Read Ebook: Tom Finch's Monkey and How he Dined with the Admiral by Hutcheson John C John Conroy

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Ebook has 369 lines and 30368 words, and 8 pages

Furtively shoving the fez down over the monkey's head, so that it almost concealed its features, he threw the boat-cloak that rested on the sofa around him; and, taking hold of his paw, marched in the admiral's wake to the gangway, and thence down into the chief's barge alongside, where the admiral and he and Jocko took their seats in state in the stern- sheets and were rowed off to the flagship--our crew manning the rigging as they left and giving three hearty cheers!

"I like to see that proof of affection in your men," said the admiral, as he witnessed this unofficial performance. "They are proud of their commander, and, I am sure, you have a crew to be proud of!"

Tom bowed in acknowledgment of the compliment. He knew well enough what had occasioned the enthusiasm of the blue-jackets, and bit his lips to restrain his laughter, which so suffocated him that he felt he would burst if he had to keep it in much longer!

All he could do now was to brazen out the imposture, and he huddled the boat-cloak round Jocko so as to conceal his form.

"Poor Senor Carrambo is suffering fearfully from the ague," he said in explanation to the admiral of this little attention on his part--"I'm afraid he should not have ventured out of the cabin."

"A good glass of sherry will soon warm him," said the admiral smiling, "and I think I shall be able to offer him one."

"He's rather partial to bottled ale or stout," suggested Tom, "and he may possibly prefer that."

"Rather a queer taste for a Spaniard," said the admiral, as the barge reached the side of the flagship; "but I think I can also gratify on board my ship this predilection of Senor--"

"Carrambo," prompted Tom.

"Yes, Carrambo," added the admiral as he mounted the accommodation ladder of the flagship--Tom Finch with Jocko on his arm following in his wake, as before, amidst the mutual salutes of the admiral and the officers, to the state cabin of the chief.

Seated at the dinner-table, to which all were summoned with all proper ceremony to the exhilarating tune of the "Roast beef of old England," Jocko, who had a chair alongside of Tom, behaved with the utmost decorum.

He indeed appeared to eat little but bread, biscuit, tart, and fruit; but, beyond a grimace, which must have caused the admiral to reflect that of all the ugly persons he ever beheld in his life, this Chilian officer was certainly the ugliest, nothing particularly happened, and the dinner passed off without an exposure.

Tom, the admiral observed, frequently helped "the generalissimo's aide- de-camp," especially in pouring out his wine, which he limited in a marked degree; but the jocular lieutenant-commander passed this off by saying that his distinguished friend--whom he exchanged a word with occasionally, of some outlandish language, a mixture of Spanish and High Dutch, with a sprinkling of the Chinese tongue--was in the most feeble health and acting under the doctor's directions regarding his diet:-- that was the reason also, he explained, of his remaining cloaked and with his head-covering on at the admiral's table, for which he craved a thousand pardons!

After dinner, Tom would have given worlds to have beaten a retreat to his own ship, as several officers came into the saloon while coffee was handed round, and he dreaded each moment that Jocko would disgrace himself and the bubble would burst; but no, there the admiral, would keep him, talking all the time, and directing most of his attention towards the pseudo "Senor Carrambo," for whose benefit Tom had to translate, or pretend to translate, what was said.

Tom said he never got so punished for a joke in his life before, and he took very good care not to let his sense of the ridiculous put him in such a plight again, as for more than two mortal hours he suffered all the tortures of a condemned criminal; as he said, he would rather have been shot at once!

But when the admiral shook hands with him on his departure, Tom felt worst of all.

Poor Tom! after believing that the admiral had suspected nothing up to the last moment, to be thus undeceived.

It was heartrending!

Gone was his commission, he thought, at one fell blow, with all the pleasant dreams of promotion that had flashed across his brain after the admiral's encomiums on him that afternoon; and he would have to think himself very lucky if he were not tried by court-martial and dismissed the service with disgrace.

It was paying dearly for a practical joke, played off on the spur of the moment, truly!

After a great deal of persuasion, I got him to indite a letter of apology to the admiral, detailing all Jocko's perfections, and how he had been constantly an inmate of his cabin; while assuring him that the passing off the monkey as a "foreigner" had not been a planned thing, but was only the result of an accident and his own unaccountable love of fun, although the falsehood he had been guilty of was most reprehensible.

Indeed, as I made him observe, if it had not been for the admiral himself suggesting the imposture, he, Tom, would never have dreamt of it; but, he concluded, he would regret it all his life, for he had not only told a lie, but the whole matter appeared like a deliberately contemplated insult to his superior officer.

This letter Tom, still acting under my advice, sent off immediately to the flagship, as it was yet not late, and within half an hour he received an answer which made him dance an Indian war-dance of delight around the cabin table, where he and I were awaiting the news that was to make or mar poor Tom's future life.

The admiral's ran thus:--

"Dear Commander,

"I accept your apology, and forgive the joke which I enjoyed, I believe, more than you did, having discovered Master Jocko's identity from the first moment when he took his Turkish fez off to salute me in the cabin, on my entering--you young rascal! I would not have missed for a hundred pounds the agony you were in all the time you were sitting at my table, and, I really think, I had the best of the joke!

"Yours, with best compliments to `Senor Carrambo,'

"Anson."

"No, I suppose not," said he, "at all events, Gerald, he's a trump! I recollect my old father saying something once about asking him to put in a good word for me; but, I daresay he forgot all about it: but I am none the worse for it now, eh?"

"No," said I, "thanks to Jocko!"

Poor Jocko, as I hinted at before, came finally to grief in a very sad way.

We were chasing a suspicious looking blockade-runner, a short time after he had his remarkable invitation to dine with the admiral; our engines were moving a little more rapidly than usual; and, Jocko, who was perched on the skylight above, was looking at them with the most intense interest.

ESCAPE OF THE "CRANKY JANE."

A STORY ABOUT AN ICEBERG.

One day, some three years ago or so, I chanced to be down at Sheerness dockyard, and, while there, utilised my time by inspecting the various vessels scattered about this naval repository. Some of the specimens exhibited all the latest "improvements" in marine architecture, being built to develop every destructive property--huge floating citadels and infernal machines; while others were old, and now useless, types of the past "wooden walls of old England," ships that once had braved the perils of the main in all the panoply of their spreading canvas, and whose broadsides had thundered at Trafalgar, making music in the ears of the immortal Nelson and his compeers.

Amongst the different craft that caught my eye--old hulks, placidly resting their weary timbers on the muddy bosom of the Medway, dismantled, dismasted, and having pent-houses like the roofs of barns over their upper decks in lieu of awnings; armour-plated cruisers, in the First Class Steam Reserve, ready to be commissioned at a moment's notice; and ships in various degrees of construction, on the building slips and in dry dock--was a vessel which seemed to be undergoing the operation of "padding her hull," if the phrase be admissible as explaining what I noticed about her, the planking, from which the copper sheathing had been previously stripped, being doubled, apparently, and protected in weak places by additional beams and braces being fixed to the sides. Of course, I may be all wrong in this, but it was what seemed to me to be the case.

But, no.

He was a seafaring man. I could see that at a glance, although he was not one I should have thought who had donned her majesty's uniform, for he lacked that dapper look that the blue-jackets of the service are usually distinguished by; but he was a veritable old salt, or "shell- back," none the less, sniffing of the ocean all over, and having his face seamed with those little venous streaks of pink which variegate the tanned countenances of men exposed to all the rigours of the elements, and who encounter with an equal mind the freezing blast of the frozen sea or the blazing sun of Africa.

I told this worthy that once, when on a voyage in one of the Inman line of steamers from Halifax to Liverpool, I had gone--or rather the vessel had, to be more correct--perilously near an iceberg, when my nautical friend proceeded to give vent to his own exposition of the "glacial theory," saying that a lot of nonsense was written about the ice in the Arctic regions by people who never went beyond their own firesides at home and had never seen an iceberg. It made him mad, he said, to read it!

"I daresay you've read a lot of rubbish on the subject?" said the old gentleman, getting excited about the matter, as if he only wanted a good start to be off and away on his hobby.

"I daresay I have," I replied.

"Well, what with all the fiction that has been written and the fabulous stories told of the Arctic and its belongings, the `green hand' who makes the voyage for the first time is full of expectations concerning all the wonderful sights he's going to see in `the perennial realms of ice and snow'--that's the phrase the newspaper chaps always use-- expectations which are bound to be disappointed,--and why?"

"Because the things that he fancies he's going to see don't really exist, nor never yet did in spite of what book-learned people may say! The voyager who goes north for the first time is bound, let us say for illustration, for Baffin's Bay; and, from what he has learnt beforehand, bears and walruses, seals and sea-lions, whale blubber and the Esquimaux who eat it, all occupy some considerable share of his imagination. But, above all these, the first thing that he looks forward to see are the icebergs, or floating mountains of ice, which are so especially the creation of the cold regions, to which he is sailing. These icebergs, sir, form the staple background of every Arctic view, without which none would be deemed for a moment complete. Their gigantic peaks and jagged precipices are familiar to most, in a score of pictures and engravings drawn by artists who were never beyond the Lizard Lights; and really, I believe that if one was sketched that wasn't at least a thousand feet high or more, and didn't have a polar bear perched on top and a full rigged ship sailing right underneath it, why, the generality of people would think it wasn't a bit like the real thing!"

"And what is the `real thing' like?" I asked with some curiosity.

"There you have me," said the old sailor, who had from his speech evidently received a good education; and if once "before the mast" had now certainly risen to something much higher. "To men whose minds have been wrought up to such a pitch of fancy and expectation, the first sight of a real iceberg is a complete take-down to their imagination. Your ship is pitching about, say, in the cross seas near the mouth of Davis Strait, preparatory to entering within the smooth water of the Arctic circle, when in the far distance your eye catches sight of a lump of ice, looking, as it rises and falls sluggishly in the trough of the sea, not unlike a hencoop covered with snow, after it had been pitched overboard by some passing ship, or like a gigantic lump of foam tossed on the crest of a wave. If the day is sunless, the reflection of light which gives it that glistening appearance, so remarkable as the midnight sun glances among an array of these objects, is wanting to add dignity to the contour of what it is a rude dissipation of life's young dream to learn is an iceberg--though on a very small scale. It is simply a wave- worn straggler from the fleet which will soon be met sailing southward out of the Greenland fjords. The warm waters of the Atlantic will in the course of a few days be too much for it. The sun will be at work on it; it will get undermined by the wash of the breakers, until, being top-heavy, it will speedily capsize. Then the war between the ice and the elements will begin afresh, until the once stately ice-mountain will become the `bergy bit,' as whalers call the slowly-lessening mass of crumbling, spongy ice, until it finally disappears in the waters; but only to rise again in the form of vapour, which the cold of the north will convert into snow, the parent of that inland ice about the polar regions which forms the source of subsequent icebergs afresh--the process being always going on, never ending!"

"Why, you are quite a philosopher," I observed.

"A bit of a one, sir," said the old gentleman with a smile. "Those who go down to the sea in ships, you know, see wonders in the deep! But, to continue what I was telling you about the icebergs. As your ship proceeds further north they become more numerous and of larger dimensions, until, as you pass the entrance of some of those great fjords, or inlets, which intersect the Greenland coast-line, they pour out in such numbers that the wary mariner is thankful for the continuous daylight and summer seas that enable him so easily to avoid these floating rocks. Here are several broken-up ones floating about in the Waigat, a narrow strait between the island of Disco and the mainland of Greenland, and in close vicinity to several fjords noted for sending big bergs adrift in the channel way to float southward. These are the `ice- mountains' of the fancy artist. One ashore close into the land, and yet not stranded or on account of its depth in the water getting into any very shallow soundings, you may see in your mind's eye, as I've seen them scores of times in reality. It presents to your notice a dull white mass of untransparent ice--not transparent, with objects to be seen through it on the other side, as I have noticed in more than one picture of the North Pole taken by an artist on the spot! This mass is generally jagged at the top with saw-like edges, and it doesn't so very much resemble those Gothic cathedral spires as Arctic writers try to make out. Still, on the whole, the shape of this monster floating mass of ice is very striking to those seeing it for the first time; and when you come to look at it more closely, its size and general character lose nothing by having the details ciphered down, as a Yankee skipper would say."

"Are the icebergs very big?" I inquired.

"Well," said the old gentleman, quite pleased at being asked for information on the subject, and evidently wishing to convert me to his own practical way of thinking in opposition to Arctic fiction-mongers, "they may sometimes be seen of a hundred and fifty feet high, occasionally reaching to a couple of hundred, while sometimes I've seen an iceberg that towered up more than double that height; but the majority of them do not exceed a hundred feet at most. The colour, as I've said, is not emerald green, as most folks think--that is, not unless it is seen under what science-folks call the prismatic action of light--but a dull white that is almost opaque. The sides are, generally, dripping with the little streams of water formed by the melting of the ice, and glistening in the rays of the sun; but a dull white is the principal colour of the mass. Its base is broader than its summit, and is here and there hollowed into little caverns by the action of the waves. The pinnacles seen in the pictures of the illustrated papers I've spoken of are not very plain. Indeed, both the one we are supposing and the other bergs, that are always, like the `birds of a feather' of the proverb, to be seen close together, are flattened on the top; and if here and there worn into fantastic shapes by the weather, they mostly go back to a shape which may be roughly described as broader at the base than the top; otherwise the berg would speedily capsize. When this happens, they go over with a tremendous splash, rocking and churning up the sea for miles round, and sending wave circles spreading and widening out as from the whirlpool in the centre, in the same way as when a child pitches a stone into a pond.

"Did you ever have any adventure amongst the icebergs?" I asked the old gentleman at this juncture, thinking I had quite enough of the scientific aspect of the subject, and dreading lest he might dive further into the original composition of ice.

"Not in the Arctic Ocean," he replied; "but once, when I was only a common sailor before the mast and aboard a vessel in the Australian trade, I came across icebergs in the southern latitudes which were mighty perilous; and one of these bergs was, by the way, bigger than any I ever saw in northern seas."

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