第18章

So sail did get shortened more or less in time even in that ship, and her tall spars never went overboard while I served in her.

However, all the time I was with them, Captain S- and Mr.P- did not get on very well together.If P- carried on "like the very devil" because he was too deaf to know how much wind there was, Captain S- (who, as I have said, seemed constitutionally incapable of ordering one of his officers to shorten sail) resented the necessity forced upon him by Mr.P-'s desperate goings on.It was in Captain S-'s tradition rather to reprove his officers for not carrying on quite enough - in his phrase "for not taking every ounce of advantage of a fair wind." But there was also a psychological motive that made him extremely difficult to deal with on board that iron clipper.He had just come out of the marvellous Tweed, a ship, I have heard, heavy to look at but of phenomenal speed.In the middle sixties she had beaten by a day and a half the steam mail-boat from Hong Kong to Singapore.There was something peculiarly lucky, perhaps, in the placing of her masts -who knows? Officers of men-of-war used to come on board to take the exact dimensions of her sail-plan.Perhaps there had been a touch of genius or the finger of good fortune in the fashioning of her lines at bow and stern.It is impossible to say.She was built in the East Indies somewhere, of teak-wood throughout, except the deck.She had a great sheer, high bows, and a clumsy stern.

The men who had seen her described her to me as "nothing much to look at." But in the great Indian famine of the seventies that ship, already old then, made some wonderful dashes across the Gulf of Bengal with cargoes of rice from Rangoon to Madras.

She took the secret of her speed with her, and, unsightly as she was, her image surely has its glorious place in the mirror of the old sea.

The point, however, is that Captain S-, who used to say frequently, "She never made a decent passage after I left her," seemed to think that the secret of her speed lay in her famous commander.No doubt the secret of many a ship's excellence does lie with the man on board, but it was hopeless for Captain S- to try to make his new iron clipper equal the feats which made the old Tweed a name of praise upon the lips of English-speaking seamen.There was something pathetic in it, as in the endeavour of an artist in his old age to equal the masterpieces of his youth - for the Tweed's famous passages were Captain S-'s masterpieces.It was pathetic, and perhaps just the least bit dangerous.At any rate, I am glad that, what between Captain S-'s yearning for old triumphs and Mr.

P-'s deafness, I have seen some memorable carrying on to make a passage.And I have carried on myself upon the tall spars of that Clyde shipbuilder's masterpiece as I have never carried on in a ship before or since.