Alan Villiers
The Set of The Sails
Chapter 6 - 'A move For'ard'
Part II
The James Craig had no half-deck and only the smallest poop. Her fo'c'sle was a house on deck immediately abaft the foremast. It was obvious that it was a new house, built to replace an older, smaller one which had been removed when the abarque was a coal hulk. The new house took up most of the space between the main hatch and the fore fife-rail. It served to accommodate crew, galley, and cook, and to carry the two double-ended life-boats. The after-part of the house was a small galley, with a coal stove. Adjoining the galley, on the port side, was an airy mess-room for the crew. This was an innovation. There was a sliding hatch through which the cook could deliver meals, piping hot from the stove. The mess-room was enamelled in white and was spotlessly clean. The remainder of the house, forward of the galley and mess-room, was the fo'c'sle proper. It was divided into two sections by means of a bulkhead down the middle. The starboard side, with six bunks, was for the starboard watch, and the port side, also with six bunks, for the port watch. All the bunks were fore-and-aft. There was a good stowage for oilskins. There were several large ports on each side, and it seemed that the designer had really had the well-being of the sailors at heart. I never saw a better fo'c'sle in a sailing-ship anywhere. A locker was provided for each man to stow his gear, and the mess-room was also a recreation-room. I was pleasantly surprised.
"You'll be starboard watch. Take any free bunk. They're all the same. No water comes in here," said a cheerful young Englishman who was repairing some sennett on his ditty-bag. "Grub's good, too. No 'whack' here, though we signed for it. She's on 'sufficient without waste'. Do me, too, after the hungry Cumberland. You're from the Rothesay Bay?"
I said I was.
"You'll find a good crowd here. My name's Keen - Sharkey Keen, they call me," said my new friend. "The old man's one of the best. The mate's a lanky Tasmanian. He's a grand fellow to work for. Gets things done without yelling. She's got a bos'n. Doesn't carry a second mate. Bos'n is a very old Scot, name of Sandy McNab. Sandy is a good one, too. There isn't much he don't know about sailing-ships. He's over eighty and he's been in 'em since he was ten. We're in Sandy's watch. That's him you can hear now, making that awful row on the pipes. You've got to put up with that. Never let on you don't like it! It stops sometimes. Not often, though."
Sharkey Keen was quite right about the Craig's crew. They were a very decent set of men, most of them much older than the Scandinavians who manned the Rothesay Bay. The fo'c'sle was inhabited by twelve men, eight of them able seamen - real able seamen - and four ordinary seamen. Half of the men were over forty, two of them over sixty. They were old sailing-ship men who had never been in steam. They were the real faithful. The bewhiskered mariner who had hailed me in the boat was Dan Murchison, a distant clansman of Murdo' Murchison, the master. There were several others named Murchison, all distantly related and all from the same part of Ross-shire. These spoke Gaelic among themselves, and were much given to playing upon a reed they called a "chanty", which seemed to be the mouthpiece of a set of pipes without any pipes to it.
"They sold their pipes," confided Sharkey. "That's all they've got left - thank the Lord."
I soon discovered that life in the fo'c'sle was well regulated and, except during bouts of drunkenness among the Scots (which were rare, because it cost a great deal to get them drunk, and they had very little), good manners prevailed. The place was kept to the same standards of cleanliness which our half-deck boss had insisted upon in the Rothesay Bay, except that the men were neater than the boys, and the place was less cluttered with gear. The older they were, the neater were the sailors, and the less gear they had. Whatever else they might not have had, each treasured a small canvas bag, liberally decorated with sennet and fancy work, in which he kept the tools of his trade - his fid and marline-spike, a palm and a few needles, a piece of beeswax and a sail-hook on a lanyard for holding the seams when working on the sail-maker's bench. By that time I had one of these bags myself, though there was little in it.
The boss of the starboard fo'c'sle was a Belgian name Bert who had run from one of the big Bordes four-masted barques at Hobart. Bert ruled the roost thoroughly, but with benevolence. It was queer to hear him remonstrating with the Scots for using what he called "Garlic". English, he said, was the proper language of the ship and they should use it. But the Scots were intransigent. Bert's own version of English was rather astonishing. An argument between him, big Dan Murchison, and an old Russian Finn named Gus was a delight to hear, provided one was not expected to follow it.
At the meal table, if there were any ignorant departures from the men's own code of good manners, Bert's rebuke was instant and severe. Our code could be summarised very simply. Eat quietly; waste nothing; allow elbow-room to all. These were the basic rules. There was no tolerance of any departure from them. It was, for example, definitely not the thing to cut half a piece from the loaf of bread.
"If you only vant an 'alf-slice you don't vant any," Bert laid down. "If you vant an 'ole slice cut it flush-decked an' eat the lot. No fo'c'sle 'eads on de bread!"
As with the bread, so with everything else. Tidiness reigned. On deck, and in the quarters, everything was shipshape, and the Lord help any who "while sober" did anything out of place.
Reproduced with the kind permission of Laurence Pollinger Limited and the estate of the late Alan J Villiers.
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Last modified on Saturday, 17-Mar-2012 09:38:09 EST
