss the number of miles between ourselves and our goal, the probable discomfitures by the way, even the possibility of not getting there at all. Not so Peter. We were going to the South Sea Islands, and to go to the South Sea Islands without “barter” was a thing undreamed of in her philosophy. Hence a hurried pilgrimage to London, and the purchase, out of our rapidly diminishing capital, of variegated prints, looking-glasses, imitation tortoise-shell hair combs, Jew’s harps, and brown paper belts.
On our return, the Skipper, who had remained aboard as watchman during our absence, displayed a certain uneasiness, the cause of which was hard to determine. He expressed his keen admiration for the dream ship, as he had often done before, and then paused, until goaded into the confession that he wished he thought as much of her crew. That is not how he put it, but that was what he meant, and we were inclined to agree with him. In other words, it was on the dear old man’s conscience that he was letting us go to sea with insufficient knowledge, a scruple as rare as it is refreshing these days. We immediately and unanimously pointed out that there was only one way out of the dilemma, and that was for him to accompany us. He shook his grizzled head, and smiled wistfully; said it was twenty years since he had been to sea, that he was too old, that his “missus” would never let him go, and finally, with a twinkle in his keen blue eye, that he would come as far as Spain “just to get us into the hang of longitude,” whereat we fell upon him in a pæan of gratitude.
Behold, then, the crew of the dream ship ready to sail, with a combined capital of one hundred pounds sterling, and a clearance for Brisbane, Australia.