A High Wind in Jamaica - Richard Hughes [38]
"If I'm not fit to steer in foul weather, I'm not fit to steer in fair!" he muttered, but without glancing at the captain. "He can take the helm all day and night, for all the help _I'll_ give him!"
The captain appeared equally not to see the mate. He looked quite ready to take both watches till kingdom come.
"If _he'd_ been at the wheel when that squall struck us," said the mate under his voice but with biting passion, "he'd have lost the ship! He's no more eye for a squall coming than a sucker-fish! And he knows it, too: that's what makes him go on this way!"
The children did not answer. It shocked them deeply to have to see a grown-up, a should-be Olympian, displaying his feelings. In exact opposition to the witnesses at the Transfiguration, they felt it would have been good for them to be almost anywhere rather than there. He was totally unconscious of their discomfort, however: too selfoccupied to notice how they avoided catching his eye.
"Look! There's a steamship!" exclaimed Margaret, with much too bright a brightness.
The mate glowered at it.
"Aye, they'll be the death of us, those steamers," he said. "Every year there's more of them. They'll be using them for men-of-war next, and then where'll we be? Times are bad enough without steamers."
But while he spoke he wore a preoccupied expression, as if he were more concerned with what was going on at the back of his mind than with what went on in the front.
"Did you ever hear about what happened when the first steamer put to sea in the Gulf of Paria?" he asked, however.
"No, what?" asked Margaret, with an eagerness that even exceeded the necessities of politeness in its falsity.
"She was built on the Clyde, and sailed over. (Nobody thought of using steam for a long ocean voyage in those days.) The Company thought they ought to make a todo--to popularize her, so to speak. So the first time she put to sea under her own power, they invited all the bigwigs on board: all the Members of Assembly in Trinidad, and the Governor and his Staff, and a Bishop. It was the Bishop what did the trick."
His story died out: he became completely absorbed in watching sidelong the effect of his bravado on the captain.
"Did what?" asked Margaret.
"Ran 'em aground."
"But what did they let him steer for?" asked Edward. "They might have known he couldn't!"
"Edward! How dare you talk about a Bishop in that rude way!" admonished Rachel.
"It wasn't the steamer he ran aground, sonny," said the mate: "it was a poor innocent little devil of a pirate craft, that was just beating up for the Boca Grande in a northerly breeze."
"Good for him!" said Edward. "How did he do it?"
"They were all sea-sick, being on a steamer for the first time: the way she rolls, not like a decent sailing-vessel. There wasn't a man who could stay on deck--except the Bishop, and he just thrived on it. So when the poor little pirate cut under her bows, and seen her coming up in the eye of the wind, no sail set, with a cloud of smoke amidships and an old Bishop bung in the middle of the smoke, and her paddles making as much turmoil as a whale trying to scratch a flea in its ear, he just beached his vessel and took to the woods. Never went to sea again, he didn't; started growing cocoa-nuts. But there was one poor fish was in such a hurry he broke his leg, and they came ashore and found him. When he saw the Bishop coming for him he started yelling out it was the Devil."
"O-oh!" gasped Rachel, horror-struck.
"How silly of him," said Edward.
"I don't know so much!" said the mate. "He wasn't too far wrong! Ever since that, they've been the death of our profession, Steam and the Church. . . what with steaming, and what with preaching, and steaming and preaching.. .. Now that's a funny thing," he broke off,