Patrick O’Brian 3-Book Adventure Collection: The Road to Samarcand, The Golden Ocean, The Unknown Shore. Patrick O’Brian
in a water-front bar. I had gone down there to see how the simple sailormen enjoyed themselves when they were ashore: I think I expected them to sing shanties and to dance the horn-pipe, or something like that, but all I found was a few Blue-noses and a melancholy Dane, a great whale of a man who was sitting at the same table as I was. He told me that he was off a barquentine in the harbour – a lovely vessel: I had already seen her and thought how nice it would be to go for a picnic up the coast in her in the summer – and that he was looking for some of his crew who had deserted. I remember saying that I wondered how anybody could desert such a fine-looking ship: then we had a few drinks together, and I began to feel rather queer. I remember how they stood looking at me in a curious way, and how the man at the bar nodded to the Dane. Then, when I woke up, there was a foul taste in my mouth, and I found that I was lying in a dark bunk. It was heaving underneath me, which was scarcely odd, because we were at sea, two days out of port. They had put a knock-out drop in my drink, and they had shanghaied me, being several men short of a full crew. They had been unable to sign on any of the sailors on shore, as it was known that the ship was bound round the Horn to Chile for nitrate, and that she had a bucko mate aboard, so they had picked up what men they could as best they could.
‘Presently a man came below and had a look at me. He was the big Dane I had been talking with, but now he did not seem nearly so pleasant as he had on shore. Instead of wishing me a good morning and asking after my head, which was aching as though there were a wedge driven into it somewhere, he said, “Get up on deck, you.” Well, I was young and foolish in those days, and I told him that I did not like his manners or his face, or anything about him at all. He murmured, “Fractious, eh?” and pulled me out of the bunk by the scruff of my neck. I took a crack at his jaw, and the next second I was flat on my back, wondering what had hit me. I got up, and let him have a good one on the end of his nose just before he laid me out again. Then he picked me up and threw me bodily on deck. “Throw me a bucket of water over this swab,” he said, “and put him to work.” “I’m an American citizen,” I said, feeling good and sore, but not getting up – I was learning wisdom fast – “and you can’t do this to me.” “Throw me a bucket of water over the American citizen,” he said, “and show him how to heave on a rope.”
‘Well, I got two buckets over my head, one for being a swab and the other for being an American citizen, and they damped my ardour for the moment. They put a rope into my hand, and I heaved as tame as Mary’s little lamb. But after a while I began to feel better, and when I had got some duff into me and had managed to keep it down, I said to this fellow – his name was Lars Gunnar, and he was second mate – “You can’t do this to me,” I said, “I am an American citizen.” When he had knocked me down again he picked me up and leaned me against the rails and addressed me in these words, “Listen,” he said, “you poor bum, you’re a citizen of this ship now, and a hundred brass-bound consuls won’t keep you alive if you don’t work.” He was quite right. Every time I got in the least uppish or made a landlubber’s mistake right up in the to’garn-stuns’ls, way up in the air miles above the deck, Lars Gunnar would beat me up; and if it was not him, it would be the master or the first mate. I was never a very timid fellow, but they knew how to keep their footing on a heaving deck, and how to crack a man with a belaying-pin, and I did not: anyhow, each one was as big as the side of a house, and I got weary of skinning my knuckles on their heads with no effect at all. They were terribly short-handed, and they drove their crew like blacks, but, even so, we were too late to slip round the Horn easily, and we beat to and fro for what seemed like years. It was a very bad passage, and two of the men were lost overboard, but somehow I survived, and by the time we dropped anchor in Antofagasta roads I had learnt a wonderful lot about being a sailor.
‘Now they sound tough, from what I have said, and they were tough: but they were not a bad lot of men at all. If you worked hard – and I did, when I understood how badly it was needed coming round the Horn – they treated you very well. They had shanghaied me because they felt that their ship’s need was more important than my comfort, and they beat me up so that I should be some use to the ship, not out of any personal spite against me – it was just like hammering a horseshoe into the right shape, no ill-will in it at all.
‘By the time we reached Chile I had come to the conclusion that I liked the sea. I had started out a weedy, lanky young chap, but at the end of this voyage, and it was a very long one, I had filled out and put on weight. When we were ashore in Antofagasta I beat the daylights out of Lars Gunnar and helped him back to the ship more dead than alive. They were still short-handed, for they had been able to pick up nothing more than a decrepit old Portuguese in Antofagasta, and they were desperate about their return passage. Lars and the Old Man asked me as civilly as they could – and to see them being civil was a wonderful sight, like two polar-bears trying to behave as if they were on a Sunday-school outing – to ship back with them, as a favour. Well, I had no people to worry about: there was only my sister, and I wrote to her to say that I was going on a voyage to see the world – I knew she would not worry in the least, as she was used to my comings and goings, and I signed on with them. It was a wonderful voyage, down to Australia with nitrates, and then with grain to Helsinki, where we paid off. I crossed the Atlantic again in a Cunarder, as a passenger this time, and very queer it felt; but when I got home everything seemed dull and flat. I fooled around on shore for some time, and then I took to studying navigation and so on and got my ticket. Some of my relatives said that it was a waste of an expensive classical education to be a nasty, low, common sailorman, but my sister thought it was fine, and so did your great-uncle Simon, who in spite of being a professor of pastoral theology was quite a rich man.
‘He was a dear old gentleman, and although he knew nothing about the sea at all, except that he rather suspected it was the sharp end of a ship that went first, he left me enough to buy my own schooner after I had risen to the dizzy height of a master-mariner’s certificate.’ He suddenly stopped and cocked his head, listening intently. ‘No, they won’t be moving yet,’ he said, after a minute. ‘What was I talking about? Oh, yes, I was telling – by the way, do you know whether your horrible dog can retrieve in water?’
‘Chang will do whatever he is told,’ said Derrick. ‘He is a very intelligent dog.’
Chang, hearing his name, stood up and waved his tail.
‘If he is,’ said Sullivan, ‘he conceals it very well.’ He knocked out his pipe, packed it carefully and re-lit it. For some time he was silent: then he began again, ‘Yes. I had my own schooner. I had been a good many voyages in steam, but it was not the same thing. There is nothing like sail; nothing like it at all. I knocked about all over the place in her, chiefly in the South Seas – pearling and copra – but I was going to tell you how I became a pirate, and that started in South America, in the Republic of Rococo. I had got mixed up with one of their revolutions, but if I were to tell you all about that the dawn flighting would be over before I had begun. The long and the short of it was that my friend, Porfirio Broll, came out on top: he wasn’t a bad chap at all; we used to call him Little Brolly at college, and I believe he really did have some sound notions about liberty. Anyway, he was President, and he made me a full-blown admiral. Now that was very kind, and it would have been kinder still if Rococo had ever got around to building a navy, but it had not. I pointed this out to Porfirio, and he gave me the choice of being Postmaster-General, Ambassador to Luxemburg or Minister without portfolio: I said that we would call it quits if he would give me the right to work a guano island that I had sighted off the coast. He jumped at the idea, and gave me a nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine-year lease of the island, all written out on a fine piece of parchment and covered with seals.
‘As soon as I had got my lease I set sail for my island. It was only a couple of sheer rocks stuck in the sea a hundred miles from anywhere, and nothing lived on it but sea-birds. There was no anchorage to speak of, and there was no water, but the guano had never been touched, and it lay twenty feet thick all over the island – it is the droppings of gulls, you know, and the best fertiliser in the world. It was a very valuable find indeed, and I was in a fair way to make my fortune. I put some convicts ashore – Porfirio had provided me with his predecessor’s cabinet – and left them to provide a cargo against my return while I went off to arrange about selling the stuff. The first cargo was all ready according to plan, and I began to work out how many voyages it would