what a depth of mystery is concealed in the phenomena of likes and dislikes! why, at first sight, we are attracted by one person and repelled by another, independently, to all outward seeming, of personal appearance or habits of observation. this is, of course, a common experience of most people, but one of the strangest instances i have ever known was in my own affection for jack stadey and all that grew out of it.
stadey was a russian finn, one of a race that on board ship has always had the reputation of being a bit wizard-like, credited with the possession of dread powers, such as the ability to raise or still a storm, become invisible, and so on. the bare truth about the seafaring finns, however, is that they make probably the finest all-round mariners in the world. no other sea-folk combine so completely all the qualities that go to make up the perfect seaman. many of them may be met with who can build a vessel, make her spars, her sails, and her rigging, do the blacksmith work and all the manifold varieties of odd workmanship that go to complete a ship’s equipment, take her to sea, and navigate her on soundest mathematical principles, and do all these strange acts and deeds with the poorest, most primitive tools, and under the most miserable,190 poverty-stricken conditions. but, as a rule, they are not smart; they must be allowed to do their work in their own way, at their own pace, and with no close scrutiny into anything except results. now, jack stadey was a typical finn, as far as his slow ungainly movements went, but none of that ability and adaptiveness which is characteristic of his countrymen was manifest in him. to the ordinary observer he was just a heavy, awkward “dutchman,” who couldn’t jump to save his life, and who would necessarily be put upon all the heaviest, dirtiest jobs, while the sailorizing was being done by smarter men. with a long, square head, faded blue eyes, and straggling flaxen moustache, round shoulders, and dangling, crooked arms, he seemed born to be the butt of his more favoured shipmates. yet when i first became acquainted with him in the fo’c’sle of the old dartmouth, outward bound to hong kong, something about him appealed to me, and we became chums. the rest of the crew, with one notable exception, were not bad fellows, and jack shuffled along serenely through the voyage, quite undisturbed by the fact that no work of any seamanlike nature ever came to his share. i came in for a good deal of not ill-natured chaff from the rest for my close intimacy with him, but it only had the effect of knitting us closer together, for there is just that strain of obstinacy about me that opposition only stiffens. and as i studied that simple, childlike man, i found that he had a heart of gold, a nature that had no taint of selfishness, and was sublimely unconscious of its own worth.
we made the round voyage together, and on our return to london i persuaded him to quit the gloomy environment of sailor-town to come and take lodgings with me in a turning out of oxford street, whence we could sally forth and find ourselves at once in the midst of clean, interesting life, free from the filthy importunities of the denizens of shadwell that prey upon the sailor. my experiences of london life were turned to good account in those pleasant days, all too short. together we did all the sights, and it would be hard to say which of us enjoyed ourselves most. at last, our funds having dwindled to the last five pounds, we must needs go and look for a ship. i had “passed” for second mate, but did not try very hard to get the berth that my certificate entitled me to take, and finally we both succeeded in getting berths before the mast in a barque called the magellan, bound for new zealand. to crown the common-sense programme we had been following out, we did a thing i have never seen deep-water sailors do before or since—we took a goodly supply of such delicacies on board with us as would, had we husbanded them, have kept us from hunger until we crossed the line. but sailor jack, with all his faults, is not mean, and so all hands shared in the good things until they were gone, which was in about three days. to our great disgust, jack and i were picked for separate watches, so that our chats were limited to the second dog-watch, that pleasant time between six and eight p.m. when both watches can fraternize at their ease, and discuss all the queer questions that appeal to the sailor mind.
jack never complained, it wasn’t his habit, but, unknown to me, he was having a pretty bad time of it in the starboard watch. of course, the vessel was short-handed—four hands in a watch to handle an over-sparred brute of nearly a thousand tons—and as a consequence jack’s ungainly want of smartness was trying to his over-worked watchmates, who were, besides, unable to understand his inability or unwillingness to growl at the hardness of the common lot. the chief man in that watch was a huge shetlandman, sandy rorison, who, broadly speaking, was everything that jack was not. six feet two in his stocking vamps, upright as a lower mast, and agile as a leading seaman on board a man-o’-war, there was small wonder that sandy was sorely irritated by the wooden movements of my deliberate chum. but one day, when, relieved from the wheel, i came into the forecastle for a “verse o’ the pipe,” i found sandy bullying him in a piratical manner. all prudential considerations were forgotten, and i interfered, although it was like coming between a lion and his kill. black with fury, sandy turned upon me, tearing off his jumper the while, and in choking monosyllables invited me to come outside and die. i refused, giving as my reason that i did not feel tired of life, and admitting that i was fully aware of his ability to make cracker-hash of me. but while he stood gasping, i put it to him whether, if he had a chum, any consideration for his own safety would stop him from risking it in the endeavour to save that chum from such a dog’s life as he was now leading jack stadey. well, the struggle between rage and193 righteousness in that big rough man was painful to see. it lasted for nearly five minutes, while i stood calmly puffing at my pipe with a numb sense of “what must be will be” about me. then suddenly the big fellow went and sat down, buried his face in his hands, and was silent. i went about my work unmolested, but for nearly a week there was an air of expectation about the whole of us—a sense that an explosion might occur at any moment. then the tension relaxed, and i saw with quiet delight that rorison had entirely abandoned his hazing of jack.
after a most miserable passage of a hundred and ten days we arrived at our port, and almost immediately after came an opening for me to join a fine ship as second mate. it could not be disregarded, although i had to forfeit to the knavish skipper the whole of my outward passage earnings for the privilege of being discharged. so jack and i parted, making no sign, as is the custom of men, of the rending pain of our separation. when next i saw jack, several years after, i had left the sea, but on a periodical visit to the docks—a habit i was long curing myself of—i met him, looking for a ship. how triumphantly i bore him westward to my little home i need not say, but when in the course of conversation i found that he and rorison had been chums ever since i left the magellan, i was dumbfounded. the more because, in spite of the change in rorison after my risky interference on that memorable afternoon, i had passed many unhappy hours, thinking, in my conceit and ignorance of the nobleness of which the majority of human kind are194 capable, given the proper opportunity for showing it, that jack would have but a sorry time of it after i had left him. malvolio thought nobly of the soul, and i have had reason, god knows, to think nobly of my fellow-men, even of those who upon a casual acquaintance seemed only capable of exciting disgust. i believe that few indeed are the men and women who have not within them the germ of as heroic deeds as ever thrilled the hearts and moistened the eyes of mankind, although, alas! myriads live and die wanting the occasion that could fructify the germ. made in his own image, although sorely battered out of the divine likeness, the father does delight in showing how, in spite of the distance men generally have placed between themselves and him, the type still persists, and self-sacrifice, soaring above the devilish cynicism that affects to know no god but self-interest, blazes forth to show to all who will but open their eyes that “god’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world.”
two more strangely assorted chums surely seldom foregathered than sandy and jack. i remember none in real life, though the big trooper george rouncewell and phil have been immortalized by dickens in “bleak house,” and the probability is that such a friendship had been known to that marvellous man. how the bond between the shetlandman and the finn gradually grew and toughened i had no means of knowing, for jack was a man of so few words, that even my eager questioning never succeeded in drawing from him the information that i thirsted for. however,195 to resume my story, the pair succeeded in obtaining berths in the same ship again, a big iron clipper, the theodosia, bound to melbourne. i did not succeed in meeting sandy before they sailed, though i tried hard in my scanty leisure to do so. but i determined that when they returned i would have them both home to my little place, and devote some of my holidays to entertaining them. i watched carefully the columns of the shipping gazette for news of the ship, and succeeded in tracing her home to falmouth for orders from port pirie. thence in due time she departed, to my great disappointment, for sunderland. and the rest of the story must be told as i learned it long afterwards.
it was in the late autumn that they sailed from falmouth, leaving port on a glorious afternoon with that peerless weather known to west-country fishermen as a “fine southerly.” up the sparkling channel they sped with every stitch of canvas set, and a great contentment reigning on board at the prospect of the approaching completion of the voyage under such favourable conditions. being foul, the theodosia made slow progress, but so steady was the favouring wind that in two days she picked up her channel pilot off dungeness. he was hardly on board before a change came. one of those sudden gales came howling down the stern north sea, and gradually the labouring ship was stripped of her wings, until in a perfect whirl of freezing spindrift she was groping through the gloom across the thames estuary. but no uneasiness was felt, because the pilot was on board,196 and the confidence felt in the well-known skill and seamanship of those splendid mariners makes even the most timid of deep-water sailors feel secure under their charge. no man is infallible, however, and just before midnight a shock, which threw all hands, then standing by to wear ship, off their feet, brought the huge vessel up all standing. not many minutes were needed to show every man on board that she was doomed. lying as she was on the weather edge of the galloper sand (though her position was unknown even to the pilot), she was exposed to the full fury of the gale, and the blue lights and rockets made but the faintest impression upon the appalling blackness. all hands worked with feverish energy to free the long-disused boats from their gripes, although they were often hurled headlong from this task by the crushing impact of those inky masses of water that rose in terrible might all around. and as the boats were cleared, so they were destroyed until but one remained seaworthy and afloat upon the lee-side, fast by the end of the forebrace. one by one the beaten, bruised, and almost despairing men succeeded in boarding that tiny ark of refuge as it strained and plunged like a terrified creature striving to escape from the proximity of the perishing leviathan. when it appeared that all hands were crowded into the overburdened boat, the watchful skipper mounted the lee rail, and, waiting his opportunity, leapt for his life.
“cast off, cast off,” shouted a dozen voices as the captain struggled aft to the place of command, but one cry overtopped them all, the frenzied question of197 rorison, “where’s jack stadey?” a babel of replies arose, but out of that tumult one fact emerged, he was not among them. the next moment, as a mountainous swell lifted the boat high above the ship’s rail, rorison had leapt to his feet, and, catching hold of the drooping mainbrace above his head, was hauling himself back on board again. and the boat had gone. doubtless in the confusion, some man had succeeded in casting the end of the rope adrift that held her, not knowing what had happened, so that the next vast roller swept her away on its crest a hundred fathoms in an instant. the wide mouth of the dark engulfed her. all unheeding the disappearance of the boat, rorison fought his way about the submerged and roaring decks, peering with a seaman’s bat-like power of vision through the dark for any sign of his chum. buffeted by the scourging seas, conscious that he was fast losing what little strength remained to him, he yet persisted in his search until, with a cry of joy, he found poor stadey jammed between the fife-rail and the pumps, just alive, but with a broken leg and arm. not a word passed between them, but with a sudden accession of vigour, sandy managed to drag his chum aft and lash his limp body to one of the poop hen-coops. he then cast another coop adrift, and secured it to the side of the first. having done this, he lashed himself by stadey’s side, and with one hand feeling the languid pulsation of his chum’s heart, awaited the next comber that should sweep their frail raft away into the hissing sea.
next morning, under a sky of heavenly glory, two198 harwich fishermen found the tiny raft, still supporting the empty husks of those two faithful souls, undivided even unto the end of their hard life, and together entered into rest.
with these two exceptions all hands were saved.
