10 
LAND & WATER 
August 17, iqtG 
slats, I cowered in terror, and was ever music sweeter 
than the raucous bellow of bluff old Captain G — when, 
cursing like a pirate and banging right and left with the 
belaying pins he held in either hand, he plowed 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 
\'oyages 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 G — had 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 Val- 
paraiso, 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 " Nor- 
ther " and was fast driving before the mountainous 
swells upon the malccon or seawall, 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 sax-ed. . I was one* of the half- 
dozen who did not fail in their leaps 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 heeling deck. 
At times memories crowdpd so that they became con- 
fused. 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 shark-infested Rotrura Lagoon to jerk 
the kink out of an air-hose before his diver stranglad ; 
or which of two otherwise well-remembered " B.T" 
skippers it was that 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 the 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 that 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 coconut 
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 " sufiiciency unto occasion " of 
my old friends, but most that 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 otliers. 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 " 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 odours of the spice 
groves of Celebes. B— had 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 rocks— mostly lurking, half-submerged — 
in between. 
" By the Little Paternosters, as you come to the Union Bank' 
We dropped her — I think I told you — and I pricked it off 
where she sank — 
ITiny she looked on the grating — that oily, treacly sea — ) 
' Hundred and eighteen East, remember, and South just three. 
Easy bearings to carry . . ." ' 
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 
hasty reckoning, nothing would do but B — must start 
the lead going to determine the depth. Never shall I 
ferget the way his face lit up when the leadsmen droned 
out " Fourteen," and there were tears ghstening in his 
eyes as he turned back a couple of pages and read — 
" .\nd we dropped lier in fourteen fathoms ; I pricked it off 
where she sank." 
" 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 sovmdings ! " 
The margins of " The ' Mary Gloster,' " in my " Seven 
Seas," bear the pencilled records — now thumbed and 
fingered into dim blurs — of our " mid-sea madness " 
to this day, and there is nothing that I treasure more. 
B — would never have taken his 5,000-ton freighter 
rniles 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 I^aureate " 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 recollection of. how kind old 
N — , of a Liverpool-Para-Manaos freighter, 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 set the current of my 
thought on another tack. N — was 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 gateway 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 laboured for an hour in helping 
the ship's doctor worry back into place the shoulder I 
had dislocated in the " sports " one afternoon ; and it 
was D — , of the Rangoon-Calcutta " B.L," who had 
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 plying from Basra to Bagdad, who 
stitched up my scalp after the Arabs of the bazaar of 
then almost unheard of Kut-el-Amara had amused 
themselves with bouncing rocks off my head because (this 
was during the Turco-Italian war) they imagined I 
looked like an " alien enemy." 
A — was killed when the Turks shelled his ship — then a 
transport — early in the Mesopotamian operations, I 
remembcre4, 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 been roaming 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 a number of 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 lUawara, 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 
tip-toeing on his nearby deliveries to avoid making un- 
necessary nofse. Out of the retreating fog-bank to 
seaward two small freighters took sharpened line and 
headed for the harbour mouth. They were much of a 
i 
