The occasional stranding of an ocean steamer, and the consequent transhipment or landing of the passengers, furnishes about the best illustration to be found of the extraordinary inconvenience that delay, in these days of swift and sure despatch, carries with it. The immense discomfort experienced is really a tribute to the management of the people who undertake to convey passengers. We are so habituated to precision, we are so used to confidently count not only on the hour but on the moment even of our arrival and departure, that a single failure is as much felt as though something had gone wrong in nature; and a small shock of earthquake is not more startling than detention for a day in a voyage round the world.

I was in the neighbourhood of the Downs not long since; it was blowing a fresh breeze from the westward, and I believe there could not have been less than three hundred vessels at anchor: ships of all kinds, from the large three-masted vessel down to the billyboy, from the high, light, slate-coloured steamer, down to the little schooner loaded to her ways with salt. There they lay, and there a goodly number of them had lain for some days. When they should start for their three hundred destinations depended entirely upon the wind. It was like a picture out of an ancient sea-book, an old-world pageant, with something of irony in what you could not but regard as its affected correspondence with times whose true spirit found interpretation in a large steamer of the National line majestically stemming at ten knots into the wind’s eye. Taking the first volume that comes to hand from a row of maritime records, and opening it at hazard, my eye lights on this: “Jan. 6, 1771.—The wind having shifted to the East, upwards of four hundred and fifty sail of ships, outward bound, which had been detained by the westerly winds many weeks, sailed from the Downs.” 1771, and I, writing this in the close of 1886, am fresh from beholding just such another spectacle! How eloquent are time’s comments! how everywhere, throughout all things, is old human nature breaking out! No need to wade through history to remark the character of survivals and recurrences, to note where the echoes die or where the reverberations gather fresh volume. Study the mighty page of the sea. The years, to be sure, write no wrinkles on its azure brow, but every ripple is a library, and there are more meanings in it than herrings. But to be windbound! The traveller scarcely knows the meaning of the word in this age. To lie off Deal for a space of time longer than a New Zealand steamer occupies in measuring the distance betwixt Tilbury and Wellington! Why, in these days you may be stranded thrice, thrice transhipped, and yet reach your destination in the time a ship took in the age of the fine old English gentleman to drop down to Gravesend and let go her anchor in the Downs.

Henry Fielding, when he started on his voyage to Lisbon, left his house on Wednesday, June 26, 1754. He arrived at Rotherhithe in two hours, and immediately went on board, expecting to sail next morning. On Sunday, June 30, the ship “fell down” to Gravesend. Next day she got as far as the Nore, and brought up. Tuesday, July 2, they again set sail, and anchored off Deal; weighed on the 4th, and after a short struggle anchored again off Deal. Started on the 6th, and on the 11th “came to an anchor at a place called Ryde.” On the 22nd they fell down to St. Helen’s, and on the 25th were off the island of Portland, “so famous for the smallness and sweetness of its mutton,” and anchored in Torbay. Started again August 1. On the 3rd the captain took an observation, and discovered that Ushant bore some leagues northward from him. So that it took Fielding thirty-eight days to sail from Rotherhithe to Ushant! The voyage to New Zealand is now performed in two days less.^[46]

But the singular slowness of this journey down the Channel is by no means the strangest feature of Fielding’s voyage, in respect, I mean, of the contrasts established by the great master’s narrative. A man proposing a trip to Lisbon nowadays, can, if he likes, choose as a ship a fabric of above three thousand tons, with a spacious and richly decorated saloon illuminated by electric lights, a table as elegantly and hospitably furnished as that of any first-rate hotel ashore, numerous waiters to fly at his bidding, a comfortable bedroom fitted with a wire-wove mattrass and a hair bed. He may quench his thirst with choice of twenty refreshing drinks at a bar. The captain and officers are as much distinguished for their courtesy as for their seafaring qualities. The ship is despatched with the punctuality of a mail train; there is nothing in head winds or boisterous weather to detain her, and she commonly arrives at her destination before she is due. Fielding’s ship was a vessel not at all unlike one of the scores of sailing colliers which to this day go on staggering down the North Sea, laden with coals from Newcastle or Sunderland. Her master was so great a ruffian that Fielding has drawn the figure of no completer character of that kind in any of his novels, not excepting “Jonathan Wild.” When the novelist ventured mildly to complain of the long detention at Rotherhithe, this brutal skipper, in whose mouth every other word was an oath, declared that had he known Mr. and Mrs. Fielding were not to be pleased he would not have carried them for five hundred pounds. “He added,” says Fielding, “many asseverations that he was a gentleman, and despised money, not forgetting several hints of the presents which had been made him for his cabin, of twenty, thirty, and forty guineas, by several gentlemen, over and above the sum for which they had contracted.” The size and comfort of the accommodation may be conjectured from what Fielding says of the captain’s snoring: “he loved to indulge himself in morning slumbers, which were attended with a wind-music much more agreeable to the performer than to the hearers, especially such as have, as I had, the privilege of sitting in the orchestra.” The passage money was five pounds a head, and it was expected that passengers fed themselves. Fielding provided tea and wine, hams and tongues, and a number of live chickens and sheep; in truth, says he, “treble the quantity of provisions which could have supported the persons I took with me.” A sample is given of the captain’s politeness. I omit the wicked words. Fielding had objected to his cabin being littered with bottles. “Your cabin!” repeated he many times; “no, ’tis my cabin! Your cabin! I have brought my hogs to a fair market. I suppose, indeed, you think it your cabin and your ship, by your commanding in it! but I will command in it! I will show the world I am the commander, and nobody but I! Did you think I sold you the command of the ship for that pitiful thirty pounds? I wish I had not seen you nor your thirty pounds aboard of her.” To appreciate all this it is necessary the reader should imagine himself dying of dropsy as Fielding was, seeking in poverty a brief prolongation of life in a more genial climate than that of England, his wife prostrated with sea-sickness and the agonies of tooth-ache! It is well that those days are dead and gone. Hundreds of us are every year going abroad for health;—think of embarking on that painful quest as the invalid of a century ago did—in a ship of probably a hundred tons burden, commanded by a pitiless, foul-mouthed bully, and worked by men who, to use Fielding’s own expression, seemed “to glory in the language and behaviour of savages!”

It is fair to admit, however, that much of the misery endured by the sea-borne passenger was, in those and later times, limited to the short service ships. It is true that on the American route the vessels continued small and wretched down to the present century. For instance, you read of two hundred Highland emigrants embarking for Boston in a snow—a kind of brig—of one hundred and forty tons. A few years ago I was in company with an old gentleman who, pointing to a small barque lying moored alongside a wharf, told me that he sailed to New York in her in 1836, and that she was esteemed a high-class commodious passenger-vessel even in those days.^[47] But it must be admitted that at the period of Fielding’s voyage there were ships trading to the East and West Indies of a bulk and beauty which might justly entitle them still to admiration. The craft of both the Dutch and East India Companies were as capacious and seaworthy as ships of the State: their forecastle companies were abundantly and highly disciplined; their commanders of the roughly polite type, excellently represented by the heroic old Commodore Dance. Their round-houses, or great cabins, were exceedingly handsome apartments, plentifully embellished with carpets, mirrors, flowers, hand-painted panels, and in other ways richly decorated. Such were the ships which carried Clive and Hastings, and such they remained down to the time of the fine old Earl of Balcarres.

It was reserved apparently for the days of the application of steam to ships for owners of vessels to discover that passengers embarking on a short voyage stood in as much need of comfort and security as passengers embarking on a long voyage; and that more misery could be packed into the run between Dover and Calais than could be found in a journey of three years round the globe.^[48] How much of suffering went to such a trip as that from Rotherhithe to Lisbon may be read, very much at large, in Fielding’s wonderful narrative—the more wonderful when we reflect that the hand that penned it was a dying man’s. Nor is it hard to collect similar experiences of the old passages to Ireland, to Scotland, or to near ports, such as from London to Yarmouth or from Southampton to Plymouth. The risks, the horrors, were increased by the character of the people who had charge of the vessels. There were no Board of Trade examinations in those days; no standards of excellence; no special qualifications insisted upon. That the British mariner was always a good seaman I should be the last to deny; but he swore, he drank, he was rude, tempestuous, ruffianly, and little fitted—I am speaking of the coasting trade—to do the honours of the cabin table, or to provide by his attention and courtesy for the needs of ladies and children. Henry Taylor, writing in 1811, says, “The ship in which I engaged belonged to Hull. The captain was one who indulged himself in bed during night, in every situation; the mate—a middle-aged man—was much addicted to strong liquor. In the middle of the night, when the ship was in a perilous place, the master went to bed, and the chief mate invited the crew into the cabin to drink. In a short time he fell stupidly drunk down into the steerage. The sailors dared not arouse the master, and so took their chance of letting the ship run on until the watch was out.” On another occasion Taylor was seaman in a ship in stormy weather. The captain went below to his cabin and “turned in;” the mate, standing on the windlass end, fell asleep; a young man at the helm suddenly cried out, “We are running too far in!” Taylor seized the lead, found little more than three fathoms, and sung out to the other to put the helm hard down. “So stupidly drunk and asleep was the mate that we were hauling the head yards about before he awoke.” Such mariners must stand as representatives, and how passengers suffered when they took passage in vessels commanded by men of this pattern is only too painfully told in the relations of shipwrecks.

Take a single incident of a gale a century ago. A vessel was proceeding on her voyage from Chester to Dublin. Her provisions, which at the start had been all too scanty for “the vast number of souls she took out with her”—as the record describes them—had been stowed on deck, to make room below for the passengers. In a very short while the sea washed them overboard. “What followed may be better imagined than expressed. The wretches were crammed into the hold, without light or air, and all on board the ship without bread or water, with scarce any other prospect of seeing an end to their sufferings but by the ship’s foundering.” After forty-eight hours of misery the captain made shift to enter a small Welsh port, but the distress of the passengers continued, for the village or hamlet was too small to afford them either provisions or accommodation. What became of them is not told.

Contrast such an experience with the cabins and food of a Holyhead boat—the swift journey, be the weather what it will, the brilliant, hospitable, comfortable hotels on either side the water! Or read the account of the loss of the Union, the regular packet between Dover and Calais, in 1792, side by side with the description of the last steamer built for the Chatham and Dover Railway Company: how, through unnecessary delays, she had suffered the time of high tide to slip past; how, in endeavouring to turn to windward, she had missed stays, fouled the south pier, and lay beating there; how, by a miracle, the crew and passengers were rescued, but after embarking next morning in the Pitt, Captain Sharp, were wrecked afresh, “being driven on shore at the north head, in a violent gale, but fortunately no person was lost.” One finds in such narratives as this the reason why Frenchmen for ages lived in ignorance of the true character of the English, and wrote fancifully of boule-dogs, ros-bif, Smeetfield, and Goddam. The fact is, they durst not cross.

Take another wreck of a Dublin boat—the Charlemont packet—a memorable item in the catalogue of maritime disasters. She sailed on a Wednesday, and managed to reach Dublin Bay, but was driven back by the weather. She started afresh on Friday, with the number of her passengers increased to one hundred and twenty, and was again forced to put back. The people implored the master to make for Holyhead, but he said he was ignorant of the coast. After a while, however, he yielded; the mate, deceived by some lights, mistook his course, the vessel struck and went to pieces. Of the passengers, sixteen only escaped, one of them being Captain Jones, a son of Lord Ranelagh. Think of an Irish “mimber” in these days, thirsting to be in his place at Westminster at a given hour, forced to take ship after the manner of his ancestors! A gale of wind would make a large difference in the number of votes, and at times might prove superior to the closure.

War-time also communicated a degree of discomfort to voyagers beyond all capacity of realization in this age. It was common enough for an Indiaman to be engaged by an enemy’s ship or a privateer which, if she did not carry and seize the vessel, repeatedly succeeded in killing and maiming the passengers amongst others. “Two gentlemen,” you may read in an Annual Register of the beginning of this century, “passengers from Holland, landed at Margate. They affirm they were in the evening boarded in sight of the North Foreland by an English privateer cutter, whose crew, in disguise, confined the captain and crew of the vessel in the cabin, and then plundered it of goods to the value of £2000, demanded the captain’s money, and took what the passengers had.”^[49] This sort of thing furnishes engaging reading to boys when told in story-books; but how about the reality? To be tossed for days and days in sight of land; to be horribly sea-sick and barbarously used by captains and mates: to be battened down in foul weather in loathsome interiors, there to expire after a little of suffocation; to be coarsely fed and often starved; to be boarded and massacred and mutilated; to be plundered of the very coat on one’s back—such were the pleasures of the short-voyage passengers in the good old times, of the people who went to France, or sailed to the kingdom of Ireland, or to the Scotch ports, or those of Flanders.

It is not pleasant, to be sure, to be delayed four and twenty hours by the stranding of a steamer of 5000 tons. But all the same, I think we have a good deal to be thankful for.