On the morning of November 21, 1837, the schooner Mowbray lay at anchor abreast of Greenwich. In the fresh westerly wind you found the sun-white sparkle of winter. Buildings, ships, wharves, the further bends of the Reach, stood out with the sharpness and delicacy of ivory work. The movements of the drapery of bunting, the swelling and breathing of passing canvas, were beautiful to see under the hard, blue sky, with its frost-work of gleaming cloud high over Plaistow Level.

The schooner looked exceedingly handsome as she floated at her cable, with the ripples of the blown stream twisting in slender lines of light from the cut-water. These lines flashed in her glossy sides as they trembled past, and her coppered hull was beautified by other lustres than the light of day, as she sat motionless, courting the eye to the tall heights of the delicate mastheads, each of them star-crowned with a shining gilt truck.

She was handsomer than a yacht, because she lacked the summer precision and fine-weather finish of that sort of craft. The nautical eye does not love fine feathers. The Mowbray was a sea-going boat. She had beam for stability, a height of side which promised a dry ship, a spring of bow smack-like with its promise of domination. Her copper shone; she was sheathed to the bends; she carried little or no finery about her decks, but the scantling of everything—the companion, the skylights, the sailors' deck-house, nay, even the caboose forward—might have been that of a ten-gun brig.

The hour was about half-past eleven. A number of seamen, apparelled with some regard to uniformity of attire, lounged in the bows, staring Greenwich way, or at the familiar scene of docks the other side of the river. They looked a rough company of the genuine merchant-sailor type—raggedly hairy, defiant in stare, in fold of arm, resolved in their several postures. They wore round hats and jackets, and the bell-ended, blue-cloth trousers of the Jacks of that day.

On the quarter-deck walked Captain Glew and the mate who had signed articles for the run, Mr. Tweed. This was a short, hearty, plump man. His grog-blossomed, jovial face suggested a suppressed boisterousness of spirits; you felt that in him lay the voice for the back-parlour of the Free and Easy. The owner of the vessel and party were expected on board shortly, and Tweed had clothed himself with care, in a short, round jacket, with a corner of red silk handkerchief carelessly straying from one side-pocket. His trousers rippled as he walked, and the rest of him consisted of a check shirt and pumps.

'I think he ought to be pleased,' said Captain Glew, coming to a stand at the binnacle, and throwing a look over the little ship and then up aloft; 'nothing handsomer sails out of the Thames this year.'

'She is sweet enough for a pennon,' said Tweed. 'I wish she was mine. I'd like to go a-pirating in a vessel of this sort. No, I wouldn't, either; I'd go a-slaving. A hundred and eighty tons. I reckon you could stow away six hundred blacks in her 'tween decks.'

'I sometimes wish I'd been born a hundred years sooner,' said Captain Glew. 'I would have been a pirate; the ocean was thick with booty, and you got an estate with very little risk. The dogs came to the gibbet because they never would be satisfied.'

'Piracy gave a sailor a good chance,' said the mate, with a groggy look at the hands lounging forward.

'Here am I grateful for this £30 job,' growled the captain. 'The wife and young uns may now eat and drink for three months, and for three months the thought of to-morrow morning shan't keep me awake. Holy Jemmy! But it's on the quarter-deck where the hearts of stone are wanted. To those fellows forward the getting a ship's as easy as an oath. Do you or I get ships as easily as we swear?'

'No, not by all that I'm worth!' answered Tweed. 'Captain, I have followed the sea for twenty years, and I'll tell you how it stands with me now: in my cabin you'll find a sea-chest; it's painted green—green it should be; it's the colour of my life. In that sea-chest is all that I own in the world, saving a matter of a few pounds stowed away ashore. Twenty years of the sea, and nothing but a bloomed green sea-chest to show for it!' exclaimed Tweed, with so much blood in his face that his grog-blossoms made him look as if he had burst into a dangerous rash.

Thus these worthies discoursed, as they walked the quarter-deck, awaiting the arrival of Mr. Vanderholt and party. They had been shipmates in prior times, were in some fashion connected, had frequently of late met ashore, and had grown intimate during the time occupied by the refitting of the Mowbray. We are not to confound the discipline of this little schooner with that of a great Indiaman. Men who had commanded fruiters were not commonly distant to their mates when they afterwards handled small vessels.

Forward the seamen growled in talk indistinguishable to the quarter-deck walkers.

'What sort of boss is th' ole man going to turn out?' exclaimed one of the seamen, staring aft. 'I don't like his looks. But when once I've signed a vessel's articles I'm for outweathering the skipper, if he was the devil himself. He'll get no change out of Joseph Dabb, and it's extraordinary, bullies, that Joseph Dabb should be my name.'

'If there's no eddication in the fok'sle of this vessel, fired if there oughtn't to be enough aft to enable all hands to spell the word "lush,"' said a dark, heavy-browed man, gazing with a deep and surly smile at the plump figure of Tweed, as he walked, rolling about like a butterbox in a seaway, alongside the captain. 'I never see a face in all my time more beautifully decorated. How many pints go to one of them blossoms? We shall be hearing of him singing "We're all a-noddin'" in some middle watch, when there's onusual need for a bright look-out.'

'I was spliced three weeks ago,' exclaimed a red-headed seaman. 'I'm a-missing of Sally, my joys. I feel gallus like going home again.'

He eyed the land about the West India Docks, and extended his arms, amidst a rumble of laughter and much spitting of yellow froth over the bows.

'I don't expect to see my old 'oman again,' exclaimed a seaman, standing upright with his arms folded. 'If she don't die, she'll make tracks, and, foreseeing of that, I sold off my household furniture yesterday.'

'Ain't ye left her nothing to sit upon?' said the red-headed seaman.

'Yes; a carpenter's knee. D'ye think I'm to be hubbled?' he cried, letting fall his arms, and turning fiercely upon the red-headed man. 'I wondered to find her at home last voyage. She'd have found me a true man. Bruised if I like ship's carpenters, anyhow. I never yet knew a ship's carpenter yer could trust as a man.'

'Stow that!' exclaimed a seaman, leaning over the rail, and merely turning his head to speak.

'You're no ship's carpenter,' was the answer. 'This ain't no ship. Present company's always excepted, too, in polite society;' and he began to step the deck with temper.

'Where's this vessel bound to?' said another man.

'I signed for a cruise,' answered someone.

'Something was said about the Equator,' exclaimed another.

'The Equator's no coast,' said the red-headed man.

'The covey that owns this here craft,' exclaimed the carpenter, who was also the boatswain, 'is a Dutchman. He ain't a Dutchman only—he's a feenansure. Now, I've heard tell that when a Dutchman makes more money than his mind's capable of weighing the idea of, his intellects go wrong. Did ye ever hear of the prices they paid for toolips? I'm the son of a sweep, lads, if some of 'em didn't pay as much as a £100 in good money for a durned stalk not worth a cabbage! They was all rich men as bought them bulbs, and they was all mad; and you lay your last farden's-worth of silver spoons if this here scheme of a voyage to the Equator ain't the caper of a blooming Dutchman who's made so much money that his brains have given under the weight of the idea of his fortune!'

Just then a large white boat was seen to be approaching the Mowbray from the direction of Greenwich, and in a few minutes she was alongside—a boat full of ladies and gentlemen; and Captain Glew stood at the open gangway, cap in hand. The party consisted of Mr. and Miss Vanderholt and a few friends who had accompanied them to Greenwich to see them off. Vanderholt shook hands with his captain, nodded to the mate, and cast a look of approval in the direction of the forecastle. He seemed in high spirits. His eyes smiled deep in their little sockets, and the fresh and friendly wind blew his beard into twenty expressions of kindly laughter. He was rigged out for the sea. No Minories slop-shop could have furnished him with a salter aspect. The seamen on the forecastle eyed him, and murmured one to another. They seemed to recognise their own vocation in the man, yet viewed him doubtfully, as dogs watch with suspicion the dog in Punch and Judy.

His daughter was handsomely draped in velvet and fur, and wore a turban-shaped hat that was as good for the deck as for her looks. In a minute there was a little crowd of well-dressed gentlemen and ladies standing on the quarter-deck, gazing around them and aloft, with Mr. Vanderholt laughing with the wind in his beard, and Miss Vi gazing somewhat pensively at the full scene of the schooner.

It was the right sort of morning for a start for the ocean. The brisk breeze covered the surface of the river with sliding shapes, coming and going. A large Indiaman, newly arrived, with the rust of four months of brine draining down her chain-plate bolts, her sheathing green as grass, with a quivering of weeds here and there, lay off the Docks opposite. Her house-flag blew stately from the lofty masthead; stately and proud, too, she floated, tall and square. She seemed alive, and conscious of victory. The lights of her cabin windows shook through the ripples in long darts of silver. A chorus of thirty stormy throats swept down the wind, and there came out of that inspiriting windlass-song of sailors who had brought their lofty ship home the whole spirit of the ocean into this living, brimming picture of river.

Mr. Vanderholt's friends walked about the decks of the Mowbray, praising the schooner highly.

'He goes alone with his daughter,' said one gentleman to another, 'and touches nowhere. I do not envy her.'

'Don't you remember,' said the other, 'what the German said? "I don't see der use of being seek onless you makes your friends seek mit you."'

They both laughed.

Mr. Vanderholt led the whole party into the cabin, where they found the table clothed for a cold lunch. A steward stood in a corner, waiting for the hour to strike when he should summon the company by a bell. Some baskets of champagne were beside him. It was a roomy cabin, with plenty of accommodation for eight or nine people to sit at table; brightly lighted, handsomely upholstered, painted and gilded as charmingly as a drawing-room. Some little berths aft had been knocked into two, and Violet was very well pleased with the size and comfort of her sea bedroom. She would swing in a cot; the furniture provided her with many more conveniences than she would get ashore in a friend's house.

Mr. Vanderholt's cabin was plainly equipped. He was going to sea as a sailor; he was bent upon reviving old memories; and his guests laughed when he pointed to a sea-chest, which he said contained nearly the whole of his kit, which chest had also been the one he had used in the last voyage he made as a sailor.

'Do you see those ragged marks?' said he, stooping to run his finger along the edge of the chest, whilst he looked up into the face of a fashionably-dressed lady. 'They were caused by my cutting up plug tobacco. I would not have them filled in. On this chest I have sat and blown strong Cavendish tobacco-smoke into an atmosphere composed almost entirely of carbonic acid gas; I have watched the blue ring burning round the flame of the lamp, and smoked on.'

'Would you be a sailor again?' asked the fashionably-dressed lady.

'Not for a million on these terms,' answered Mr. Vanderholt, bringing his fist down, in a sudden passion of recollection, upon the lid of his chest.

Presently the little bell rang, and they seated themselves. The champagne fizzed, knives and forks rattled on plates, the one steward ran about. Mr. Vanderholt was in high spirits; he drank to his daughter amongst others; no more cordial or hospitable gentleman ever sat at the head of a cabin table.

'The hardest part of a sailor's life,' said a pretty young woman, with black eyes, and a handsome white feather coiled round a large hat, 'must be saying good-bye to the girls, as I think they call them,' exposing a row of milk-white teeth. 'They are absent for months and years; how can you expect constancy?'

'Ha!' exclaimed Mr. Vanderholt. 'But a man may be faithful, even though he should be as much cut off from his girl as if he was buried. Don't you remember what your Richard Steele says? I quote from memory: "The poor fellow who lost his arm last siege will tell you that he feels the fingers that are buried in Flanders ache every cold morning at Chelsea."'

'I do not see the application,' said one of the gentlemen.

'It is perfectly plain,' said Violet, flushing.

'Vanderholt,' exclaimed one of the guests, 'tell me what has become of that old sailor who used to take a month in making a pair of clews for the captain's cot, or a fancy pair of beckets for the mate's camphor-wood chest.'

'He belonged to the days of leisure,' answered Mr. Vanderholt. 'It is all for speed now, cracking on, carrying away, four months to Bombay, when in my time six months was looked upon as a good voyage.'

Captain Glew, at the invitation of Mr. Vanderholt, sat at the foot of the table.

'The lady,' said he, with an inclination of his head in the direction of the person referred to, 'was speaking just now of constancy amongst sailors. I remember some years ago being aboard a ship in a collision. The other vessel received us, and it turned out that the first seaman who sprang into the ship was the husband of the wife of the captain.'

'Lor', what a complication!' said somebody.

'The seaman who sprang was supposed to be dead?' said Mr. Vanderholt.

Captain Glew looked at him without smiling. His face, however, was not wanting in a certain arch expression.

'Sailors undergo very many more perils than are written down, or than the world wots of,' said a gentleman. 'I once met a travelling show. Part of it was a man in a cage. Nothing in this or the under world could be more frightful to see than that man. And what had happened to him? He had slept on a bale of cloves, and the cloves, by drawing all the moisture out of him, had left him a skeleton, with a heart beating under a loose coat of parchment.'

'Poor thing!' said a lady. 'And are cloves so drying? Really! How could the poor creature while away the time in a cage?'

'By showing the crowd how to make clove-hitches, I expect,' said Vanderholt.

Captain Glew rose, and, bowing to the company, went to his cabin, which was a cupboard forward annexed to the pantry. Opposite was the mate's. He reappeared in a minute or two, said something to Mr. Vanderholt, and passed on deck.

'I wonder you do not touch at Madeira,' said a gentleman.

'I touch at the Line only.'

'Oh, but Miss Vanderholt,' exclaimed the gentleman, 'if you have not seen Madeira, you should compel your father to stop at the island,

'I know nothing about the virgins of that island,' said a gentleman; 'but the men who visit your ship, and the men who salute you when you get ashore, are poisonously hideous. They cling like toads to a bed of glorious growths. The spirit of man is not divine at Madeira.'

'I touch nowhere,' said Mr. Vanderholt. 'When our forefoot cuts the zero of the chart, we shift helm for the homeward run.'

He glanced at a clock in the skylight, made a movement, and simultaneously all stood up, and, standing, they drank a final glass of champagne to the safety of the voyage, to Vanderholt's health, to the return of the charming Violet Vanderholt; then, conducted by the owner of the schooner, the guests went on deck, and in a few minutes took their leave.

There was much hand-shaking—all the usual assurances of friendship agitated by leave-taking. Nevertheless, when the company were in their boat, going ashore, one of the gentlemen exclaimed:

'I think Vanderholt must be a selfish old cuckoo to carry away his daughter to the ocean, with no other company but his own grumbling self and Captain Glew.'

'I would not be sailing to the Equator in that schooner for a thousand pounds!' said a lady. 'I should have to be run away with to do such a thing;' and she leered sweetly at a gentleman opposite her.

'They are flourishing their handkerchiefs to us,' cried someone.

All stood up in the boat to wave back.

'For Gord's sake, sit down, ladies and gents! You'll be capsizing of us!' bawled the one-eyed bow oar.

On board the schooner they were getting under weigh. The name of the boatswain—he was also the carpenter—who had shipped to act as second mate whenever his services in this capacity should be required, was Jones. No man blew the boatswain's silver pipe more sweetly. He had sent his lark-like carol to the mastheads, and afar on either hand the streaming river that pure music of the sea thrilled, whilst their guests were making their way ashore.

The Mowbray was a small ship, but her deep-water men dealt with her as though she had been a thousand-ton Indiaman. The hearties, in their round jackets, sprang, as an echo of the boatswain's roaring cry, to the windlass handles, and in a moment a voice, broken by years of drink and by hailing the deck from immense heights, broke into that most melancholy chorus, 'Across the Plains of Mexico.'

The cherry-faced mate, Tweed, standing in the bows, soon reported the cable up and down; then sail was made. The eager little ship herself broke her anchor out of the London mud, and to the impulse of her mounting standing jib, staysail, and gaff foresail, was, with a clipper's restlessness of spirit in the whole length of her, swiftly turning her head down-stream, whilst a few hands sang 'Old Stormy, he is dead and gone' at the little windlass, lifting the anchor to the cathead.

Before the length of Blackwall Reach had been measured, the schooner was clothed, her seamen coiling down, some attending the sheets—everything quiet and comfortable. The captain stood beside the tiller, conning the little vessel. He was qualified as a pilot for the Thames, and boasted that he could smell his way up and down in the dark—and truly perhaps the nose, in some parts of this noble river, would be as good as the lead, or a buoy, to tell a man where he was. Glew caught the eye of Mr. Vanderholt, who, approaching him, said:

'I am very well pleased. You have chosen well. This is a good company of seamen.'

Captain Glew touched his cap, and continued to watch the schooner. She was square-rigged forward, carried topsail, top-gallant-sail, and royal; but there was no good in humbugging with this sort of canvas in a serpentine river that shifts your course for you every two miles by three or four points.

Miss Vanderholt stood at the rail viewing the moving picture round about, with a very pensive face. Her eyes often went to a large vessel at anchor ahead. That full-rigged ship made her think of George. In much such a ship, no doubt, George would return. When? In all probability before her own arrival; and how maddening that would be! For, oddly enough, though it was a long time since they had parted, Miss Violet Vanderholt was quite as much in love with Captain George Parry as ever she was on that day when she and her father saw him off in the East India Docks, when she cried, and he hugged her, and when they had spent half an hour up in a corner all alone in talk as impassioned as ever passed between two lovers.

This must convince us that there was something Dutch and solid in the girl's character, for she had had many opportunities to recollect herself and transfer her affection. Though Vanderholt's wealth was not of a size to lead to newspaper paragraphs and to editorial exaggerations, it was, in a quiet way, known and talked about, and people passing his house would look up and nod at it, and say:

'A rich old cock lives there.'

However, Miss Vi's meditations were presently to be interrupted by a scene not very unfamiliar in the River Thames. The wind was west, and it blew a fresh breeze. The ripples rushing to the whipping carried a little edging of foam. Whatever was under canvas, unless it was a barge, or something running in a mile or two of straight water, leaned in shafts of light. You caught the glance of copper sheathing, the sunshine showered in a rainbow glow upon flashes of brackish foam bursting without the life of brine from shearing bows and gliding sides. The smoke ashore blew away quickly, and the heavens remained a beautiful blue, and the sky over the Plaistow Flats shone like the inside of an oyster-shell with the prismatic hues of a setting of motionless, finely-linked clouds.

Just as the Mowbray passed down Bugsby's Reach, opening the long tract of the Woolwich waters beyond, two collier brigs reaching up the river swept into each other with crackling jibbooms. The schooner's road was blocked; her helm was shifted swift as the swallow curves in flight, and then followed a pause which enabled Miss Vanderholt to gain some little insight into the ways of the deep, and the behaviour and speech of those who go down to it for two or three pounds a month.

The two brigs came together with a crash that might have been heard at London Bridge. They butted bow to bow, then, swinging to, locked themselves helplessly broadside to broadside, and began to float shorewards, with sails and heavy pieces of timber falling from aloft, and men, two or three of them wearing tall hats, and shawls round their throats, rushing about the decks in agonies of pantomime. It was a saying that there was no better school than the North Country Geordie for seamanship. Certainly there was no school in which a man learnt more quickly to swear. The Mowbray floated close past, and all could be seen. Nothing is more helpless in this world than two ships thus yoked, steering each other ashore, with an occasional drag, or jerk, or butt, that brings a ton of top-hamper crashing about the ears of the profane on deck.

'Let go your tawps'l brace, you blooming old fool! Don't you see it's foul of my mainyard-arm?'

'What in flames are you keeping your jib hoisted for? You're paying her right into me!'

'Jumped if we shan't both go ashore if yer don't starboard yer 'ellum. Why don't you let go yer anchor, you rooting hogs?'

'Yes, and tear my smothered bows out because a crew of dairymen don't know how to steer their ship!'

Then, in the midst of this—crash!—off short like a carrot would snap a yard, or down, torn bodily out by its roots, would fall a gaff, amidst yells of:

'You gutter-sots! You're all drunk this holy day! Suffocate yer, you scabs! Let go yer taws'l halliards! Don't you see they're binding the wessels together by my yard that's gone in the slings?'

But the Mowbray was now on her course; the distance between her and the embracing brigs was fast widening, and articulate oaths had faded into a chorus of indistinguishable shouts. The vessels were doomed. They both drifted ashore abreast of Woolwich, and next day a paper described a fight that was bloody with knives between the two crews, and reported the death of a foolhardy waterman who tried to make peace, clearly with an eye to salvage.

'This,' said Mr. Vanderholt, as the Mowbray, rounding into Galleon's Reach, put the brigs out of sight, 'is a sample of the poetry of the sea, Vi. But very few poets have dealt with subjects of this sort. They write of the splendours of the sunset and moon-rise at sea, and such things. Yet, if I were a poet, I would rather choose a subject in those two brigs in the Thames in a collision, going ashore, full of curses, than in all the stars which shine upon the ocean.'

At five o'clock the Mowbray let go her anchor off Gravesend.