A BUSHMAN AFLOAT.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 133, 5 June 1907, Page 6

A BUSHMAN AFLOAT.

(By ALBERT DORRINGTON, Author of ' ; Along the Castlereagh," " Children

of the Gully, ;

" etc., etc)

We left Fremantle at eight o'clock on Monday night, and began our climb north to Colombo. The journey across the Indian Ocean is apt to become monotonous. The endless stretches of sea and sky. the absence of bird life, has a numbing effect on the eye and brain. We spent an hour looking at the ship's freezing chambers, and met a small piocesaion of stewards carrying ice on their backs up to the saloon pantry. Last trip the ship's cat got locked in one of the freezing chambers, and remained there for nrne days, surrounded by frozen poultry and meat. It was a mystery how she kept herself alive in such an Arctic temperature. When released she bounded upstairs into the hot air, and fell asleep on the saloon couch. She was as lively as a kitten the next day. The English stewards and deck hands appear to suffer from the heat already, and we are five or six days south of the Line; They are mostly fat, over-fed fellows, who believe in a good, beef steak and a bottle of stout before going to bunk every night. No wonder they lie awake during the tropic nights, wearing a pale, bloated expression on their faces. We have discovered that quite a number of New Zealand boys are working their passages to London. One took on a. job in the stokehole, but gave :t up before we had been three days out of Fremantle. The ship's surgeon is busy this aaorning inside his little deck dispensary. A small procession of patients wait outside on the form. A fireman crawls along the port alleyway exhibiting a badly scalded foot to his comrades. A white-faced greaser with consumption in his luminous eyes enters the dispensary and is examined by the genial surgeon. The Cockney fireman is a born tough. He does not mix with the rest of the ship's company. His woric unfits him for polite society. The Sydney larrikin would not be seen dead in his company. Down in the throbbing spaces under the engineroom he slams things and rakes with slice-bar and shovel feeding the fire-hun-gry boilers that gasp and sigh for coal and yet more coal. His boots are ample shod to protect his feet from the burning plates. His hapds and bod. ye scarred and livid where he nas been flung at one time or another, against the boiler doors. When ashore he finds much relief in fighting policemen. If he has been stoking for ten years, his brain is more or less affected by the terrible heat and the violent changes to which he is subjected. They come up from below dripping from head to shoe with coal-blackened bodies, slack-jawed and limp as fever patients. The Bed Sea. is the horror of all white firemen, and black ones for the matter of that. In the majority -of cases the rum served out in cold latitudes is saved until Colombo and Aden are reached. "' Kum is our mother and father," said one of them .to mc. "It feeds us when •we.can't eat, and it makes us sing when the beat is crawlin' down our throats." "" But the after effects ? " " There ain't none. The fires sweat us ,4ry. It shrivels us up an' boils Uβ, an' there ain't no,room left for after effectb. IVe tried oatmeal water and cold tea, but neither of 'em keeps off the heat lite rum- Ruin 'as got hands an , feet, an' it nurses yer when yer dyin , below." "Do men die below?" " Die! Some of us was never properly alive. I've seen white-faced corpses of nien shovellin' beside mc. Yer can't get 'em to speak. Yer never hear 'em complain neither until they lie down, wh?le the second engineer gives 'em an ice poultice." " How do Australian face the music below?" " They're quitters when the clinkers are out. Most of 'em would sooner .fight the chief than stay through the Red Sea." "Make the game good enough," broke in Bill," and we'll fill your stokeholes with Australian firemen. Why, stokin's a fool's game compared with sewer work and rock blasthr. I've seen a- gang of Australian-born men face' choke damp an , dynamite year in an* out when the wages was all right. But you ain't goin' to get our live men to sweat in your stokeholes for four pounds a month— not while there's a rabbit in the county-" The discussion ended abruptly. Increased ventilation has made the stokehole of the average mail-boat a more comfortable hell than formerly. But so long aa London can supply legions of the damned at three to four pounds a month, the steamship coinpanics Will allow poor Jack just enough air to keep him ironi dying .with, a- ehovel

A SLIGHT DISSERTATION ON COWS. We have on board about fifty afnulent farmers from New Zealand and Australia. Hard work and strict attention to the better industry has brought its reward to the majority. It must be admitted that the New Zealanders as a ■whole swear by he land which gives so bountifully and requires so little in return.

The nights, especially -while crossing the Tndian Ocean, are delightful beyond compare. In the smoke-room and on deck these "well-to-do farmers compare notes and methods of conducting an up-to-date dairy farm. This cow-talk, as it is often referred to by the sailors, i≤ often amusing and. full of human interest.

"I'd sooner have women and children to look after my cows than men," said an Otago passenger at dinner. "If a cow kicks a woman she doesn't rise and belt it with an axe or paling. She simply wipes her fa-ce and tells the animal that it is a wicked creature, and if she isn't badly hurt, will go on milking again. When a man gets kicked lie stands up and belts Gehenna out of poor Strawberry, especially if she is not his own property. Result is that Strawberry gets to hate him, and his milk returns will fall off wonderfuUy throughout the year/ "I don't know about ■women not 'hitting back," put in Bill suddenly. "Dropped a maul on my wife's toe one morning, and she kept mc running round the paddock for 13 minutes by the clock. "Still," said Bill genially, "I don't remember ever seeing a woman lay violent hands on a cow, although I know a lady out West who hit a bull camel in the nose with a flat-iron when it poked its upper lip through the kitchen window one afternoon. She had great presence of mind, that woman. But she told mc afterwards that she mistook the camel's face for a sewing-machine canvasser. Some of these machine agents have wonderful upper lips," concluded Bill.

We crossed the Equator at 4 o'clock on Monday, March 25th. The day was warm, but not so unbearable as eydney or Brisbane during midsummer. Consideration must be given to the fact that a mail-boat rushing along at 15 knots an hour creates a refreshing air current.

Hereabouts the dawn skies are full of ■weird beauty. The sun peering over the sky line flinty seaxf on scarf of winered light across the naked East. The north-weet monsoon rears into the bigthroated windsails-, flooding the lower decks with cool air. The vertical sun when veiled by clouds casts a blinding salt-white radiance over the face of the ocean.

DODGING A TYPHOON. Past midnight two officers awoke the captain, who appeared suddenly on the bridge scanning the distant horizon. Since eleven o'clock the barometer had fallen considerably, and the sound of the bos'n's whistle and the hurrying of feet along the deck warned us that something special in the way of typhoons was bounding across the far West.

A strip of inky cloud about the size of a shawl fluttered on the horizon. A faT-off humming noise reached us as though innumerable harp-strings were being rent asunder. The black cloudshawl opened fanwise revealing its huge wind-torn body.

"Heaven help the cargo tramp that runs into it to-night!" said an old salt standing near the bridge.

The sea grew white under the enfolding body of the cloud, as though whipped into mountainous waves by tae fury of its onslaught. Incidentally our ship turned her heels to the onrushins; mass of cloud and water, her increased funnel smoke showing that pressure was being brought to carry us beyond the track of the old man ty-phoo'n.

The strumming note of the storm changed swiftl to a deep booming sound that seemed to slide under our keel with the force of an avalanche. The water fairly snarled as it flew over the rail.

The fury of the wind-driven waves is ■incredible. They appear to attack a ship from all points, as though guided by an unseen, brain. The wrenchings and groanings of a big ship as she plunges and rolls into the mountainous hollows are almost human. Imagine a sea sweeping away a couple of lifeboats fixed securely in their davits forty feet above the surface of the water.

Mile on mile we skirted the downrnshing typhoon, which seemed to confine its operations within a special area. Far away in the west the sky was clear and full of stars. Yet the near east was a cauldron of storm-whipped clouds and seething water.

"We' 3 only caught the edge of it!" shouted a voice in my ear. "It doesn't pay to run away from ordinary storme, but this affair would bend our patent ceilings and deck fittings if we pushed through it. Indian typhoons are better left alone." And so it proved, even, though we had only danced a polka on the skirts of the storm. Two hundred gallons of fresh milk had been burst asunder in the ice-room. A row of sharp meathookd pressing suddenly against the big tins had sliced them asunder, allowing the milk to ran over the floor. About a hundredweight of crockery came to grief before the pantrymen could stow it safely away. To prevent loss by carelessness on the part of these servants, many of the Australasian shipping companies have inaugurated a Missing Silver Fund. At the end of every trip the chief steward goes over the table cutlery and plate carefully, and each missing article has to be made good from the fund. As much as ten shillings per head is deducted from the stewards' salary to replace lost articles. The chief explained the matter briefly to a party of saloon • passengers one morning. "Before the Missing Silver Fund was started," he said, "our losses through carelessness were very severe. Last year a pantryman left a locker of entree dishes and tureens near the port rail ivhile he adjourned to a cabin to light a cigarette. The vessel rolled suddenly and £150 worth of plate went overboard. "I had occasion to watch a young Australian steward one morning," went on the chief. ,- He was engaged in sweeping out the first saloon smokingroom. It was his duty to rinse the cuspidores, very expensive articles, costing us from one pound to thirty shillings each. He picked up one casually, looked round the empfty smoke-room sharply, and pitched it through the port i hole. 'One less to clean/ he said, | and' went on sweeping. Yes, we've got a check on that kind of thing now. The stewards watch each other, and every spoon and fork and entree dish is guarded pretty closely." Within three hours we had left the typhoon area in our wake, and the i grey dawn showed us the black funnels of a P. and 0. liner bound from Colombo to Fremantle, her saloon-lights gleaming with 3tar-like brilliance across the naked sea levels. ■■ . ■