The Canary Islands
Chapter IV Dropping the Pilot — And the Result
Our first and imperative need was sleep. There comes a time when enforced wakefulness causes the eyes to feel as though they were sinking into the head. We of the dream ship had reached this pitch, and turned in “all standing,” to remain log-like until disturbed by port officials at five o’clock the next morning.
In a state of pyjamas and semi-torpor I handed them the ship’s papers, which proved to be satisfactory; Steve treated them to a few chosen words in near-Spanish picked up during a doubtful past in Mexico, and we tumbled in again. But not to sleep. Thereafter, an endless procession of boats, manned by picturesque and voluble brigands who offered for sale every conceivable commodity from anchor chain to picture postcards, succeeded in dragging us from our bunks, and propelling us on deck.
A pleasant little town is Vigo. One of a goodly number scattered over the world that I should like to make my home. Each to his taste, and perhaps I am impressionable as to the desirable spots of this earth, but to my way of thinking almost any race knows how to enjoy life better than the Anglo-Saxon of to-day, and fashions its surroundings to that end.
From the river front, with its handsome promenade, hotels, and green, open spaces, Vigo climbs the sunny hillside in cheerful fashion. No one seems overburdened with business cares, but when such things have to be attended to, the palm-fringed Alamada takes the place of an office, and the “deal” is discussed over vino tinto and cigarettes, to the accompaniment of an excellent band.
We of the dream ship went ashore with the Skipper wearing a fancy-worked carpet-slipper on one foot and a boot on the other, but no one appeared to notice the peculiarity, and it is quite certain the Skipper would not have minded if they had. His is a type of hardihood that I envy as much as I admire.
At lunch, too, he found cause for complaint in the food, and small wonder. After a week’s enforced abstention, he found that in these benighted parts figgy dough was as unprocurable as elsewhere. Frankly, he was disappointed in Vigo and, after limping over the cobblestones in clothes more adapted to the Arctic than to Spanish sunshine, he returned aboard “to do a few jobs.” We knew what this meant. He would systematically and efficiently set right everything that was wrong aboard the dream ship—a long-splice here, a bit of carpentry there—which was precisely what we ought to have been doing instead of gallivanting about Vigo. Most excellent of skippers! He had been a tower of strength to us in time of stress, and a qualm seized me when I secured his passage to Southampton, and realized that in another week he would be gone.
From the quaint cobbled and terraced streets of the old town we went down to the Alamada, and sat for a while watching the children dance to the music of the band. No organized, mechanical spectacle this, but a joyous affair of rhythmic abandon, twinkling legs, and laughter. Most of us like to think that the children of our own particular country are the most desirable, and they would be poor folk who did not; but for unconscious grace of movement and dainty appearance, the Spanish kiddy is hard to beat.
And this happy absence of self-consciousness is not confined to the children. Picture, if you can, and as we of the dream ship saw him a little later, a well-dressed Spanish gentleman standing in the middle of one of Vigo’s main thoroughfares and gazing toward the housetops, apparently engaged in practising the deaf-and-dumb alphabet. No one of the stream of pedestrians passing along the sidewalks took the slightest notice of him. Neither did the wheeled traffic, except to swerve obligingly out of his path. It was his affair, and a love affair at that. He was conversing with his enamorata at the third-floor balcony window in the only way possible to a suitor in Spain, where parents firmly believe in “love at a distance” until the actual engagement. And it needed three vulgar sightseers such as the crew of the dream ship to find anything unusual in the proceeding. I am ashamed to say that the lady caught sight of us, and pointed in alarm, whereat the gentleman turned with an excusable frown of annoyance, and we hurried on our way.
There are only two things the Spaniard takes really seriously: his love and his bull-fights. Leave him to them, as you value a whole skin.
Our next introduction was to the local cable office. Personally, I have always regarded such places as drab receptacles for grudging messages, but with the Eastern Telegraph Company it is a different matter. Certainly this admirable concern takes your message, but then proceeds to take you to its heart, and thereafter, wherever its myriad wires extend, you may be sure of a welcome from the kindliest of hosts. It conducts you to its palatial bachelor quarters situated on the hillside behind the town, and proceeds to spoil you with every device known to a pampered age. Tennis, golf, dances, and dinners are yours to repletion, followed by moonlight car rides into the country, and feasts at distant fondas under the trellised vines.
At any rate, that is what it did with us, and we tried to reciprocate. The Eastern Telegraph Company, or as much of it as could get aboard at one time, made the dream ship its headquarters during our stay; dived from her bowsprit or under her keel with equal delight, mealed off strange messes in her seething saloon, and sang songs on deck to Peter’s piano accompaniment below.
With such distractions afoot, it is small wonder that nearly a week slipped by before the subject of a sailing date received the attention it deserved. The Skipper grunted his disapproval of our dilatory methods, and pointed out in a satirical fashion peculiarly his own that there were “things” to be done. Amongst them, he mentioned the necessity of making out a new deviation card by the Polar Star, whereat Steve and I collapsed. Had we not done with this pest of deviation? Had we not already discovered and tabulated, at the cost of terrific mental effort, the error of the dream ship’s compass owing to local attraction?
The Skipper admitted as much with a wistful smile, but pointed out that deviation has an aggravating habit of changing with latitude. It was the first we had heard of it, and that night we sat again under our long-suffering professor, and swung the dream ship to a mocking North Star.
Then there was the matter of our broken boom. The Skipper and I towed it over, neatly scarfed (dovetailed and bound) from a neighbouring shipyard the next morning. And the instability of things below as demonstrated in the Bay of Biscay? This was remedied by having iron bands placed round everything movable, and screwed to bulkhead or floor. We were ready. The Skipper stepped ashore with his modest little suitcase, and limped away without so much as a backward glance. Why? His “missus” has told me since that he never expected to see us again.
So we three and the dream ship dropped down Vigo River bound for Las Palmas, Canary Islands, with the biggest mixed cargo of hope and ignorance that ever put to sea.
Four hours on and eight off was how we apportioned our watches and, thanks to fair winds and the easy handling of the dream ship, it was seldom necessary for more than one of us to be on deck at a time. In fact, there were hours on end when the helmsman could peg the tiller and take a constitutional.
Cooking we took week and week about, a dreaded ordeal. It is one thing to concoct food in a porcelain-fitted kitchen on terra firma, and quite another to do it over a primus stove in a leaping, gyrating fo’c’s’le. Porridge was found adhering to the ceiling after Steve’s “week,” but hush! perhaps he may have something to say on the subject of Peter and myself. There is always plenty to say about the other fellow, but in nine cases out of ten it is best left unsaid. Forbearance is as much the keynote of good-fellowship on a dream ship as elsewhere—perhaps more—and we are rather proud of the fact that we have covered half the world without battle, murder, or sudden death.
With only three of a crew some of our troubles may be imagined, but undoubtedly the worst of these, after a couple of weeks at sea, was being awakened from a trance-like sleep to take a trick at the tiller. One does not feel human under such circumstances, but more in the nature of a bear disturbed during hibernation.
And the awakener’s task is not much better. He is forced to peg the tiller, even with a following wind, nip below to resuscitate somehow his log-like relief, and get back before the ship jibes. If there is time he may employ the proper and humane method of applying gradually increased pressure to the sleeper’s arm until he awakes. If there is not, he must resort to any merciless method that proves effective. In either case, he is as unpopular as an alarm clock, which, by the way, we tried, but discarded on account of its waking everyone aboard.
The manner of our several wakings formed an interesting, if somewhat intimate, subject of discussion at breakfast one morning. Peter’s was voted uninteresting because whatever means were employed to arouse her she merely opened her eyes, and meekly murmured: “All right.” Steve, upon the other hand, was uncertain. If he happened to be dreaming at the time, which was usually the case, he either hit out the instant he was touched, or muttered something unintelligible, and tenderly covered the disturbing hand with his own.
As for me, I yawned cavernously, invariably said: “How’s she going?” and almost as invariably fell asleep again. Or so runs the report, and one is not permitted to argue with reports. Verily, if man would discover himself—and others—let him have recourse to a dream ship and a crew of three!
It was during the passage from Vigo to Las Palmas that we first experienced that most aggravating of winds, the light, varying, following. I have heard schooner skippers declare that they prefer the “head” variety, and I can well believe it. At night, when it is exceedingly difficult to tell where such a wind is coming from, it is no more pleasant to jibe inadvertently than to have to do so sometimes thrice within the hour to keep the ship on her course. It wears out a short-handed, light-weight crew (Peter turned the scale at ninety-eight pounds, Steve at one hundred and forty-five, and myself at one hundred and forty), and conservation of energy, which makes for good health, is of prime importance on a voyage such as ours.
Finally, we lowered the mainsail, with its jolting, crashing boom, and carried on in blessed tranquillity under a squaresail, which proved to be the most useful sail we had aboard.
At the end of seven days’ routine, and fair but light winds, we experienced the acute joy of finding land precisely where our frenzied calculations had placed it. As Madeira loomed on the starboard bow, Steve was seen to pace the deck with a quiet but new-born dignity—until hailed below to help wash dishes. But even this failed to quell the navigator’s exuberance, and the dish-washer exchanged views on the subject with the helmsman through the skylight. This, then, was the navigation that master mariners made such a song and dance about! Well, we must be master mariners, that was all we had to say! We had summoned Madeira, and Madeira had appeared! We were not at all sure that we had not discovered Madeira!
Peter seemed strangely unimpressed. Perhaps she sensed what is indeed a fact, that luck in navigation, as in most things, favours the beginner. For instance, a mistake somewhere in our calculations brought us as near disaster in the next twenty-four hours as one cares to be. Taking Madeira as our point of departure, we shaped a course for Las Palmas, giving the intervening Salvage Islands a berth of ten miles to the westward. We reckoned this a safe distance, considering that according to “sailing directions” there was still more to the westward a strong current inclining toward the African coast. Well, that current failed to register in the particular case of the dream ship, and on top of it the “mistake somewhere” caused a cold shiver to traverse the spine of the helmsman when, at one o’clock of a pitch-black night, while doing a comfortable seven knots, a mass of rock reared itself out of the sea seemingly not more than a few hundred yards, though probably more nearly a mile, to starboard.
It was the westernmost island of the Salvages, uninhabited, unlighted, and this same helmsman who, as it happens, was myself, would like to know what prevented the “mistake somewhere” from being just that trifle bigger necessary to land us in splinters on the rocks, the fate of more than one good ship provided with a lookout and master mariner. Surely the luck of the beginner!
The incident gave us violently to think, and we thought again when, a few days later, on summoning the island of Grand Canary with the magic wand of sextant and logarithm, it failed to materialize. Had we overrun the entire Canary Group, and were we gaily heading for the African coast with its picturesque Riff pirates who specialize in becalmed ships, or were we even now heading for the iron-bound coast of Grand Canary? In the dense mist that so often shrouds this group we could not tell. Moreover, our dead reckoning said one thing and our observations another. They usually do.
“When in doubt, heave to,” was a maxim of the Skipper’s that we happened to remember, so we hove to and waited, though for what I am not quite clear. If it were for the mist to disperse, I am inclined to think we should be there still. Steve and I passed the time in heated discussions as to our whereabouts, which under the circumstances was as futile an occupation as any we could have indulged in, but what would you? After golf it is doubtful if there is anything more debatable than incipient navigation. We continued to talk, and the dream ship continued to rock idly on a heavy swell, until Peter broke the spell by emitting a well-known squeak of excitement and pointing heavenward.
“That isn’t a cloud,” she announced with apparent irrelevance.
It was not. It was the peak of Teneriffe towering out of the mist, to port, like the great pyramid from the sands of Egypt.
“There you are,” quoth Steve.
“Exactly,” said I, though what either of us meant I have no notion.
“In the meantime,” suggested Peter the practical, “don’t you think we might be getting on with it?”
On this point the master and the mate of the dream ship were agreed, and the voyage continued.