FROM THE TOWER

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 71, Issue 221, 18 September 1928, Page 6

FROM THE TOWER

(By

“SENTINEL")

Last night I met an old shellback; and when I meet an old shellback. I stop and ta k. How can 1 help it, with the brine still thick in my veins, and the taste of salt beef, pea soup anil lobscoush still on my though ’tis twenty years and more since 1 was at sea on a wind-jam-mer? Wc stood on Duric Hill, with the 'wind from the sea blowing hard upon us, and with the breeze there came memories of days when wt stood not upon immovable soil, but walked, the reeling deck and cambed to dizzy heights to furl or lossen sail. For this is the season of the Equinoctial gales, and all sailormen know well that when the sun enters the points of the Equinoxes the wind goes on a jazz. There are landsmen who scoff at the notion. The only way in “,'arn’em.” would be to ship them before the, mast on a windjammer. And alas! Where arc the wind-jam-mers I ♦ * * ♦ Before the mast! Aly shellback friend can tell you all about that; more than can 1, for he is much my senior, and he went to sea in “The days when the world was wide”— when conditions were even harder than wau the case on the day I shouldered my sea-bag aboard a sailing ship. And things were hard enough then for poor Jack. Dowa the west Coast ot South America he has sailed this old shellback; out from Puget Sound* and around. the ureuded Horn he goes, on a hardcase Yankee ship, where men are sent, aloft to scrape and grease down in. bitter winter 's weather, or perhaps made to sugee—mugee paint work on deck, with Angers irozen beyond feeling point. Round the Horn and up past tne Falklands and beyond, into line weather again. Time was not counted—“more days, more dollars,” the sailors would philosophise. Four months’ pay would go in four days on booze and its kindred pleasures in A'ew York, .Liverpool, Yokohama, Singapore, Bombay, Sydney, Hong Kong—it was all the same! Then poor Jack would sell his kit and urink that, and. off to sea again. Poor Jack.

There were some skippers who wouldn t allow their crews ashore fur fear of losing them when they got to port after months of voyaging. Laying out in the stream and discharging cargo into lighters, such ships would be floating pi isons to sailormen. If they could give the watchman the slip, men wouid drop over the side and swim for the shore, cnancing sharks and currents. Often enough ’hey were drowned or otherwise lest, from especially hard ships they aeserted. glad enough to get clear, though they left the pay tentiines earned by months of toil and privation. Those men who go to sea to-day in comfortable steam ships, well fed, well berthed and well paid, live in luxury compared with *he sailors of the old wind-jammer days. Y’ct they grumble. A lot they 've got to grunibi) about! • • • • Was it yesterday, or 25 years ago, that I went aboard a little old barque in the port of Hobart and got a headache with the smell of bilge-water and Stockholm tar, even before we put to sen? They were dizzy days, the first three or four on that little barque. No sooner did she put her jib-boom out of the river Derwent into Storm Bay than I knew why the bay had been thus named. On the wide ocean outside it was worse. We had put to sea just as the Equinoctial gales commenced to blow!

Aly chief memory of that first trip is that of chewing dry sea-biscuits, while listening tp the cheerful voice of Captain Athol* E. Morrison, of the handy (but ancient) little barque, Natal Queen, singing Twas in the Atlantic in the Equinoctial gales When a man he did fall overboard all among the shares and whales Singing ‘Rule Driltania, Brittania rules the waves,'.” etc. There were goodness knows howmany verses of this. But the man who fell overboard was all right, for later on he pipes up from Davy Jones’ Locker that "'Tis true that to refresh mp mind no bacc\} now I gets. But I have made a lucl(V find, and so 1 never frets For I’m mar-i-aide to a mer-a-maid at the bottom of the dark blue se» Singing, 'Rule Brittania,'" etc. In another Equinoctial period T remember (shall I over forget it?) there was a smashing and a tearing on a big Yankee ship I was on. That was south of The Snares (which are south of Stewart Island). A drunken skipper, bullying officers, a mutinous crew, a crippled ship, with her cargo broken loose in the holds and tearing up the decks, sails blown away, pumps unworkable—what was not wrong! .... Wo limped into Lyttelton Harbour, and mighty lucky to get there. I xvent farther in that ship. Most of the other members of the crew didn’t. They preferred gaol or starving “on the beach.’» Well, perhaps 1 am better off up in the Tower than on the look-out in the fo’c’stle of a windjammer. Eh, Old Shellback?