17TH CENTURY SAILORS

Waipa Post, Volume 48, Issue 3471, 26 May 1934, Page 8

17 TH CENTURY SAILORS

THE PRESS-GANG IN STUART DAYS. Somewhere Stevenson admits something to the effect that the ruins of a city left to the jackals and the ' lizards might not greatly move him, : but that an ancient beam from a ship on which seamen had leaned in the middle watch would bring him up all standing, writes H. M. Tomlinson. He would have been brought to a deep reverie by the journal of Edward Barlow. A character moves in it; a sort of ghost; you can easily imagine the figure of Barlow standing with his dunnage at Blackwall Stairs,-not long after the Plague and the Great Fire, about to board an Indianman for Surat; and it is the sort of stout figure John Silver would have found to be a very difficult handful. Barlow evidently was a ready seaman — he knew his job—an honest and resisting fellow, never greatly disturbed by dangerous junctures. He saw what to do, and as a simple man tried to do it at the double, though not always to his satisfaction; and, occasionally, even to his grief, just when he thought all was well and now he was free of-the quarter-deck; or rogues were common in his day and as unscrupulous, as ever about their own advantage. Then, as now, there were men who considered their own good to transcend the success of the job and the' rights of every fel!cw. This puzzled Barlow, who desired his just reward, and no more. The original log of a seventeenth or eighteenth century seaman can be as affecting, in the hands of a good reader, as the manuscript of one of Lamb’s essays. It is usually a curiously personal document. The man, making his record, was alone with his fancies in seas that were still full of wonders, where landfalls might mean anything. Surveys and exploration had not then made much difference. It could still easily be the first time. So down into the log all went, rumours as well as what was seen. Often enough the log is decorated with the seaman’s careful attempts to show you what ma'n-o’-war birds, dolphins, boobies, albacores, and the outline of strange lands are like. Self-Taught Artist. Barlow did that in his journal, and more. He decorated in colours. These two volumes give examples of 13 coloured illustrations and 43 coastline drawings. His notion of perspective would be no good at an art school; but where is the artist who could give us such pictures of the old ships? Barlow must have loved doing them: “The Shippe Royall Charles that v/as in the year 1660 when debt was incurred on November 8, she returend with his Majesty, King Charles, on his Return to England at the Restoration.” Noble she looks, too, that wonder of a hundred guns, with all her bunting! Barlow was present, we must remember. He gives i an accounnt of it; he was a boy in the ship itself when the fleet went over to Scheveningen to take the King aboard —only she was then the Naseby, which name the King promptly changed. We must remember, too, that Barlow taught himself not only to draw but to read a'nd write; which does not mean that his spelling gave no trouble to his editor and transcriber. It was entirely phonetic. The Forecastle in 1659. Readers who are interested in all the affairs of which the Red Ensign is the symbol know their debt to Basil Lubbock. Here he greatly adds to it. This view from the forecastle of those days—l6s9 to 1703—is Pot the same as an admiral’s. You cannot help wondering why Barlow went voyaging for so many years, dodging Sallee rovers in the Mediterranean, while living on rations which would have justified a mutiny; making long and arduous voyages for the good of the East India Company’s directors and shareholders, which resulted in deductions from seamen’s pay that might provoke a riot in Leadenhall Street to-day. One gets Jack’s view in this book, and it is clear that not all the pirates sailed under the Jolly Roger, but could go about their business under most respectable emblems. It is news to me that seamen once had to help pay for damage to cargo, no matter how leaky a ship’s timbers. What with that and the food no wonder a seaman, after an absence of three years (in conditions which would cause the death of forty men between the Downs and the Cape of Good Hope, outward bound), would put in his log that he thought “he was born under a three-penny planet, 1 never to be worth more than a groat before a beggar.” Or this, about the press-gang: “It is a very bad thing for a poor seaman . . . for if he have wife and children he is not suffered to go to see them, nor to go and look after his wages . . . hut must leave it to the trust of one whom he knows not whether he will ever see it. . . . Many times the master of a ship payeth what he plcaseth when a man is pressed and not there to answer for himself.” And that happened to Barlow himself, when in the mouth of the Thames, after a long voyage. A boat from a King’s ship boarded them and took away Barlow and another, though in his case the master was honest about his wages. His Wide Travels. It must not be thought that here

ic nothing but a record of hard tack and hard times. Barlow knew the Levant, he voyaged several times to the Red Sea (he was in command there), Madras, Formosa, China, Java, and the Brazils. He saw a number of hot engagements, was taken prisoner by the Dutch in Sunda Strait, on another voyage was marooned among the Malays, stood off Kidd by good gunnery, knew a captain who insisted that the rising moon was a ship and clapped on sail to get away from it. Barlow accepted scurvy and beriberi as inevitable in any longvoyage.

He makes shrewd comments on people and places. He says of Glasgow: “The people here are civil and kind-hearted, but stand up stoutly in praise of their own country.” He met Dampier at Tongkeng in January, 1688. It should he added that he was born of a poor husbandman at Prestwich, Manchester, in 1642, and served as a “whitester,” hut hated it.