Tracks of a Rolling Stone. Henry J. Coke
were originally of an evil kind. Sir John Lubbock (‘The Origin of Civilisation’) says: ‘The baying of the dog to the moon is as much an act of worship as some ceremonies which have been so described by travellers.’ I think he would admit that fear is the origin of the worship. In his essay on ‘Superstition,’ Hume writes: ‘Weakness, fear, melancholy, together with ignorance, are the true sources of superstition.’ Also ‘in such a state of mind, infinite unknown evils are dreaded from unknown agents.’
Man’s impotence to resist the forces of nature, and their terrible ability to injure him, would inspire a sense of terror; which in turn would give rise to the twofold notion of omnipotence and malignity. The savage of the present day lives in perpetual fear of evil spirits; and the superstitious dread, which I and most others have suffered, is inherited from our savage ancestry. How much further back we must seek it may be left to the sage philosophers of the future.
CHAPTER VII
The next winter we lay for a couple of months off Chinhai, which we had stormed, blockading the mouth of the Ningpo river. Here, I regret to think, I committed an act which has often haunted my conscience as a crime; although I had frequently promised the captain of a gun a glass of grog to let me have a shot, and was mightily pleased if death and destruction rewarded my aim.
Off Chinhai, lorchers and fast sailing junks laden with merchandise would try to run the blockade before daylight. And it sometimes happened that we youngsters had a long chase in a cutter to overhaul them. This meant getting back to a nine or ten o’clock breakfast at the end of the morning’s watch; equivalent to five or six hours’ duty on an empty stomach.
One cold morning I had a hard job to stop a small junk. The men were sweating at their oars like galley slaves, and muttering curses at the apparent futility of their labour. I had fired a couple of shots from a ‘brown Bess’—the musket of the day—through the fugitive’s sails; and fearing punishment if I let her escape, I next aimed at the boat herself. Down came the mainsail in a crack. When I boarded our capture, I found I had put a bullet through the thigh of the man at the tiller. Boys are not much troubled with scruples about bloodguiltiness, and not unfrequently are very cruel, for cruelty as a rule (with exceptions) mostly proceeds from thoughtlessness. But when I realised what I had done, and heard the wretched man groan, I was seized with remorse for what, at a more hardened stage, I should have excused on the score of duty.
It was during this blockade that the accident, which I have already alluded to, befell my dear protector, Jack Johnson.
One night, during his and my middle watch, the forecastle sentries hailed a large sampan, like a Thames barge, drifting down stream and threatening to foul us. Sir Frederick Nicholson, the officer of the watch, ordered Johnson to take the cutter and tow her clear.
I begged leave to go with him. Sir Frederick refused, for he at once suspected mischief. The sampan was reached and diverted just before she swung athwart our bows. But scarcely was this achieved, when an explosion took place. My friend was knocked over, and one or two of the men fell back into the cutter. This is what had happened: Johnson finding no one in the sampan, cautiously raised one of the deck hatches with a boat-hook before he left the cutter. The mine (for such it proved) was so arranged that examination of this kind drew a lighted match on to the magazine, which instantly exploded.
Poor Jack! what was my horror when we got him on board! Every trace of his handsome features was gone. He was alive, and that seemed to be all. In a few minutes his head and face swelled so that all was a round black charred ball. One could hardly see where the eyes were, buried beneath the powder-ingrained and incrusted flesh.
For weeks, at night, I used to sit on a chest near his hammock, listening for his slightest movement, too happy if he called me for something I could get him. In time he recovered, and was invalided home, and I lost my dear companion and protector. A couple of years afterwards I had the happiness to dine with him on board another ship in Portsmouth, no longer in the midshipman’s berth, but in the wardroom.
Twice during this war, the ‘Blonde’ was caught in a typhoon. The first time was in waters now famous, but then unknown, the Gulf of Liau-tung, in full sight of China’s great wall. We were twenty-four hours battened down, and under storm staysails. The ‘Blenheim,’ with Captain Elliott our plenipotentiary on board, was with us, and the one circumstance left in my memory is the sight of a line-of-battle ship rolling and pitching so that one caught sight of the whole of her keel from stem to stern as if she had been a fishing smack. We had been wintering in the Yellow Sea, and at the time I speak of were on a foraging expedition round the Liau-tung peninsula. Those who have followed the events of the Japanese war will have noticed on the map, not far north of Ta-lien-wan in the Korean Bay, three groups of islands. So little was the geography of these parts then known, that they had no place on our charts. On this very occasion, one group was named after Captain Elliott, one was called the Bouchier Islands, and the other the Blonde Islands. The first surveying of the two latter groups, and the placing of them upon the map, was done by our naval instructor, and he always took me with him as his assistant.
Our second typhoon was while we were at anchor in Hong Kong harbour. Those who have knowledge only of the gales, however violent, of our latitudes, have no conception of what wind-force can mount to. To be the toy of it is enough to fill the stoutest heart with awe. The harbour was full of transports, merchant ships, opium clippers, besides four or five men-of-war, and a steamer belonging to the East India Company—the first steamship I had ever seen.
The coming of a typhoon is well known to the natives at least twenty-four hours beforehand, and every preparation is made for it. Boats are dragged far up the beach; buildings even are fortified for resistance. Every ship had laid out its anchors, lowered its yards, and housed its topmasts. We had both bowers down, with cables paid out to extreme length. The danger was either in drifting on shore or, what was more imminent, collision. When once the tornado struck us there was nothing more to be done; no men could have worked on deck. The seas broke by tons over all; boats beached as described were lifted from the ground, and hurled, in some instances, over the houses. The air was darkened by the spray.
But terrible as was the raging of wind and water, far more awful was the vain struggle for life of the human beings who succumbed to it. In a short time almost all the ships except the men-of-war, which were better provided with anchors, began to drift from their moorings. Then wreck followed wreck. I do not think the ‘Blonde’ moved; but from first to last we were threatened with the additional weight and strain of a drifting vessel. Had we been so hampered our anchorage must have given way. As a single example of the force of a typhoon, the ‘Phlegethon’ with three anchors down, and engines working at full speed, was blown past us out of the harbour.
One tragic incident I witnessed, which happened within a few fathoms of the ‘Blonde.’ An opium clipper had drifted athwart the bow of a large merchantman, which in turn was almost foul of us. In less than five minutes the clipper sank. One man alone reappeared on the surface. He was so close, that from where I was holding on and crouching under the lee of the mainmast I could see the expression of his face. He was a splendidly built man, and his strength and activity must have been prodigious. He clung to the cable of the merchantman, which he had managed to clasp. As the vessel reared between the seas he gained a few feet before he was again submerged. At last he reached the hawse-hole. Had he hoped, in spite of his knowledge, to find it large enough to admit his body? He must have known the truth; and yet he struggled on. Did he hope that, when thus within arms’ length of men in safety, some pitying hand would be stretched out to rescue him—a rope’s end perhaps flung out to haul him inboard? Vain desperate hope! He looked upwards: an imploring look. Would Heaven be more compassionate than man? A mountain of sea towered above his head; and when again the bow was visible, the man was gone for ever.
Before taking leave of my seafaring days, I must say one word about corporal punishment. Sir Thomas Bouchier was a good sailor, a gallant officer, and a kind-hearted man; but he was one of the old school. Discipline was his watchword, and he endeavoured to maintain it