The Start Across the Atlantic
Chapter V Visitations — Pleasant, and the Reverse
Our entry into Las Palmas savoured of a circus come to town. We were the “act” where the music stops for effect. No one seemed to know who we were or why we were, which after all is not surprising, and the curious, consisting of gaping crowds on the breakwater and a heterogeneous fleet of anything from powerful launches to frowsy bumboats, seemed intent on finding out.
There is an immense and almost constant swell off Las Palmas, and the performance started when, in answer to our signal, a pilot stepped aboard, and came as near to measuring his dignified and bedizened length on the deck as was possible without actually doing it. He was evidently unused to dream ships in a swell. Regaining a certain amount of equilibrium, he tottered to the mast and clung there affectionately, until informed that we were from England, when he risked changing his grip to shake us all warmly by the hand, and point dramatically harbourward.
This last I took as a signal for the engine which, to my relief, “went,” and we rounded the breakwater with the entire fleet of bumboats and their yelling occupants in our wake. Peter was at the tiller, in pyjamas she had not had time to change, frenziedly following the course indicated by the pilot’s outstretched arm. Steve was attempting in halting Spanish to communicate the fact that our engine had no “reverse,” and failing utterly. And I had made the distressing discovery that there was something amiss with our water circulation. Above all rose the clamour of the bum-boatmen:—“Hi, washing, Señor!” “Hi, hi, bananas!” “Hi, hi, hi....”
So the dream ship threaded the intricacies of Las Palmas’s inner harbour, missing coal hulks by a bare foot, shaving schooners and, by means of the anchor dropped in sheer desperation, barely saving herself from ramming the Club Náutico.
Even then our troubles were by no means at an end. A boarding party of eternal bumboatmen broke through our defenses, and thronged the deck. In vain we pointed out that all we needed at the moment was sleep, and that if they had any for sale we would buy large quantities, otherwise they must go, or be pushed. They chose to be pushed, and there was something in the nature of a mêlée afoot when a sleek launch came alongside and a short, corpulent gentleman, literally glittering with gold lace, and using a sword as a walking stick, stepped aboard. He was the chief of the harbour police, and the effect of his august presence was magical. The enemy retired in disorder, and our saviour, who honoured us with his company over a glass of rum, gave us the key to peace and quiet in a Spanish port. It consisted in presenting the law (embodied in himself) with a trifling donation, and running the international code flag “P” up to the mast head, after which one is at liberty to shoot any one who comes aboard without permission. It is worth knowing, for we of the dream ship did both these things, and from that hour suffered no further molestation.
Unless you are a coal magnate, a ship’s chandler, a banana agent, or a consumptive, it is hard to find a reason for living at Las Palmas. It is a dreary sort of place built on, and occasionally smothered by, sand blown across the ocean from the Sahara, hundreds of miles distant, and the only diversion appears to be dances and roulette at the Club Náutico.
We of the dream ship promptly “fell” for the roulette, in company with most of the inhabitants, until it was borne in upon us that if we “fell” much further we should plumb the depths of our slender resources. It is a pathetic sight to see workers, not the leisured “profitocracy” one encounters at a place like Monte Carlo, handing over their hard-earned week’s wage to a stony-faced croupier, and borrowing from any one who will lend for “just one more spin.” No, we remained for the most part well out amongst the cooler breezes of the harbour, under the thrice-blessed squaresail which now did service as an awning—sleeping, swimming, fishing, and again sleeping, for we had some arrears to make up in this last respect.
Our splendid isolation, however, did not prevent us from meeting interesting people, foremost amongst whom was the skipper of the four-masted schooner Dorothy of New York, a hard-bitten Yank if ever there was one. He caught us clinging to his anchor chain for a breather during the morning swim, and was treating us to an entirely new vocabulary of invective when suddenly, and with no apparent cause, he changed his mind and invited us aboard.
In his remarkably comfortable quarters, and standing in pools of our own making, we discussed things in general and a bottle of Madeira in particular.
“Waal,” he observed, on learning that we were off “that funny bit of wood yonder,” and had every intention of remaining on it across the Atlantic, “if you ain’t got a gall!”
From that moment the Dorothy and the dream ship became “matey craft,” though a greater contrast than between a four-masted schooner and a twenty-three-ton cutter can scarcely be imagined. Our friend had several grievances, and aired them, though with such cheerful profanity as to cause us endless amusement. He had left the sea for good when he was lured out of retirement by a stupendous sum to command the Dorothy. The fact was they had no sailing masters in the States these days, and now that they had found wind to be cheaper than coal, and were building schooners so fast that half of them were green timber and opened up like sieves, they could get no one to take charge—no one, that is, but hairless boys who learnt navigation on a three-weeks’ course, and knew as much about seamanship or handling the hoboes one ships these days as a dead-ripe lemon....
At this juncture Steve and I might have been seen to exchange guilty glances, but I don’t think we were, and the diatribe continued.
... Another thing: here was he at a port like Las Palmas, with his entire crew, bar the mate, in a Spanish gaol through a few shore indiscretions of the previous evening, and no one to do anything about it. There was no United States consul in Las Palmas, no, sir; what did we think of that? There was nothing against a bit of shore joy once in a while. It was to be expected. But when they took a man’s cook.... He would have to see his very good friend the British Consul about it, that was all, though the idea was abhorrent to his independent spirit.
Amongst other things he treated us to a vivid and somewhat terrifying picture of present-day New York, and expressed the whole-souled wish never to return. It appeared that in this barbarous spot a mere man is at a discount. He can get nothing to drink. His pipe, cigar, or cigarette is in imminent peril of being snatched from his mouth, and if he chances to look sideways at a lady she arrests him on the spot. We shivered in unison, and refilled our glasses.
Our friend dined aboard the dream ship that evening, and showed himself to be the good fellow that he was by demonstrating short cuts in navigation, telling us of winds and weather we should be likely to encounter, giving us introductions to friends at distant ports, and—listening without flinching to a clarionet solo. It is such members of the vast fraternity of the sea that one hopes to meet again, and so rarely does.
Another of our guests was of a very different calibre, though none the less interesting in his way. We awoke one morning to find a sleek white yacht of about the dream ship’s tonnage anchored hard by, and flying a silken flag of gorgeous but unknown design, which on book reference proved to be the now-extinct emblem of the Portuguese Royalist.
By noon her owner had paid us a formal call, and at four o’clock this amazing youth, in a natty naval uniform garnished with decorations for various heroic deeds, was laying bare his heart in excellent English over a cup of afternoon tea. It was good, he informed us, to see the Blue Ensign again after what he had been through. There was something stable about the Blue Ensign that was vastly refreshing to a homeless exile. During the present welter of world upheaval the Portuguese rebellions had been overlooked, but what he, a Royalist, had been through—what he had been through!
His was the only yacht in Portuguese waters during the late rebellion. She lay in the bay of Funchal, Madeira, and in Madeira’s gaol reposed, or at any rate contrived to live, two full-blown counts, a general, and various smaller fry, incarcerated for their political views. Could a fellow Royalist and a yacht owner stand by and do nothing under such circumstances? A thousand times, no! On a dark night, and in face of sentries armed to the teeth, he had rescued them, taken them aboard his ship, and set sail for Las Palmas without stores, water, or navigation instruments, fearing that any such preparations would arouse suspicion. Well, he had arrived. After incredible hardships, he had arrived, only to have his yacht and cargo of hungry counts interned by the rascally Spaniard! Another cup of tea? Ah, thanks... to the CAUSE!
The Portuguese says: “A Spaniard is always a Spaniard.” The Spaniard says: “A Portuguese is always a Portuguese.” Or they do at Las Palmas, and the mere outsider can only take their respective words for it, and draw his own conclusions.
After two weeks of idling—and cooking—we became so heartily tired of the latter that we determined to indulge in the wild extravagance of a cook. The process of engagement was simplicity itself. We merely selected one of the almost constant stream of applicants for work that visited the dream ship, duly installed him in the fo’c’s’le, and left him to it.
Our selection, or rather Peter’s, as we left such things to a woman’s alleged intuition, was a venerable Maltese with a sheaf of credentials the size of a pack of cards, and a winning if somewhat weak smile. Thereafter, for a week, real food, though doused in olive oil, emerged from the fo’c’s’le, and we experienced the keen satisfaction after meals of being able to hold a cigarette in one hand without a dish cloth in the other.
This happy state of affairs continued until, following one of his “evenings off,” our cook was stricken with an illness that he ascribed to bad meat, though the symptoms corresponded more to the effects of bad drink. In any case, he lay writhing in his bunk, clasping various portions of his anatomy, and declaring that he was about to die. Now, the dream ship had a medicine chest of which she was as proud as the eminent physician who had selected it. This personage believed in injection rather than internal application; and no doubt he was right, provided there was someone aboard who understood a hypodermic syringe. But there was not. I stood beside the bunk, looking up the unhappy man’s symptoms in a ship’s medical guide as they occurred, while Steve and Peter lifted from its bed of cotton wool a glass-and-steel instrument more like an overgrown mosquito than anything I can call to mind. The look of it appalled me, but not so Steve. He pumped our wretched cook so full of laudanum that he never moved an eyelid for fifteen hours. We called his state one of merciful oblivion, and rather prided ourselves on the achievement until it occurred to someone that we might have killed him. Followed frantic tests with a looking-glass, and much listening for heart-beats, until our victim was resuscitated—and left the next day.
No, in future, and in spite of expert advice to the contrary, which perhaps does not take the limitations of dream ships into account, I shall in future only take the trusted remedies endeared by experience: iodine, a good aperient and astringent, asperin, plenty of boracic lint and bandages, and a lancet.
As though in judgment, there descended upon us in turn a plague of these islands called Canary fever. It was our first and last illness throughout the cruise, but it pulled us down to such an extent that Peter and I decided to try the hills of Grand Canary as a recuperative.
A quiet little fonda amongst the vines and purer airs of the highlands was the vision that lured us into a lurching motor, and up through the sand and cactus landscape to Fergus, where our vision was shattered as promptly and effectually as visions usually are. There was a fonda, and there were cacti, these last covered for the most part with the cochineal beetle, the raising of which as a food dyestuff is still an industry on Grand Canary, though chemical substitutes have almost run the genuine article off the market. But the fonda was more crowded with guests than the cacti with cochineal, and there was no doubt as to which were the more disturbing.
Peter and I shared a room nine by twelve, with an apology for privacy in the form of a riddled screen between us, and mosquitoes took full advantage of our netless beds. The salon at our very door seethed with dancing and shrill-voiced señoritas until two o’clock in the morning, and—— But why prolong the agony? We caught the next lurching motor back to Las Palmas, and sank gasping but grateful into deck chairs under the awning of the dream ship.
Such a home as ours spoils one for roughing it. The infinite peace and quiet and privacy of it make one detest all the more the bustle and turmoil of ordinary travel. People have said to me: “But how can you live in such restricted quarters?” My answer is: “Very easily, thank you.”
For six mortal weeks we waited at Las Palmas, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the weather-prophets concerning the West Indian hurricane season:
June, too soon.
July, stand by.
August, if you must.
September, remember.
October, all over.
And on the third of this last, reassuring month we set sail across the Atlantic.