The South-East Trade was blowing fresh next day, if a damp clammy rush of hot air deserves the term. The threatened heavy rains of the Doldrums had not come; the heavy heat subdued talk at table. Cloud and sultry steamy haze had hung about us during the morning; at two or thereabouts the first land seen by the Bonadventure since her first day’s stubborn entry into the English Channel came into view. My view was at first none at all; but encouraged by Bicker and with his glasses I could make out the island of Fernando Noronha, twenty miles away to the south-east. A tall peak and the high ground about it for a space gave the illusion of some great cathedral, a Mont St. Michel seen by Cotman faintly forthshadowed; then, the willing fancy rebuked, I discerned its low coasts of rock, inhospitable and mist-haunted.

This singular crag breaking out of the mid-ocean, I knew, was a convict settlement. “Life sentences” were safely mewed up here. At length we were abeam of this melancholy place, while the sun seemed to make a show of its white prison camp, at a distance of twelve or thirteen miles. It would have been hard not to imagine the despair of men condemned to such a prison. The peak’s stern finger might have struck with awe the first navigators to approach it. To see the immutable pillar in every sunset and at every sunrise, surveying all the drudgery, the emblem of perpetual soullessness, must be an unnerving punishment. The constant processions of ships, to whom Fernando Noronha is a welcome mark, with their smoke vanishing swiftly to north or south, could scarcely tantalize more?

The rough overhanging pinnacle faded again, and evening fell. Leaning with the third mate over the bridge canvas, while the moon, now waxing, riding through the frontiers of a black cloud, cast a dim avenue over the sea, and from other dishevelled clouds a few quiet drops came down, was a most peaceful luxury. About the bows the water was lit up by sudden flashes gone too soon. These travelling lights–akin to the gem of the glow-worm seen close–were, according to Mead, the Portugee men-of-war which I had seen by day. No name could be less descriptive. These small creatures, at night living lamps of green, by day with their glassy red and blue like the floating petals of some sea-rose, were worthy of some gentler imagist. When, Mead said, you take them from the water, they are nothing but a little slime; evanescent as the rainbow on the spray.

Splendour and fiery heat marked the day still. I had discarded jacket and socks, enjoying the soothing gush of air about the ankles; otherwise even reading was made unprofitable by the drug-like heat. The same sky and seascape, the same condemnations of “a dirty ship” recurred day by day. “The worst ship I ever sailed on, mister. You turn in washed and you wake up black.” The bath was still an enjoyable interlude, despite mechanical drawbacks. The bath proper was out of order, owing tosome deficiency of the water-pipes. At one end, in substitution, you lodged your bucket in a board with a hole in it. At the other end a crossbar offered the bather a seat. Much splashing transferred the water from the bucket to your coal-dust surface; while, there being little air in the bathroom, you breathed sparingly. Yet how well off was the acrobat with his sponge, compared with the fireman who just then was taking bucket after bucket of ashes from the stokehold hoist and tipping them overboard–a job that was never done until the engines rested in port; that punctuated our progress, as did the morning hosepipe on the cabins and the bridge deck.

Not much was said of the country to which we were going. Englishmen were definitely unpopular there, said some one; English sailors, on the slightest pretext, taken off by the police to the “calaboosh.” “You only want to look like an Englishman.” “Well, what about trying to look like a German?” The chief engineer rarely missed a chance to rub in his politics, and he jumped at this one–“Doesn’t the same thing apply at home?”–with eager irony.

Ships were discussed and compared at almost every meal. Some, luxurious.

“But that yacht she was pretty, there’s no getting away from it.”

“That was my yacht.”

“They must employ quite a lot of shore labour to keep these yachts from looking like ships.”

“Well, they couldn’t very well make them look like standard ships, if they wanted to.”

“Oh, I don’ know–get the second mate and the chief to co-operate–saw off the funnel halfway, and throw a few ashes about the decks.”

Some, ideal.“She looked just like the model of a ship–and she was spotless.”

Some, not what they ought to be.

“I looked and saw her name, The Duke of York. I thought to myself, I’ll write to him and tell him about the state of his namesake. She looked like a wreck.”

Some, again, like the Bonadventure, standard ships, the hasty replacements of submarine wastage. The criticism here, of course, had the severity of domestic familiarity.

“They have these ships made in one piece at the shipyard. When they want one, they just cut off a length, and join the ends.”

“Well, I say the man who designed this ship ought to have designed another and pegged out.”

“Mister, she’s a dirty ship.”

I detected–it was not difficult–a vague prejudice against wireless. The wireless operator was foolish enough to have at his fingers’ ends all the tabular details of shipping companies and their vessels, and to display this dry knowledge in the middle of his seniors’ recollections. His seafaring experience, it may be mentioned, was altogether recent, and among the elders he would have done better not to know. It was of course impersonally aired, this prejudice against wireless. First, there was the view that as ships had hitherto, beginning with the Ark, gone to sea without the invention, they could continue to do so. Then, the fact that wireless might save life admitted, the system current was decried. It seemed that the merchant ships of over 1,600 tons carried wireless operators and sets, but that one operator to a ship was the allowance; now one operator watched eight hours out of the twenty-four, and all were off duty at the same time. So it was believed. “There’s nothing in the Bible,” the critic would urge, “to say a ship mustn’t be wrecked when all the operators are off duty.”

I had expected music–chanteys, or at least accordions–aboard a merchantman; but very little was that expectation justified. There had been a gramophone (and step-dancing), but it was out of action after one evening’s protracted use. It was not often, yet, that I had heard even a whistled scrap; occasionally the coloured firemen would sing in falsetto.

An epidemic of hair-cutting broke out. Every time I saw the process going on, the artist was a fresh one; and I was inclined to think that we are a nation of hair-cutters. Among the practitioners, the cook, with his usual severe expression, plied a neat pair of scissors. It was a scene which reminded me of old trench life. I thought of a close support trench opposite Auchy, about the month of June, 1916, where a sickly programme of sniping by field guns, rifle grenades, “pineapples,” and incredible escapes from them did not prevent my being shorn by the steadiest of amateurs. With what outward intrepidity I sat there!

At the captain’s request, the cook advanced to cut his hair. That done, he cut mine. Venturing to talk, I was soon exchanging sallies of the British Expeditionary Force, for he had been thereof, a tunneller. Of his being in a countermined shaft at the wrong moment at Vimy, and his luck in being dragged out by the sergeant-major, he gave some details; but the first evident attack of mirth to which I had ever seen him give way came as he mused over rations supplied by the French for a fortnight at St. Quentin under some temporary arrangement. “Wine, beans, and b— horseflesh,” he said, staccato, and with a dry laugh like the rattling of beans. “First we’d all get bound up and then we’d all get diarrhoea. Oh, it was the hell of a go.” “There,” he said, leaving a little tuft over my forehead, “you’ll still be able to have a couple of quiffs there.”

He was not only cook and hairdresser off duty, I found: he was given to sketching portraits. I went once or twice to talk with him in the galley, where the heat was enough to make the famous Lambert himself turn thin. And his work, he pointed out, was continuous, with his assistant’s services; he had to put up double meals to suit the watches. “But why do I stick it?” he said, taking a batch of bread from the oven and standing it on end against the others. “A man can stick shore jobs all right when there’s five mouths depending on him. There’s not a lot of shore jobs now.”

His drawings were done in the little corner where he and his mate had their bunks. They were pictures of ladies and seamen of his acquaintance; crude, with lips of a bitter redness, and cheeks faintly pink, staring and disproportioned, yet done with such pains, such strivings after “likeness,” that when he requested me to help him to a post as artist to The Times, I much wished that I could! I had no sooner made the acquaintance of the cook’s portraits than a poem was bashfully brought to me by its author, Bicker. I must say that, although his lines had occasionally been eked out with last resorts, there was a heartiness about them which I liked; and, going down presently to his cabin, I got him to show me more. He had already written several rhyming epistles during the trip, which with the retiring instinct of poets he had left to blush unseen. So we had aboard among a crew of forty or so a painter of portraits and a writer of verse.

We had our philosopher too, Phillips, the chief engineer, veteran of Khartoum, master of machinery, physician less active but more reliable than the steward; but above all, the Diogenes–with a slush-lamp. His philosophy might be no ill store about this time, when in the heat the pitch melted from the seams of his cabin roof and mottled his bed, as he put it: a circumstance not yet mentioned in sonnets wooing tardy sleep, and which of course called upon that nimble sixpence of Bonadventure conversation, “She is a dirty ship.”

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