THE ROVER
THE LIFE APART
By Harry Tobin
Copyright 2008 Harry Tobin.
This is a voice from the aft. The true story of those last steam and motor ships, manned with the wandering souls of the seamen—the unique race of men which, soon after the era of the steamship, disappeared forever.
All coiled down, an’ it’s time for us to go;
Every sail’s furled in a neat harbor stow;
Another ship for me, an’ for her another crew—
An’ so long sailorman—good luck to you!
—Cicely Fox Smith, So Long (All Coiled Down)
In Sea Songs and Ballads 1917-1922.
Chapter 1
My name is Gargles, but they just call me Charily, I cannot say to have had any proper occupation, though I’ve been in the merchant service for quite a long time, so I elect call myself as a Jack of all trades, master of none.
How came I to embarked on the business as a seafarer, however the idea have been haunted in my mind sice i was eleven in that tiny fishing village where I spent my early years of my youth, and where I became so familiar with the sea.
I well remembered that chilly morning of late December when I was arriving at the town on that particular day - it was cold morning and I was travelling from the village on the early bus, and when it finally had stopped in front of the bus station I jumped down from it carrying my gear with me. The northeast was blowing and the street lamps hanging in the wires above the empty street made their swings in the gusts as if they were waiving me farewell and wishing me good luck, and there were quick flashing of the light running upon the snow-covered pavements. I had arrived in the town to be continuing my journey to the harbour, for I was going to sea, to be sign on a ship. I had an order from the harbourmaster to come by, and sign on her. And this was the order I had been long waited, and it only could offer me the way out, to see the word, and no more arrested in the dim tiny village with no joy.
When you have, with great difficulty, acquired all of the documents required to be a sailor, and after all that you have been waiting nearly three months for a ship to come in - working hard in the forest in the meantime as a woodcutter and spending all your leisure time in a small lifeless village - you will be eager to find something else, and ripe to sign on to a ship of any kind, or of any size, just to see the world a bit.
The street felt cold under my soles as I was to take the next bus to the outer harbour. There were couple of those long nosed auto-buss staying idle by the platform with their motors idly running and with the illumined labels above their windscreen. As I got nearer I found them being empty and standing with no drivers aboard, and no one of them had lightest intention to start for the outer harbour. No more waiting, I said to myself, making up my mind to walk, and I pulled my fur cap more down, then, picking up my gear, I set off on foot for the harbour.
The morning was dull and dim and everything was covered with white cold snow around. The wind blew down and I could feel the dampness turning my cheeks numb.
With chilly feet I went on, down the road towards the port. The road was lined with electric poles, and the wires were sounding and singing as if hungry wolves were howling at the moon.
The road ran beside the river, then up the bank. A locomotive went by and w I followed the railroad after the train.
On my right said I saw a plain gray-painted wooden hut, it was the well-known building of the port office. It was also the office of “Old Hooknose,” the harbormaster who held his post in that low-roofed house. Having stumbled along that rough track about a kilometer or so, I passed the red-brick customs house. I went further, and I caught a first glimpse of the cranes. I could see their standing arms towering well over the gray iron roofs of the warehouses. Behind them I made out the shape of a steamship, lying alongside the quay.
I can’t say exactly what I was thinking. There were multitudes of thoughts in my head as I approached the vessel, all about the future ahead of me. Many questions came to me that bother my happiness. What kind of ship would she be? The ship might be alright, but what about the ships’ company? I knew some sailors, but what kind of brute waited for me aboard that unknown ship?
In fact, things would be different: an entire new world I could not have imagined.
Having reached the outer end of the low-roofed warehouse I ran into a bunch of longshoremen standing by the wall of the warehouse. In spite of the bitterly cold morning they were bareheaded. Their hands were buried deep in their overcoat pockets. It seemed that they were idly waiting for something to happen—suddenly it dawned on me that they were waiting for the beginning of the working day of the harbour.
I walked past them and they turned to watch me go by. A blast of wind blew up a black cloud of coal and ash, and for a while there was a black swirl in the air. The longshoremen turned their backs against the wind and pulled their bare heads further down, seeking more shelter in their upturned collars.
I walked on and came into a yellow glare of gangway light where I paused for breath. Looking up, I saw the ship’s side in font of me. There she was, riding high in the water with her great and lofty grey-painted hull. I could see regular lines of rivets running over her hull, there were lines of rivets, running vertically and horizontally like seams of stitches. To me the ship was massive, colossal, like a floating city built of wood and steel, fitted with lights and chimneys. A few lamps were burning above the deck, giving a poor light, making deep shadows over the dim scene. I stood there on the quayside for awhile, surveying her and trembling with tension. I could hear a his of steam , like a muffled whistle, coming from the crooked horns of the ventilators. There was a smell, too, the sharp smell of burning coal. A black smokestack stood straight up like a pencil, pointing up toward the murky sky above. There was a white band around the smokestack, and a decorated scarlet vase on it.
I was struck with the scene: all those white-painted rails and davits, the lifeboats, all the multitudes of parts, and the alien atmosphere around the ship. The whole scene breathed the adventure and romance of the sea.
The black figure of a man, wearing a long, mantel-like overcoat, crossed the quay. He stopped next to me and after glancing down at my bag, the man greeted me by saying, “Are you are going to sign on the ship?”
“Yes,” I replied.
“Bad times, bad luck,” the man said. ”I’m looking for a ship too, but I’ve been stuck on the shore. It’s winter, you know. It’s bad for the sailors. Could you spare some money for a cup of coffee?”
Standing there on the quay in his strange clothes, his hand outstretched to beg, this unfortunate man was a living symbol of the uncertainty of the trade of the sailor—like a warning flag raised beside the ship. I dug in my pocket and brought out three coins left over from the bus fare.
I started for the gangway. When I put my foot on the first step of the gangway, a spout of water swept across it, soaking my shoes. There was a hole in the ship’s side, and the condenser water showered out onto the quay. A short arc of warm water splashed and steamed in the chilly air. With soaking shoes I continued scrambling up along the gangway.
The gangway hung from a crooked arm, extending from the upper deck and it swung left and right as I climbed. Having reached the upper stage of the gangway I halted for a while looking around, saw a square passageway opening before me. There was a hand railed iron ladder leading up the boat deck. Looking upward, I saw a part of the bow of a lifeboat, peeing over the edge of the boat-deck. Heavy block and tackles were hanging above the lifeboats.
An iron door was open into a dimly alleyway. I went on, taking a long stride over high threshold that isolated the alleyway from the maindeck, and entered the passageway that seemed to lead to the afterdeck. A weak glow from a couple of poor lamps lit the passageway. I saw a single row of doors. Two of them were open, and a path of electric light from the first doorway cut across the dim passageway. I peered though the lighted doorway and saw that it was the galley. There was a fine smell of coffee in the air, and the smells of cooked food.
There was an old man, wearing a dirty cook’s suit. He was pumping water with very slow and lazy movements into a sink beneath—the man, evidently, was the cook in this galley.
For a moment I stood at the glare of the lighted doorway, waiting for the cook to take notice of my presence, but I didn’t catch the man’s attention. The man in the galley did not even glance at the doorway. I tried to introduce myself: “I’m new here.”
“Speak to the mate!” The man snapped angrily. He went on with his work with torpid motions.
Suddenly there was a sound: the rhythmic snapping of heels against the iron deck. A woman entered the galley. She was dark and tall. She gave a quick, nervous glance at me and my bag. “Are you the new mess boy?” she asked, then turned and left without waiting for my answer.
She came back with a very tall man. The man wore an officer’s cap towering so high, that as he put his head under the galley doorway he had to bend down to avoid hitting his head on the doorframe above.
“Have you ever been at sea before?” the mate demanded. I was just about to reply that I had been working in the dockyard and knew the vessels, but the mate turned his back, went away and was out of sight. I heard his footsteps echoing from the deck as he went on his way up to the boat deck. “You will start tomorrow morning at seven o’clock,” the woman said.
I was picking up my bag from the stone floor of the galley, not knowing where to go next, when I felt a hand on my shoulder. When I turned I saw a boy, around my own age, with gray eyes in a flat, rounded face.
“Hey, you’re the new one, aren’t you?” I nodded. He added: “You’re signing on to take my place?” I nodded. “Get your bag along and let’s go!” the boy said. He shoved open the opposite double door to the passageway, and then started advancing with energetic steps. I followed him. In a row we went along the passageway—which way, I had no idea. The passageway was poorly lit; there was a solitary lamp on the ceiling. The echoes of our footsteps rang between steel walls. The boy opened another iron door and jumped over the threshold. We came out on deck on the starboard side of the ship. We kept going in a row around a corner, and then we were amidships of the fore part. Finally, the boy stopped before a teak door, which was fitted with a shiny brass knob. After pulling a brass key from his pocket, the boy unlocked the door. “So, when we put in, you must remember, keep this door locked and keep a good lookout. All kinds of people hang around onboard here,” he said, then opened the door.
There was a deck cabin behind the door, no bigger than a broom closet. The cabin was plainly furnished. There was a bare bunk, a riveted bulkhead, and a clapperboard; the cupboard was fitted with a reversible patent so that, when opening the clapper, the washbasin turned out. When the pipe was turned, the water flowed into the dish and when the slap was lifted up, the washbasin emptied itself and it disappeared into bucket below.*
Natural daylight came into the small cabin through a single porthole. A naked lamp hung from the ceiling, giving a faint glow. The air of the cabin was suffocatingly warm and there was a smell of steam, a sort of vapor smell that whirled throughout the ship’s interior. The boy lifted his bag onto the bed and began to pack.
“This is your cabin now,” he said. “It used to be mine. I’ll stay today, but tonight I’ll get my pay and leave. Don’t worry, I’ll show you around. The woman is Rissa, she’s the steward, and our boss, you know. You’ll be responsible to her. That big fellow you saw was the chief mate. We call him ‘Bloke’, number one. He’s a very demanding man—more important than the sun itself. Watch out for the cook, that bloke is jim-jams. Try to remember that he’s got all the biggest knives.”
He told me that the Captain, the deck officers, the engineers, the cook, and Rissa all lived amidships. The rest of the crew bunked in the crew quarters under the poop deck.
Then we went out to the deck, close to the gunwale. There a conical heap of slag and ash on the deck. I heard a monotonous tap, tap, tap from below. “That’s the dynamo,” the boy said. “It powers the lights. And down there . . .” He pointed toward an open, black iron door. Beyond, I could see the sooty bars of a vertical iron ladder into a bottomless, pitch-dark abyss. “Down there’s the stoke-hold, the black hole. It’s the place for the stoker. The place where bad boys go when they die. That ladder there is called the Black Jacob’s Ladder.” From the bottom of the abyss came the sound of a shovel dragging over iron plates.
“If you have to go between the pantry and your cabin, don’t go through the galley. It makes the cook mad. Try to go this way.” The boy waved for me to follow him. We went on again, at first down the passageway, then through a door up onto a narrow iron catwalk. It was secured with iron safety rails, and the handrails had been polished by hard use. The catwalk went over the engine room to the opposite passageway. The air around us was warm, and thick with oil and steam. Down below, beneath a metal grating, lit by the morning light through the skylight, I saw numerous control valves and tubes of different thicknesses looping along the walls. The upper stage of the engine room was made of iron bars. The heads of the cylinders of the three huge pistons of the massive steam engine were level with the upper platform. A narrow ladder ran deep down to disappear into the twilight of the engine room floor. There, deep down below on the bottom of the ship, I could see vague shapes like human heads, moving through the dark, to and fro, floating in the air like ghost heads.
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