To the Merchant Skippers of Britain: A Tribute From a Friend

ALL yesterday evening I came upon little knots of sailor-men gathered along the quay or at the corners of the streets of Harwich and Dovercourt. Their parchment-brown, weather-beaten faces were drawn and troubled, and they spoke in the jerkily lowered voices of men not wont to hold their tongues or passions in restraining leash. There was something in the half-stunned, half-angry looks suggestive of the expressions that I had seen on the faces of the sailors at a North Wales port on the evening that a carelessly framed dispatch had tricked them into transient belief that the British Fleet had been beaten by the Germans in the North Sea. But I had been with naval men all afternoon; I knew that there was nothing fresh to report from behind the gray fog-curtain to the North. The trouble was of another kind, and from past experience I knew that, when the British sailorman spoke through clenched teeth in those jerkily lowered tones, with his brow corrugated in dark wrinkles of perturbation and his blue eyes fixed absently on the fingers of his working hands, it was not the moment for even the most sympathetically curious to intrude upon him.

Enlightenment came later, when I asked the maid who lowered the shutters and drew the double curtains of my room in the little hotel on the Dovercourt cliff why it was that the children who were playing below my window lowered their voices and tiptoed as they came down toward the seaward end; and why many of even the belated delivery carts were taking another way on their clattering rounds.

‘Is somebody sick?’ I asked, ‘or is one of the neighbors dead?’

’Did n’t you know, sir?’ faltered the girl. ‘That’s Captain Fryatt’s ’ome down there. It’s the little red brick ’ouse — the fourth or fifth from the corner. We all o’ us ’ere knew ’im, sir, an’ loved ’im; an’ — you’ll excuse me, sir’ (her voice broke for a moment and the starting tears glistened in the flickering light of her candle), ‘but I was thinkin’ o’ the missus an’ the nippers. They’s waitin’ for more news from Belg’um. I hates to think o’ ’em. It makes me want to scream an’ — an’ to fight. I’ll be going now, sir; it gets me all wrought up w’en I talks about it.’

It came to me all at once what those stunned, angry sailors were talking of, and the hot wave of indignation — checked for an hour or two by the excitement of meeting and boarding a returning submarine — that had surged over me that afternoon when I first read the news of Captain Fryatt’s execution welled up anew inside me and throbbed against my temples.

‘No sleep while I feel like this,’ I told myself. ‘Best to let the sea-air in for a while and cool down.’

I pulled up an easy chair, lighted a cigar, blew out my candle, and sat down by the open window.

For a few minutes, like the chambermaid, I was ‘all wrought up,’ but before long those age-old sedatives, seaair and sea-fog, had done their work, and the flame of my anger flickered out, to leave behind it a quiet confidence that time would right the wrong that had been done. There was a strange sense of personal loss, too. I did not for an instant endeavor to dramatize my feelings to the extent of fancying myself in a position even remotely similar to that of the silent watchers in the little red house in Oakland Road; nor yet could the tragedy mean to me anything comparable to what it meant to those bronzed, bowed sailors I had seen during the afternoon, or even what it must mean to any man that sails the seas under a flag unblackened by the stain of piracy. It was only that I was conscious of the passing of one of a class of men whom I had learned to know and love during many years of intimate association — in craft stout and frail, on seas fair and stormy; and the fact that the death of this man had been compassed with a cold-blooded cynicism scarcely paralleled in modern history brought the significance of it home to me with especial poignancy. In a dull sort of way I had been conscious of a similar feeling every time I had read of the loss of merchant officers and crews from the inauguration of the submarine campaign; but only now had I come to understand how much of a hold these same sailor-men had on my affection, — what parts they had played in scores of the vivid incidents of my life that I cared most to dwell upon in memory.

Three of the last ten years of my life had been spent upon the sea, I reflected. Of this time perhaps six months had been put in on one or another of the floating palaces of the main tourist routes, and scarcely more than that aboard ships under the German, French, Dutch, or American flag. That left a good two years spent aboard the smaller British merchantmen — tramps, coasters, colliers, traders, flatbottomed river stern-wheelers—in outof-the-way water-lanes of the world. Two years of my life (and what treasured years they were, too!) spent in the care of the bluff bronzed British merchant captains who drove ‘ the swift shuttles of an Empire’s loom.’

What strange seas they had steered me through, and what strange corners in the ports that served those seas! And what adventures they had run me into, and what scrapes got me out of! And what courtesy, what consideration — aye, even what tenderness in times of misadventure and sickness — had I not enjoyed at their hands! And now that one of them was dead — murdered in cold blood for doing the same things for those who sailed with him that his brother skippers had so often done for me — it was only meet that I should stand that midnight watch, well called by the sailors of all the seas the ‘graveyard ’ watch, as a token of my affection for the British merchant skippers as a class — as a small tribute from one they had so safely brought to port.

Pulling on my cardigan jacket, I ‘stood-by’ as the hour of eleven — midnight by the sun-time by which the ships of the sea still sail —drew near; and at the instant when the steamers in the harbor would have been sounding ‘eight bells’ had there been no lurking Zeppelins to guard against, I leaned out of the open window till the in-drifting fog blew sharp against my face, and began my ‘watch.’ Just so — with a rough blue sleeve brushing against mine — had I leaned over the bridge or taffrail of a hundred steamers, ploughing a hundred sea-ways; and now, with the familiar breath of the sea in my nostrils and the familiar mist of the sea damping my hair again, old friends of other days strode down the corridors of memory and ranged themselves by my side. At first I tried to muster them chronologically, in the order in which I had known them from my first tentative coastal voyages in the Pacific: B-, of the Vancouver-Seattle packet, who let me sleep on his cabin couch one night when the rooms were all taken, so that I might be rested for the tennis tournament I was engaging in at Tacoma on the morrow; R-, of the old Alaska ‘Inland Passage’ coaster, who taught me to box the compass and awoke the slumbering love of the sea in my blood with tales of the Victoria sealing fleet; P-, of the Mexican trader, who smuggled me out of Guaymas when the Sonora authorities were trying to arrest me for landing on Tiburon without a permit. But presently the magnet of my quickened memory began drawing them forward out of turn, and ere long they were crowding on like guests at a reception.

Now I would think of the bravery of them, and instantly a series of pictures took shape before my eyes, a score of names leaped to my lips, a score of hands — hard, brown hands, with a world of warmth in their steady grip — reached out to clasp my own. Who was the bravest among men that had all been brave? I asked myself; and then how the pictures formed and dissolved as one stirring incident after another flashed across my mind! What could have been finer than the way Captain K—, of the cranky clipper-bowed C.N. steamer, had stuck out that typhoon off Taiwan, lashed to the bridge for three days, and subsisting on coffee and rum and pilot bread? I could see his brine-white face (as I saw it when I took a timid peep up the companion way on the day the ‘twister’ began to die down) taking shape out there in the drifting fog even as the recollection of that fearsome storm crystallized in my memory; then fancy turned another cog, and it was a sun-blistered South Pacific trader that I seemed to see, with a sallow, fever-wracked figure at the wheel, and two or three dozen naked blacks writhing in agony on the forward deck. How old B-, of the Cora Andrews, took his load of plaguestricken Papuans through the Barrier Reef and into the quarantine station at Townsville is a South Sea epic.

Then came memories with a more personal touch, and I dwelt for a few moments over the shifting scenes of the mix-up I started the time I tried to take a flashlight of the smokers in the opium den of the old Yo San, plying on the Hongkong-Bangkok run. Some of the Chinese crew were smuggling opium that trip, and, taking me for a Secret Service officer on search, started to wipe up the deck with me. Curled round my camera under a bunk in the corner of the opium den, with nothing to save me from annihilation but the fact that my assailants were so numerous that they got in each other’s way; expecting every moment that one of them would collect his wits sufficiently to pounce on me through the slats, I cowered in terror and shielded myself against the blows. Was ever music sweeter than the raucous bellow of bluff old Captain Gwhen, cursing like a pirate and banging right and left with the belaying-pins that he held in either hand, he ploughed his way into the den and yanked me out by the scruff of the neck? Poor old G—! he was lost with his ship two voyages later, when the ancient Yo San was piled up by a typhoon on the Tongking coast.

Then the recollection of the ignominious way in which old Ghad pulled me out from under the bunk by the coat-collar recalled the time when another British skipper — his command was only a P.S.N.C. tender in Valparaiso and I had long since forgotten his name — saved my life by handling me in quite the same unceremonious manner. The schooner on which I had planned to sail to Juan Fernandez had broken loose in a violent ‘Norther’ and was fast driving before the mountainous swells upon the malecón or sea-wall, when the Navigation Company’s tender, out to salvage some drifting barges, came nosing cautiously in toward where the hollow waves were curling over into crashing breakers. The barges and their cargoes were probably worth more than our walty old hooker; but the skipper of the tender, noting only that there were lives to be saved on the latter, hesitated not an instant about deciding to try and stand by. Unfortunately, we had a lot of German colonistas aboard, and the panic among them prevented many from the schooner being saved. I was one of the half dozen who did not fall short in leaping for the tender’s outreaching starboard bow; but my hold on the slippery rail was so precarious that only the mighty hand of the skipper on my neck prevented my slipping back into the sea. For a moment now, out in the drifting fog, I saw his round, red face, under its sou’wester, just as I had peered up into it after he dragged me over the rail and slammed me down on the reeling deck.

At times memories crowded so that they got confused. I was not sure, for instance, whether it was T-, of the Eimoo, or P-, of the Levuka, whom I had seen go over the rail into sharkinfested Rotorua Lagoon to jerk the kink out of an air-hose before his diver strangled; or which of two otherwise well-remembered ‘B.I.’ skippers it was who waded in, bare-handed, and floored every one of a bunch of Lascars who were fighting with their knives; or whether it was the mate or the skipper of a certain East African coaster who, with one of his thighs being torn to ribbons by the beast’s hind claws, kept his grip on the throat of a young leopard which had slipped from its cage and which he was afraid might become panic-stricken and jump overboard before it could be recaptured; or whether it was the captain of a ‘Burns, Philips’ or a Union steamer that I had seen put out through the tortuous passage of Suva Bay when the wind was snapping the tops from the cocoanut palms, and the barometer was at 28.50 and still falling, just because the wife of the missionary on some obscure little bit of the Fijian Archipelago to the north was expecting to become a mother and needed the attention of the ship’s doctor.

I would have gone on to the end of my ‘watch,’ thinking of the bravery, — moral and physical,—the ready nerve, and the general sufficiency unto occasion of my old friends, but most who had been brave had also been kind and considerate, and every now and then I found my mind occupied with recollections of the little things they had done for me, or that I had seen them do for others.

There was B-, of the old Changsha, running from Yokohama to Sydney, who went miles off his course just to satisfy my whim to pass over the spot where the Mary Gloster was buried at sea. What an afternoon that was! The Straits of Macassar ‘ oily and treacly,’ just as Kipling had described them, and the milk-warm land breeze wafting the odors of the spice groves of Celebes. Bhad his volume of Kipling and I had mine, and between us was the reef-freckled chart of Macassar Straits, with Borneo to starboard, Celebes to port, and a thousand dotted lines indicating islets and reefs and half-submerged rocks in between.

read B-, running his finger along the chart. ‘Aye, easy to carry. Here’s the spot.’ And he marked it with a circled dot. Then we ‘dead reckoned’ the latitude from the noon sight, and ‘shot’ for the longitude as we ‘came to the Union Bank.’ And finally, when we were over the spot as near as might be determined from the hasty reckoning, nothing would do but Bmust start the lead going to determine the depth. Never shall I forget how his face lit up when the leadsman droned out ‘Fourteen,’ and there were tears glistening in his eyes as he turned back a couple of pages and read, —

‘I might have known that Kipling worked it out with a chart,’ he exclaimed; ‘but what a thrill it gives one to find it exact, even to the soundings ! ’

The margins of ‘The Mary Gloster,’ in my copy of The Seven Seas, bear the penciled records — now thumbed and fingered into dim blurs — of our ‘ midsea madness’ to this day, and there is nothing that I treasure more. Bwould never have taken his 5000-ton freighter miles off her course, at the cost of some hours of time and a number of tons of good Nagasaki coal, had he been any less daft about Kipling than I was. But all British sailors love Kipling; as a class, I have always felt that they had a fuller appreciation of the message of ‘the uncrowned Laureate’ than have any others.

For an hour at least I must have turned in fancy the pages of Kipling, now with this well-remembered skipper, now with that, until the current of my thought took another drift through the recollection of kind old N-, of a Liverpool—Manaos freighter, who had read to me ‘The Hymn Before Action’ one night when I was half delirious from the Amazon ‘ black-water ’ fever he had been nursing me through. Nwas only one of a dozen who had coddled me through some sort of tropical illness or patched me up after some sort of a smash-up. It was R—, of the Valparaiso-Panama coaster, who had put my hand in splints after it had been crushed between the gangway and a dug-out full of ivory nuts off some pile-built village of Ecuador; and it was my fault rather than his that the little finger was still crooked. And it was H-, of the big White Star freighter on the Australia—South Africa run, who labored for an hour in helping the ship’s doctor worry back into place the shoulder I had dislocated in the ‘sports’ one afternoon. It was D-, of the Rangoon—Calcutta ‘B.I.,’ who reduced with horse-liniment the ankle I had sprained in dodging out of the path of a temperamental water-buffalo while ashore at Akyab; and it was A-, of the Lynch river-boat that plied from Basra to Bagdad, who stitched up my scalp after the Arabs of the bazaar of Kut-el-Amara had been amusing themselves with bouncing rocks off my head because (this was during the Turco-Italian War) they imagined that I looked like an ‘alien enemy.’

Awas killed when the Turks shelled his ship, then a transport, early in the Mesopotamian operations; and this led my thoughts off to the long watch I kept by the bedside of poor old Y-, on whose ‘B.P.’ steamer I had roamed in and out among the Solomons, New Hebrides, Fijis, and other islands of western Polynesia for two months. Y-’s heart had been giving out for several years, and now very hot weather, following the excitement of seeing his ship through an unusually heavy hurricane, had hastened an end long inevitable. He knew his number was up, and so he told me that night of things he wanted me to explain and set right for him in Australia. It was the thinking of these, and the visit that I subsequently paid to his wife and children in the Illawara, that finally brought my mind back to that other bereaved family in the little red house beneath my window.

The short night had passed, the fog had lifted, and now in the early morning light I saw a milkman stop his cart a half-dozen doors from the Fryatt home and go softly tiptoeing on his nearby deliveries to avoid making unnecessary noise. Out of the retreating fog-bank to seaward two small freighters took sharpened line and headed for the harbor mouth. They were much of a size and type, but the gay red and white splashes on the bows of the more northerly indicated that she sailed under the flag of an enterprising Scandinavian country, while the unbroken black of the side of the other told just as plainly that she was British. As I watched, the shifting of the shadows on the sides of the Norwegian told me that she was altering her course sharply every few hundred yards — ‘zigzaging,’to minimize the danger from submarine attacks. A wise precaution, I told myself; now what about the other? I took up my glass and held it on the Briton. Three — five minutes passed. All the time the wave curled evenly back from her forefoot; not a ripple of shifting light or shadow on her rusty side told of the deviation in her course of the fraction of a point.

‘Straight on to your goal, little ship,’ I said, saluting with my glass. ‘But I might have known as much. That was Fryatt’s way, and that was the way all my friends of the Red Ensign did, and always will do. Good luck, fair weather and snug berths to you all; aye, and a quiet haven when the last watch, the long watch, is finally over!’

Knots of troubled sailor-men still gathered along Harwich quay this morning, but now that I understood by what they were moved I no longer hesitated to mingle and talk with them. Their slow anger was steadily mounting — gradually crowding out all other feelings — with every word that was spoken, with every hour that passed; but among them were still men who were stunned and dazed, who could not understand how a thing so monstrous really could have happened.

‘But w’y, w’y ha’ the ’Uns done it?’ persisted a grizzled old salt, turning his troubled eyes to mine after all the others had shaken their heads perplexedly.

I gave him the only explanation that my own perturbed mind had been able to frame.

‘It’s just possible,’ I said, ‘that the Germans believe that the execution of one skipper who attempted to ram one of their submarines will make the others think twice before trying to do the same thing.’

Two or three of the older men fairly snorted in their incredulity that even the Germans should thus cheaply rate the British sailor, but the plausibility of the theory soon convinced even these.

‘Do you re’ly believe the ’Uns think that o’ us ? ’ one of them finally ventured.

‘I do,’ I replied, ‘for there is nothing else to think.’

The old man took a deep breath and turned his eyes away to sea.

‘God pity all ’Uns,’ he muttered; and ‘God pity ’em!’ ‘God pity ’em!’ fervently echoed his mates.