vanished, and a quantity of blood rose and dyed a bright patch upon the calm blue. No more was seen of the baboon, but a little later the black scythe-like fins of three sharks showed in the spot where he had disappeared."

Plums from a Sailor's Duff.

It has been commonly expected of sailors in all ages that they should encounter nothing upon the ocean but hair-breadth escapes. The theory is that the mariner but half discharges his duties when his experiences are limited to his work as a seaman. That he may be fully and perfectly accomplished vocationally he must know what it is to have been cast away, to have barely come off with his life out of a ship on fire, to have been overboard on many occasions in heavy seas, to have chewed pieces of lead in open boats to assuage his thirst—to have encountered, in short, most of the stock horrors of the oceanic calling. Considering, however, that the sailor goes to sea holding his life in his hands, I cannot but think that his mere occupation is perilous enough to satisfy the romantic demands of the shore-going dreamer. It is feigned that the sea-faring life is not one jot more dangerous than most of the laborious callings followed ashore. Let no man credit this. The sailor never springs aloft, never slides out to a yard-arm, never gives battle to the thunderous canvas, scarcely performs a duty, indeed, that does not contain a distinct menace to his life. That the calling has less of danger in it in these days than it formerly held I will not undertake to determine. If in former times ships put to sea destitute of the scientific equipment which characterises the fabrics of this age, the mariner supplied the deficiencies of the shipyard by caution and patience. He was never in a hurry. He waited with a resigned countenance upon the will of the wind. He plied his lead and log-line with indefatigable diligence. There was no prompt despatch in his day, no headlong thundering, through weather as thick as mud in a wineglass, to reach his port. We have diminished many of the risks he ran through imperfect appliances, but, on the other hand, we have raised a plentiful stock of our own, so that the balance between then and now shows pretty level.

My sea-faring experiences covered about eight years, and they hit a traditional period of immense moment—I mean the gradual transformation of the marine fabric from wood into iron. I was always afloat in wood, however, and never knew what it was to have an iron plate between me and the yearning wash of the brine outside until I went on a voyage to Natal and back in a big ocean steamer that all day long throbbed to the maddened heart in her engine room, like some black and gleaming leviathan rendered hysterical by the lances of whalers feeling for its life, and all night stormed through the dark ocean shadow like a body of fire, faster than a gale of wind could in my time have driven the swiftest clipper keel that furrowed blue water.

What hair-breadth escapes did I meet with? I have been asked. Was I ever marooned? Ever cast away, as Jack says, on the top crust of a half-penny loaf? Ever overboard among sharks? Ever gazing madly round the horizon, the sole occupant of a frizzling boat, in search of a ship where I might obtain water to cool my blue and frothing lips? Well, my duff is not a very considerable one, and the few plums in it I fear are almost wide enough apart to be out of hail of one another. However a sample or two will suffice to enable me to keep my word and to write something at all events autobiographic.

So let us start off Cape Horn on a July day in the year of grace 1859. The ship was a fine old Australian liner, a vessel of hard upon 1400 tons, a burden that in those days constituted a large craft. She was commanded by one Captain Neatby, something of a favourite I believe in the passenger trade—a careful old man with bow-legs and a fiery grog-blossom of a nose. He wore a tall chimney-pot hat in all weathers, and was reckoned a very careful man because he always furled his fore and mizzen royals in the first dog-watch every night. We were a long way south; I cannot remember the exact latitude, but I know it was drawing close upon sixty degrees. There was a talk in the midshipmen's berth amongst us that the captain was trying his hand at the great Circle course, but none of us knew much about it down in that gloomy, 'tween-decks, slush-flavoured cavern in which we youngsters lived. I was fourteen years old, homeward bound on my first voyage; a little bit of a midshipman, burnt dry by Pacific suns, with a mortal hatred and terror of the wild, inexpressibly bitter cold of the roaring ice-loaded parallels in whose Antarctic twilight our noble ship was plunging and rolling now under a fragment of maintopsail, now under a reefed foresail and double-reefed foretopsail, chased by the shrieking western gale that flew like volleys of scissors and thumbscrews over our taffrail, and by seas, whose glittering, flickering peaks one looked up at from the neighbourhood of the wheel as at the brows of tall and beetling cliffs. The gale was white with snow, and dark with the blinding fall of it too, when I came on deck at noon. I was in the chief mate's, or port watch, as it is called. The ship was running under a double-reefed topsail—in those days we carried single sails,—reefed foresail, close-reefed foretopsail, and maintopmast staysail. The snow made a London fog of the atmosphere; forward of the galley the ship was out of sight at times when it came thundering down out of the blackness aft, white as any smother of spume. She pitched with the majesty of a line-of-battle ship, as she launched herself in long floating rushes from gleaming pinnacle to seething valley with a heavy, melancholy sobbing of water all about her decks, and her narrow, distended band of maintopsail hovering overhead black as a raven's pinion in the flying hoariness. We were washing through it at twelve or thirteen knots an hour, though the ship was as stiff as a madman in a strait-jacket, with the compressed wool in her hold and loaded down to her main-chain bolts besides. By two bells (one o'clock) forward of the break of the poop the decks were deserted, though now and again, amidst some swiftly passing flaw in the storm of snow, you might just discern the gleaming shapes of two men on the look-out on the forecastle, with the glimpse of a figure in the foretop, also on the watch for anything that might be ahead. The captain in his tall hat was stumping the deck to and fro close against the wheel, cased in a long pilot coat, under the skirts of which his legs, as he slewed round, showed like the lower limb of the letter O. Through the closed skylight windows I could get a sort of watery view of the cuddy passengers—as they were then called—reading, playing at chess, playing the piano, below. There were some scores of steerage and 'tween-deck passengers, deeper yet in the bowels of the ship, but hidden out of sight by the closed hatches.

I know not why it should have been, but I was the only midshipman on the poop, though the ship carried twelve of us, six to a watch. The other five were doubtless loafing about under cover somewhere. I stood close beside the chief mate to windward, holding to the brass rail that ran athwart the break of the poop. This officer was a Scotchman, a man named Thompson, and I suppose no better seaman ever trod a ship's deck. He was talking to me about getting home, asking me whether I would rather be off Cape Horn in a snow-storm or making ready to sit down with my brothers and sisters at my father's table to a jolly good dinner of fish and roast beef and pudding, when all on a sudden he stopped in what he was saying, and fell a-sniffing violently.