In Which I Set Out for Africa

It was a soft sunny morning when, some ten days later, I stood on the white deck of the Lady Jane, taking, very earnestly, and indeed with unexpected emotion, my last look at the town and harbour of Ramsgate.

The brig lay at the mouth of the eastern entrance to the basin, and already, with the gentle northerly breeze filling her broad white topsails, she was beginning to tug impatiently at the great hawser by which she was tethered to a stone post on the quay. On board all was bustle and apparent confusion. Chain sheets rattled, blocks squealed, coils of rope thumped on the deck, and the branch pilot rushed about the vessel, as Moloney said, “like a dog at a fair”; while on the quay, a stout red-jowled harbour official stood and bellowed unceasingly—apparently from sheer excess of animal spirits.

“Are ye all clear there?” shouted the pilot, darting on to the forecastle to take a last look at the head-sails. “Are ye all clear aft—here, you! leave that trys’l be—we don’t want him yet. Are ye all clear?”

“All clear,” growled the mate.

“Cast off the sternfast, Mr. Giles,” roared the pilot, and the official, having deliberately hitched the great bowline off the post, announced that it was “All gone” in a voice like the report of a forty-eight pounder.

As the hawser fell with a splash into the water, the quay with the little crowd of onlookers began slowly to move away—as it seemed to me; and as the brig gathered way the whole scene around seemed to glide past like the shifting picture from a magic lantern. All the familiar objects—the clock tower, the row of freshly-painted buoys on the quay, the sun-lighted obelisk and the tall church steeple, the tide ball up on the cliff and the crowded masts in the basin, began to fade away and grow small in the increasing distance; while a musical tinkle arose from under the vessel’s bows, and the water astern began to be dimpled with eddies and tiny whirlpools. Then for a moment the lighthouse loomed up high above our deck, and the grey pier heads, lined with a throng of gaily-dressed girls, slipped quietly by and, leaving the dead water of the harbour, we met the soft swell of the bay, which the Lady Jane saluted with a stately curtsey.

I stood by the taffrail gazing, with my heart in my mouth, at the receding land, the clustering town above the white cliff—now grown so strangely dear—and the dwindling harbour, and rapidly reviewing the events that had occurred since my momentous meeting with Captain Bithery.

What a time it had been! How I had rushed off on the following morning to emancipate myself from the thraldom of Jobson’s! With what glee I had run up to London, on the Captain’s advice, to buy an outfit for the voyage, and how I had swaggered down the Minories with the rolling gait of a seasoned buccaneer, followed by a porter staggering under the burden of a colossal seaman’s chest. How the said chest had been triumphantly flung open in the Lady Jane’s cabin and made to disgorge piles of storm suits, sail needles, palms, jumpers, dungarees, marlin-spikes, boat compasses, sheath knives, pistols, until the Captain fell back on the locker and fairly shouted with laughter. All these things surged through my mind until the voice of the branch pilot wishing the Captain a pleasant voyage as he stepped down into his boat, recalled me to the fact that our voyage was really begun and that the wide ocean lay before us.

On the incidents of the voyage it is not my intention to dwell. It was on the whole an eminently prosperous voyage, and for that very reason singularly devoid of incident, although to me, fresh from the grinding routine of an office, every minute of the day brought with it something new, surprising and delightful. For hours at a time would I pace the heaving deck listening to the song of the breeze as it hummed through the rigging or murmured in the hollows of the sails; gazing with unwearied eyes at the ever new prospect of sunny sky and incredibly blue sea that stretched away on all sides like a moving mass of liquid sapphire. The dainty pink “Portuguese men of war” that drifted past in endless processions, and the fantastic forms of the flying fish, were wonders that never staled; the porpoises that gambolled around our bows seemed like the creatures from some Eastern fable, while at night, the glitter of the moonbeams on the water and the sparkle of the Noctiluca in the vessel’s shadow furnished visions of beauty beyond my wildest dreams.

Yet, novel and delightful as it was to me, the voyage was, as I have said, quite uneventful. The north-easterly breeze with which we started carried us to the chops of the Channel, and then veering round to the south-west gave us a fortnight of what the Captain grumblingly described as “wind-jamming.” At length, as we approached the thirtieth parallel, we felt the first breath of the north-east trade wind, and thereafter a fresh draught poured constantly over our quarter until we were well south of the latitude of Cape Verde. In all this time the only land we sighted was the peak of Teneriffe, which one day lay on the extreme verge of the horizon and which I at first took to be a bank of cloud.

One morning when we were between five and six weeks out, on coming out of my berth I found the Captain seated at the table thoughtfully contemplating a perspiring slab of corned pork which lay before him, while he slowly stirred his coffee.

“You lazy dog,” he said, smiling pleasantly nevertheless as I entered, and pushing the dish of sliced pork over to the place where my plate was set. “You idle ruffian, do you know that it’s nearly two bells and that we made the land at daybreak?”

“Made the land!” I exclaimed excitedly. “Why, I didn’t know you expected to see land for another week.”

“We might have seen it any time this last ten days, for we’ve been sailing parallel to the coast ever since we rounded Cape Palmas, and never much more than twenty miles off.”

“Whereabouts are we now?” I asked.

“Just passing Cape St. Paul. Oh, you needn’t excite yourself,” for I was rising to go on deck, “there’s nothing to see, only a thin grey line with a few cocoa nuts like pins stuck into the horizon. It’s a scurvy-looking coast, this.”