Chapter 17

AWAY! SECOND, THIRD, AND FOURTH CUTTERS, AWAY!

It was the morning succeeding one of these general quarters that we picked up a life-buoy, descried floating by.

It was a circular mass of cork, about eight inches thick and four feet in diameter, covered with tarred canvas. All round its circumference there trailed a number of knotted ropes’-ends, terminating in fanciful Turks’ heads. These were the life-lines, for the drowning to clutch. Inserted into the middle of the cork was an upright, carved pole, somewhat shorter than a pike-staff. The whole buoy was embossed with barnacles, and its sides festooned with sea-weeds. Dolphins were sporting and flashing around it, and one white bird was hovering over the top of the pole. Long ago, this thing must have been thrown over-board to save some poor wretch, who must have been drowned; while even the life-buoy itself had drifted away out of sight.

The forecastle-men fished it up from the bows, and the seamen thronged round it.

“Bad luck! bad luck!” cried the Captain of the Head; “we’ll number one less before long.”

The ship’s cooper strolled by; he, to whose department it belongs to see that the ship’s life-buoys are kept in good order.

In men-of-war, night and day, week in and week out, two life-buoys are kept depending from the stern; and two men, with hatchets in their hands, pace up and down, ready at the first cry to cut the cord and drop the buoys overboard. Every two hours they are regularly relieved, like sentinels on guard. No similar precautions are adopted in the merchant or whaling service.

Thus deeply solicitous to preserve human life are the regulations of men-of-war; and seldom has there been a better illustration of this solicitude than at the battle of Trafalgar, when, after “several thousand” French seamen had been destroyed, according to Lord Collingwood, and, by the official returns, sixteen hundred and ninety Englishmen were killed or wounded, the Captains of the surviving ships ordered the life-buoy sentries from their death-dealing guns to their vigilant posts, as officers of the Humane Society.

“There, Bungs!” cried Scrimmage, a sheet-anchor-man, ^[2] “there’s a good pattern for you; make us a brace of life-buoys like that; something that will save a man, and not fill and sink under him, as those leaky quarter-casks of yours will the first time there’s occasion to drop ‘ern. I came near pitching off the bowsprit the other day; and, when I scrambled inboard again, I went aft to get a squint at ‘em. Why, Bungs, they are all open between the staves. Shame on you! Suppose you yourself should fall over-board, and find yourself going down with buoys under you of your own making—what then?”

[2] In addition to the Bower-anchors carried on her bows, a frigate carries large anchors in her fore-chains, called Sheet-anchors. Hence, the old seamen stationed in that part of a man-of-war are called sheet-anchor-man.