The Golden Ocean (28 page)

‘My dear Sir,’ wrote Peter,

‘By Mr Walter’s kindness I may send my Love and Duty from this Side of the World, for we have reach’d this Port, and he is to go Home in one of the Merchantmen which resort hither for the China Trade. Some other Officers go with him, chief of whom is Capt. Saunders, formerly our First, but now made Post, and charg’d with the Commodore’s despatches to the Admiralty. These will be made Public (or what Part of ‘em is fit for the Public Gaze) in the Gazette, and to them I will leave the Task of recounting our Voyage: for otherwise, upon my Word, I shou’d be hard put to begin. William cou’d encompass it, I am sure, or Homer or Virgil; but I was never an Eminent Hand with a Pen, and I know that even the Commodore has been coop’d up these three days together with his Clerk, compiling his Letter to their Lordships. However, I have noted down particular Occurrences in a Commonplace Book, and with that to refresh my Memory, I hope to carry you (in Figure) in a total Circumnavigation of the Terraqueous Globe when I reach home. This (God willing) shou’d be in a few months after Mr Walter, for we have but to careen and refit, and then we weigh for Batavia and so round by the Cape—the beaten track of the Indiamen and perfectly charted and known. Our Expedition is done. It is not fit that I should give particular News of it in a private Letter, before the Despatches are known, but I may say that we have not accomplish’d all that the World might have hop’d, yet still we have done something, and at least we are come to this Place, where no Man-of-war has been before us.

‘We had but an uncomfortable time of it round the Horn,
as was to be expected; but we were entirely recover’d at Juan Fernandez. Then we had some charming sailing, in our Cruise on the Spaniards: a brush or two, some Success and some Disappointment, in the usual Mixture; and so, after some Difficulties that it wou’d be tedious to relate, we cross’d the Pacific Ocean—surely a strangely nam’d Sea.

‘As for China, I despair of giving you an Image of the Country. But Mr Brett, our 2nd Lieutenant, has in the Most Obliging Manner, given me some capital Drawings made on the Spot, and these, together with some trifling Presents (which I beg your kind Acceptance of) will tell you more than if I puzzled my Wits clean through the Watch. The little wicker Parcel is fill’d with Tea, which is a China Drink, and much taken by the grand People in England, they say. The country way of making it is to put some in a Pot and dash scalding water upon it. A tolerably large Handful will answer for a Pot. It is said to invigorate the Fancy and strengthen the Nerves: I cannot say I find this effect in myself, but this may be either brutish Insensibility or the result of Hard Tack, Junk and dried Pease as a 2 years’ Diet. I have put Labels on the other Presents, to shew what they are and for Whom: they are small, but Mr Walter is already deep-laden and I wou’d not impose upon his Good-Nature—though indeed he has a wonderful Store of it and supported us much, in fair Weather and Foul.

‘As for myself, I am in Health and as strong as a Horse. How I hope that Placidus is perfectly well, and that his near Forefoot is no longer so Tender. Sean, too, is as strong as a Horse and has his Health entire, apart from some Fingers and Toes, which came off by reason of the cold in the high latitudes South. He desires his best Duty and all his Respects. He is a steady, excellent Fellow and much esteem’d by the whole Company. He is Captain of the Foretop, and the Commodore ask’d me privately cou’d he read and write? Which may mean that he designs him for a Warrant.

‘Now, Sir, with my dear Love to my Mother and you and to my Brothers and Sisters as well as to all who remember me
kindly, I will close up this Letter. I am asham’d it is such a sad scrubby Epistle, but I will make it up by Spinning my Yarn, as the sailormen say, by the side of a good Turf fire, in my own place at Home.’

He signed, folded, and looked up into the face of Pollock, on the other side of the narrow table. Pollock’s mouth was open, and he was gazing vacantly into the air. ‘You will have to be pretty brisk if you want your letter to go in the
Walpole
,’ said Peter, catching his eye.

‘I don’t know what to say,’ said Pollock. ‘It is such a long time,’ he added, in a very low and doleful voice.

‘Cheer up, young codger,’ said Peter. ‘Come, this will never do. They all say what a roaring blade you are—you mustn’t give way, you know.’

‘Do they, Palafox, indeed?’

‘Sure, strike me—if they don’t. There now, dash away. Can’t you begin?’

‘No,’ said Pollock, relapsing again.

‘Would you like my beginning? It’s pretty good.’

‘Oh yes, if you please.’

‘All right. What’s your establishment at home? I only ask to make it square.’

‘There’s my mother, and Sue.’

‘Capital. “My dear Madam,” ’ Peter began, adapting his letter while Pollock scribbled busily after him. ‘… we’ll leave Placidus out: and Sean: but you can have a drawing if you would like it, and leave Mr Brett in. Needn’t mention
G
loucester
’s mishaps—just say you’ve been transferred—only worry them else. You’re as strong as a horse, an’t you? Good: make it so. No brothers? Cut out brothers. I suppose you don’t have turf at home. No? Put in sea-coals or wood, as the case may be. There. Sand the blot. That’s as handsome a letter as the soul could desire. No, don’t seal it—that wouldn’t be civil to Captain Saunders, who carries it. Fold again. Sling it over, and I will take it with mine.’

‘What an amazingly good fellow you are, Palafox,’ said Pollock. ‘I am extremely obliged for your—’ but Peter was gone.

On the bank of the Pearl River, with its back to the teeming city of Canton, a Chinese sage contemplated the innumerable sampans and junks. By his side his grandson, a sharp child of six winters, tended a caged cricket and gambolled in the mud—a child destined, it may be added, for a public death by boiling just forty years on.

‘Grandpapa,’ said the fledgling gallows-bird, ‘I see two sumptuous palanquins approaching in the distance.’

‘Are they officials?’ asked the sage, turning quickly and peering through his spectacles.

‘I cannot tell, being so young in years,’ piped the child. ‘They are not very sumptuous palanquins, for although they are ornate to a high degree, the hangings are somewhat tawdry.’

‘They are not sumptuous at all,’ said the sage, as the palanquins drew near. ‘They are crude, vulgar, essentially modern palanquins; metricious palanquins: yet I have been put to the trouble of presenting a benignant aspect, in case they might be mandarins, by your unconsidered remarks.’

‘There is a foreign devil marching by the nearest palanquin, grandpapa.’

‘A barbarian, my child. The educated man does not say “foreign devil”.’

‘A barbarian, grandpapa. Pray, grandpapa, tell me about the barbarians?’

‘They are engendered by the apes of the farther western deserted regions, and by certain unclean spirits of those parts, my child: they are covered with hair, but they are capable of a rude speech for their simple communications among themselves: and they have, from the supernatural side of their ancestry, a curious ability to travel in very large sea-going machines, which waft them up and down. They first had the happiness of finding the Celestial Empire in the reign of Sun Chi, when it was reported that they were capable of domestication and responsive to kindness; and it was ordered that they should be regarded as neutral monsters of the third class, neither benign nor malignant, to be officially preserved as
curiosities and allowed suitable nourishment, but to be shunned by unauthorised persons.’

‘What is suitable nourishment for a monster of the third class, if you please, grandpapa?’

‘A small brick of a very hard farinaceous substance will sustain one for a week,’ replied the sage. ‘They are not costly to maintain: but neither are they pleasant, having the hairiness of the one parent joined to the intractability of the other, together with the unbelievable lack of polish of both, doubled.’

‘The monster in the second palanquin has no hair at all,’ reported the child, returning through the crowd.

‘Then it is one of the Smooth Southern Monsters,’ said the sage sharply, ‘and so much the worse.’

‘And pray, grandpapa, why does the monster perpetually chant “Palanquin ho, palanquin hee”?’

‘It is an abortive attempt at speaking the human language,’ said the sage.

‘Does it want its brick of farinaceous substance, or is the monster in pain, grandpapa?’

‘Not in half as much pain as you will be in a minute if you do not stop asking damn-fool questions,’ cried the exasperated sage. ‘Leave the foreign devils alone, can’t you? And mind your own business. You will certainly come to a bad end if you go on like this, you very disagreeable little beast.’ With those ominous words the sage turned his face to the river, and took no further interest in the proceedings whatever.

And this, in its way, was typical of the
Centurion
’s dealings with the Chinese. The root of the trouble lay, perhaps, in that polished nation’s disregard for the military character: in a land where the fighting man was officially rated as “equal, but perceptibly inferior, to the remover of impurities from the public thoroughfares, fifth class”, and popularly as almost indistinguishable from a hired assassin; in a land, moreover, to which no ship of the Royal Navy had hitherto penetrated, the Commodore found it extraordinarily difficult to have due respect paid to his master’s flag, and even (in spite of the good
offices of the Portuguese and the well-meant but inept intervention of the East India Company’s men) to provide his ship with her daily necessities, let alone the refit that she needed so badly. Obstruction from the lower officials, continual delays, false promises and misunderstandings kept the
Centurion
in Macao for a time that seemed never-ending and perfectly intolerable to her officers; and even when the Commodore, overriding the pusillanimous merchant’s advice, cut the red-tape by a direct and forceful approach to the Viceroy himself in Canton, the work carried on with maddening deliberation.

Maddening, that is, for the commander and the senior officers: the crew, the midshipmen’s berth, and the younger lieutenants, were charmed with their long run ashore. Now that the ship was in her berth, refitting at last, with a horde of very able, if dilatory, Chinese caulkers thumping away at her bottom and sides, while smiths hammered and blew, and shipwrights wrought, the more volatile part of her company scattered abroad to add to the gaiety of Macao, Kowloon and Canton, where, for all the official Chinese reserve, and despite their status as monsters, neutral, third class, they found congenial places of entertainment and convivial souls.

Peter was particularly fortunate in making friends with some East India Company cadets, two of whom had a working acquaintance with Cantonese and all a profound knowledge of the haunts where foreigners were welcomed and fed to the bursting-point. There were also a few daring young Chinese of the mercantile class who invited him out; and at other times he scoured the countryside with Keppel and Sean in pursuit of the outraged Chinese fox. He thought China was quite lovely; and in common with all his messmates he did not mind how long they were delayed, if only his pay could be made to last out.

This was a proviso of some importance. Two years’ pay, even at a midshipman’s meagre rate, had at first appeared an inexhaustible sum; but appearances are notoriously deceptive, and by February an outbreak of borrowing began in the midshipmen’s berth. By March there was no more to borrow,
and everybody was deeply in debt to everyone else: the entire communal purse had been entrusted to Keppel to run its chance at the fan-tan table of the Teahouse of Joyous Surprises. For one dazzling moment it had swollen to three times its size, then it vanished quite away, leaving seven anguished paupers behind it. A round-robin to the Commodore, a determined frontal attack upon him after dinner, had both failed to move him an inch from his position: the prize-money was not to be touched: thrift was a quality to be cultivated, and in no profession was it more important than theirs: they were to regard their prize-money as a nest-egg, a sheet-anchor: he was sorry to find that they had already dissipated their pay, which was ample for all reasonable needs—far more, indeed, than he as a midshipman had ever dreamed of possessing: but here were ten guineas, which they might change with the comprador, and he hoped they would not contract expensive tastes, most unsuitable in a naval career.

Ten guineas was a handsome contribution: but still the
Centurion
lay up, and somehow the guineas dribbled away. Presently small articles of personal clothing began to go over the side into bum-boats or the local equivalent; the personal loot of Paita had preceded them, and quadrants, parallel rulers and protractors followed. The more tender-hearted wardroom officers were attacked; and Peter, for one, did not scorn to pillage the gundeck.

‘March 17th,’ he wrote, ‘I believe Sean is hiding two pieces of eight. I distinctly heard something rattle when he pretended to be called away before I could pin him. Mem. Mr Brett, one and ninepence. Mem. to see if Slimebound Lee Hee will change Balthasar’s groat with a hole in it. Can I do without my reefer?’

‘Certainly I can,’ he answered, aloud. ‘The course home never goes above 35° S., and therefore must be perfectly warm, all the way.’

The reefer-jacket went over the side, and he thoughtfully added Ransome’s as well, thus saving him the trouble of making a decision. Yet still no way of discovering any considerable
supply could be found, and on April 3rd he wrote, ‘We only wandered about Macao today, as glum as gib cats.’

It was a thinly-equipped berth, therefore, that stood in the waist of the ship or on the quarter-deck as the parting salute to the Portuguese fort boomed over Macao road and the
Centurion
filled to stand out to sea on April 6th. Thinly-equipped, but well furnished with animal spirits: the ship was in noble condition; her rigging was a joy to behold; her silent pumps gleamed with paint that would surely rest undisturbed between here and the Channel; ready in the braces, mingled with the Centurions, stood a good score of fresh hands, experienced able seamen, Dutch and East-India lascars. She was homeward bound, and as she came about she ran through her stays with an easy confident glide—tallow below and never a speck of foul weed—that promised a beautiful run.