Some time ago, when the Queen was at Osborne, her Majesty visited a troopship in her yacht the Alberta. Her Majesty’s ship Hector, lying in Cowes Roads, manned yards in honour of the royal presence. One of the men got as high as the main truck and stood upon it. The main truck is a small circular platform—varying in diameter, of course, according to the size of the ship—fixed on the royal masthead, the highest point of the mast. Sometimes it has holes in it, through which halliards are rove for hoisting flags. The trucks of the Hector, I was told, are furnished with iron staffs, so that the sailor who stood on the main truck had something to lay hold of. But this diminishes nothing of the wonder of the feat. The nerve required coolly to stand upon a small circumference at a prodigious elevation is one thing; the more extraordinary feature of that achievement lies, it would strike a landsman, in the man’s getting over and on to the truck, and then kneeling and swinging himself off it and down upon the royal rigging. In the fine old song of the “Leap for Life,” the skipper’s son gets upon the main truck and stands there, holding on with his eyelids. To save his life he is ordered to jump, and the dog follows him overboard and picks him up. The order to that boy was a sensible one, for though it is perfectly true that he had managed to get upon the truck, it was really impossible that he should get off it without falling.

In truth, going aloft is one of the hardest parts of the sea-life at the first start. Seamen who were active, courageous men enough, have told me that it took them months to vanquish their nervousness; and many a young fellow has given up the sea after the first voyage simply because he never could overcome the purely physical infirmity of giddiness the moment he had his feet in the ratlines. In “Redburn,” one of Herman Merivale’s delightful sea tales, this weakness is illustrated in an incident narrated with wonderful power. A young man, named Harry Bolton, ships for the return voyage from Liverpool. He is rated as an ordinary seaman, but his friend notices that when any work has to be done aloft, Harry is always busy about the belaying pins, making fast the clewlines, etc. At last he candidly owns to his friend that he has made a private trial of it, and that he cannot go aloft; that his nerves would not allow of it. But this does not save him. One day the mate ordered him to mount to the main truck and unreeve the short signal halliards. Where the ends of the halliards came is not stated, but one might think that the royal yard would have been high enough for the unfortunate young man to have clambered, even if the crosstrees would not have done. Be this as it may, Harry Bolton hesitates, is rope’s-ended by the mate, finally springs into the main-rigging and gets as high as the maintop. When there he looks down, and his heart instantly fails him. The pitiless mate thereupon orders a Dutch sailor to follow and help him up, which the Dutchman does with his head, batting at the base of his back and hoisting him along in that way. “Needs must,” continues the narrator, “when the devil drives; and higher and higher, with Max bumping him at every step, went my unfortunate friend. At last he gained the royal yard, and the thin signal halliards—scarcely bigger than common twine—were flying in the wind. ‘Unreeve,’ cried the mate; I saw Harry’s arm stretched out—his legs seemed shaking in the rigging, even to us down on deck; and at last, thank heaven! the deed was done. He came down pale as death, with bloodshot eyes and every limb quivering.”

Sailors will know there is no exaggeration in all this. Some beginners will run up aloft like monkeys, others will get into the shrouds and stand there, hanging back and looking up, and holding on as if they meant, to use an old sea phrase, to squeeze all the tar out of the ropes. There is not, perhaps, any worse cruelty practised on board ship than that of driving a nervous lad aloft. In former times there was a custom called pricking—a sailor got behind a boy and forced him up by digging into him with a pin or a “pricker.” It is, perhaps, scarcely worth while, nowadays, to speak of such things—the sailing ship is dying out, and the steamer gives but little work to do aloft; but there are few men who have followed the sea who cannot recall cases of exquisite suffering in nervous boys hurried and pricked and thrust up the rigging. One instance I remember—that of a lad of thirteen, who was shipped in an Australian port. He was ordered on to the foreroyal yard along with another youngster. It was his first journey up the masts, and when he was half-way up the shrouds he came to a dead stop. The boatswain sung out to him to look alive and go on. The poor little chap, with shaking hands and a face like the foam alongside, footed it as high as the futtock shrouds, where he halted, looking up at the overhanging platform of the top. “Over you go,” shouted the boatswain from the forecastle. “I can’t, sir; indeed I can’t, sir!” cried the little fellow piteously. “We’ll see about that,” said the boatswain, and called to an ordinary seaman to help him up. This youth was a brute, and when he reached the clinging boy he began to pinch him in the legs, and pulled out his sheath-knife and threatened to stab him if he did not go over the top. It was a big top, the angle of the mast—the wind being abaft the beam—was a small one, and the futtock shrouds stretched away from the boy like the ribs of an open umbrella from the stick. The miserable little fellow, terrified by the sight of the knife behind him, laid hold of the long irons and made a swing with his legs at the ratlines, missed them, vibrated a moment or two like a pendulum, and then dropped past the outstretched hand of the sailor below him like a flash, striking the shrouds, and rebounding as a ball might overboard. He was drowned, of course.

But as steamers multiply and the number of sailing ships decreases, going aloft will become the least and most infrequent of sea duties. Practical seamanship, in the old sense, is bound to die out, because there is no need to preserve it. It was only the other day that an old skipper assured me that he was acquainted with the mate of a steamer who did not know what a harness-cask was, “and, worst of all, sir,” cried my friend, “he’s not ashamed of his ignorance.” It is true that harness-casks have not much to do with seamanship; but one may excuse a shipmaster of the old school for taking a very gloomy view of the contemporary marine when he meets a man holding a master mariner’s certificate, ignorant of the receptacle in which Jack’s salt horse is kept when he is at sea. Most of the steamers nowadays are monkey-rigged, many of them with pole-masts, which are useful mainly as derricks upon which a little bit of fore and aft canvas will be hoisted to steady the vessels. What should men who serve in such ships know about going aloft? Even a landsman may comprehend the emotion excited in a seaman who has passed his life in sailing ships when he sees sailors without any spars or rigging to attend to, and with nothing to do but to wash decks down. Nearly all the work of the traditional mariner lies aloft, and to reflect upon Jack without dead-eyes to turn in, chafing gear to look after, reef-points to knot, rigging to tar, masts to stay, studdingsail gear to reeve, and the like, is almost as confounding as to think of him sleeping aft, eating fresh meat throughout the run, and going to the steward for a can of filtered water, instead of to the capstan for his eight bells caulker of fiery black rum. No doubt things are pleasanter as they are. It must be nice to turn in with the certainty of having the whole of your watch below, instead of going to bed in your sea-boots in readiness for the thundering of a handspike, and the cruel roar of “All hands shorten sail!” And yet, to the true sailor, going aloft is so much the part of his life, it is so complete a condition of his vocation, that when such a man finds himself aboard a steamer with nothing to take notice of above his head, it may be supposed that at the first going off he is as fully bewildered as a steamer’s man—that is, a man who has never served in anything but steamers—would be among the ropes of a full-rigged ship, taken aback with her studding sails abroad. He will miss the old songs at the reef tackles, the flapping of canvas, the thud of coils of halliards and clew-lines flung down on deck, the springing into the shrouds, the helter-skelter for the weather earing, or the ascent of the topgallant mast that jumps to the flogging of the clewed-up sails.

There is a touch of wild excitement in going aloft in heavy weather, which no seaman can be insensible to; just as in a calm day or night a man may find a strange pleasure in lingering a few moments aloft after he has done his work, and looking down. The labour of reefing has been greatly diminished by the double topsail yards, which halve the great sails, so that when the halliards of the upper yards are let go, the ship is under close-reefed topsails. Moreover, there is only half the weight of the sail to handle in reefing or stowing. This valuable contrivance makes the task of shortening sail light in comparison with what the labour was in the days of the whole topsail. Old seamen will remember what that kind of canvas involved in a ship of fourteen or fifteen hundred tons, manned by about eighteen or twenty men, capable of doing sailors’ work aloft.

It is the second dog watch. The royals and mizzen-topgallant sail have been furled, but the wind comes in freshening puffs, the sky has a menacing look away out on the starboard beam, and at eight bells all hands are kept on deck to roll up the mainsail and topgallant sails, and tie a single reef in the fore and mizzen topsails. The sea washes noisily against the weather bow, and the night settles down as black as a pocket; but the ship is tolerably snug, there is no great weight of wind as yet, and the watch below are dismissed to the forecastle. They have been an hour in their hammocks or bunks, when, on a sudden, the scuttle is rudely flung open, and a loud cry summons them on deck. They are up in a moment, scarcely waiting to pull on their jackets, for the instant they are awake they perceive that the vessel is on her beam ends, and they can hear the thunder of a gale of wind raging overhead. All three topsail halliards have been let go, and the watch are yelling out at the reef-tackles, the skipper shouting at the mizzen-rigging, the chief mate bawling from the break of the poop, and the second mate and boatswain roaring in the waist and on the forecastle. The sea is flying heavily over the weather rail of the prostrate ship, and adding its peculiar bursting noise to the din of the furiously-shaken canvas, to the deafening booming of the wind, and the hoarse long-drawn cries of the sailors hauling upon the ropes. You can barely see the weather shrouds, though to leeward their black lines are plain enough against the washing heights of foam which swell up as high as the rail of the bulwarks. You do not feel the force of the gale until you are in the rigging, and then for a spell the iron-hard pressure of it pins you against the shrouds as if you had been made a spread-eagle. The rain drives along in slashing horizontal lines, and you see the sparkle of the deluge over the skylight where the light of the cabin lamp is shining; or, maybe, the gale is charged with sleet and hail, and the cold so tautens your fingers that you can scarcely curl them to the shape of the rope you grasp. Over the top you swarm in company with the rest of your watch, perhaps getting a blow on the head from the heel of some fellow above you as you lay yourself backwards to swing over the futtock shrouds; and then, finding the weather side of the topsail yard with as many hands on it as are needed, you pass over to leeward, where you find the boatswain or third mate astride of the yard-arm, ready for the cry of “Haul out to leeward,” to pass the earing. At such a time as this a man has too much to do to look about him; the ship is brought close to shake the sail, that the men may get the reef-bands against the yard, otherwise the canvas stands out to the force of the gale in a surface as round as St. Paul’s dome, and so hard and tense that it would serve as a platform for a ball-room.

In the whole-topsail days I have seen half a dozen men standing upon the canvas in the slings and quarters trying to stamp the sail down to bring the reef points within reach without so much as dinting the wind-swollen convexity. Still it is possible to knot a reef-point, and take a look round and below. It is a wonderful scene; no landsman can conceive of its wild and awful majesty. The ship surges heavily through the black heavings, and with every headlong plunge fills a wide circumference of the far-down ebony waters with a furious swirling of foam, in the midst of which her long narrow shape is distinctly visible. Overhead is a dim vision of naked spars and yards, reeling in the boisterous void in whose gloom it is just possible to trace the outline of huge black clouds rushing past like folds of swiftly-carried smoke. The yard on which you stand is at an angle of thirty or thirty-five degrees, and every lean-down of the slender fabric that supports the immense superstructure of masts threatens to submerge the point of it, astride of which—riding it as a horse—sits the seaman who takes the lee-earing; and his figure and that of the fellow beneath swinging on the flemish-horse, and those of the row of men who overhang the yard, and who chorus with a kind of shriek that rings athwart the yelling of the gale to the cry from the weather yard-arm of “Light over to windward!” are marked like pen-and-ink drawings upon white paper against the snow of the seas which stretch from the ship’s side into the darkness.

But this is only one aspect of “going aloft.” Another—if the bowsprit and jibbooms may be included under the head of the word “aloft”—is that of laying out to furl, let me say the outer jib, when it has come on to blow hard enough to make the stowing of that sail necessary. From the masthead you see the ship under you; you can watch her hull flying through the sea, mark the glorious white of the foam that bursts from her bows and races in a broad band astern, and behold the ship in her noble solitude amid the tenantless world of waters whose pale green skirts lean against the hazy azure of the remote heavens. But on the jibboom you have the ship rushing at you, as it were; her cutwater seems to bear right down upon you; you see her coppered forefoot gleaming with a greenish tinge through the glass-clear water whose surface it divides into two feather-shaped fountains, whose seething and hissing and prismatic summits arch away from the glossy bends. And now, as she dips with a glorious rush into the hollow over whose yawning gloom you are poised as you overhang the jibboom, the half-buried bows break the sea into smoke, and yeast, and snow; the white and hissing mass, splendid with sunshine or rendered more vivid yet by the dark green of the seas along which it is sent rolling, roars and runs ahead of the ship as far as the flying jibboom, where its impetus fails and the soaring vessel swings over it, rising almost noiselessly over the thick froth, and in a breath it is passed, whilst you look down along the sloping deck from the forked-up boom and mark how like a creature of instinct the noble ship seems to be gathering herself together for the next headlong jump, her copper shining to windward, her black sides lustrous as a curried hide with the whirling spray, her leaning masts full of thunder on high, the white sails hard and still as carven marble, no sound reaching you but the regular wash of the spurned and trampled waters under the bows, the rude and clear moaning of the wind in the rigging, and the complaining of massive timbers as the stem of the ship lengthens in a steady upheaval, and then crushes down until the torn and sobbing billows of foam are flashing their white feathers over the head-boards. Or jump aloft to loose, let us say, the mizzen royal after the tropical squall has gone away to leeward, and left the clear moon shining in a purified heaven of indigo, and striking a cone of silver glory in the dark sea whose northern waters are studded with flakes of light from the great stars. It is the middle watch; you have overhauled your clewlines, the yard has been hoisted over your head, you come down the topgallant rigging into the crosstrees, and linger there a few moments. All is silent on deck; the helmsman stands motionless at the wheel; you hear the faint jar of the tiller chains; you mark the delicate nimbus of light round the binnacle hood. Nowhere is the mystery wrought by the magical beams of the moon felt so much as at sea. The pearl-like radiance steeps the fabric of the ship in an atmosphere of soft light as illusive as the clouds of phosphorescent fires which break from her sides as she leans with the swell. The movements of the sails are like the flapping of phantom wings; and not a sigh of air, not a sound of chafing rope, not a voice calling suddenly from the distant deck, but seems to take from the moonlight and the measureless and impenetrable spaces of the deep, and the immense and enfolding silence of those far-off waters, a character of unreality that makes them seem the very phantasm and mockery of the things they veritably are.

A man might linger a long hour at the altitude of the crosstrees among the shadows of the moonlit, placid ocean night without weariness. Better than the loftiest and loneliest cliff is the mast head of a ship for the surveyal of the sublime and mighty surface on which she floats, for you rock in unison with the breathings of the deep; you are upon her great heart, and every beat of it is marked by a stately motion of the towering masts against the stars; phosphoric outlines of huge fish haunt the sluggish wake; or a sound as of a long, deep-drawn respiration denotes the neighbourhood of a leviathan whose vast proportions, as they heave in the broad silver stream of moonlight, resemble the hull of a ship keel up, driven to the surface by some hidden power and slowly settling downwards again.

These are some of the excitements and some of the quiet pleasures of “going aloft.” It is, no doubt, a highly sentimental view of the duty, and sailors who have had to let go the reef points, and beat their hands against the yards to drive life enough into their fingers to enable them to hold on, may consider that a very different representation of that kind of work would recommend itself a good deal more than this to their experience. Very possibly. But retrospection is apt to make us tender; and since “going aloft” must in the course of time—unless the shipbuilders change their minds—become a thing of the past, it is worth while spending a few minutes in trying to discover what there was of poetry and the picturesque in that old obligation of the marine life in the discharge of which the English sailor has always proved a shining example to all mariners. Even now—in these days when the steam-engine has so eaten into our maritime habits that a sailing-ship is looked upon as a kind of wonder of other times—do we not find Jack doing honour to his Queen by standing erect upon the main truck? But, oh! master mariners, mates, boatswains, and able seamen, all you who have youngsters under your charge or among you as shipmates, have mercy upon the timid lad, give him time to feel his way aloft, show him the lubber’s hole, and remember that many a first-rate sailor has faltered at the outset, and gazed with horror and despair at those giddy heights whose summits seemed to his boyish gaze to pierce the sky.