OUT-TRAILS. by J. P. Guy

 CHAPTER THREE

ARGENTINA 1896

In November, 1896, I speculated in thirty pedigree Lincoln rams, worth about £15 each in order to export them for stud purposes to Buenos Ayres, and arranged to look after them myself on the way out. I went aboard the S.S. Merida¹, which was berthed in one of the docks on the Liverpool side of the Mersey. I forget what the bulk of the cargo was, but a screeching steam-winch was rapidly covering it with a large quantity of heavy iron rails. These rails had only arrived that day at the quay side, and should not have been loaded near the top of the hold over the light cargo. The captain was responsible for taking the rails on board, but he can scarcely be blamed for doing so. Had he refused on the score of the ship's safety, the owners would have said something like this " Of course we do not wish you to accept cargo at the last moment which cannot be loaded safely, but we do not profess to understand these details, and if you can't see your way to packing cargo safely, there are plenty of men ready to snap up your billet who can." And so there are; I have sailed with many a third mate who carried a captain's certificate. Working about the hatchways were half a dozen deck hands. There was nothing of the picturesque romance of the sea about these grimy fellows in their half-Wellington boots, dirty blue jerseys, and dingy garments. Foul-mouthed, brutal, and given to drunken debauch, they yet handled that ship through four days of weather that swept away Brighton chain pier, tore down concrete sea walls, and sent a great German liner ashore on the Spanish coast, with a cool hardihood. that proved each man equal to a dozen Lascars. And never a storm rages in the North Atlantic but the same lesson is taught-that the mutinous, grumbling, British tar is a strong stick to lean on at the time when the cheap foreign deck-hand is doing all he knows to skulk duty. This is the universal testimony of every captain and officer I have spoken with.

We steamed out over the bar, and before nightfall had run against the great storm that swept over North-East Europe in the end of November and beginning of December. 1896 On the third day, instead of being on the skirts of the Bay, we found ourselves about 300 miles to the south-west of Kerry. It was hard to feed the sheep, which were in deck-pens, for as fast as food was put down. in their troughs the wind swept it away. The cook and steward lad come on board drunk, and for three days they together with the ship's dog (a fat pug, which was the sole survivor of a wreck on the Goodwin Sands), and the writer of this yarn, were awfully sick.

On the second morning the captain came to my cabin, and woke me up with the news that a big sea had smashed up the pens on the port side, and killed eight sheep. A moment's reflection told me that mine were on the starboard side, and telling him so, I curled up and went to sleep again. On the following morning he woke me up again with the news that during the night another sea had knocked the starboard pens to smithereens. I got up and went on deck. In one of the alley-ways two Irish-American cattle-men were weeping at the prospect of going down ; the deck was littered with the wreckage of pens ; about 50 sheep, some dead, some with all four legs broken, were mixed up with this wreckage and the whole mass raced across deck from scuppers to scuppers with every roll of the tossing vessel. Some had met a quicker death by being washed overboard. Every now and then a wave broke over the deck, and the sheep and pen-wreckage would be half-floating for some seconds, till the water had swirled out again through the swinging, clanging scuppers. Of my thirty, only one remained alive. It was impossible to do anything for them. A bull, trusting to his weight, lay on the hatchway in the middle of the deck, and, with the exception of one solitary ram, was the only animal that survived. All that day the badly-loaded vessel threatened to turn turtle, and it was said that this was avoided only by the mate's skilful use of the rudder. At meal times the dishes leapt over the fiddles fixed on the cabin table. I forgot to say that as a shipper I was in the captain's mess, and had one of the four after-cabins to myself. On the fifth day the storm abated. I gazed at my surviving ram, and concluded it was not worth going two thousand miles for the sake of one animal. But we were due to call nowhere before reaching, Monte Video, and had no papers to take us into any nearer port. However, the captain agreed to run into St. Vincent, of the Cape Verde Islands, under pretence of getting water, provided I would sign a paper, making myself liable to pay the harbour dues if the shipping company afterwards called on me to do so. The captain was a very decent fellow, and I gave him a cow-hide writing-case at parting. I arranged with one of the Irish-American cattlemen to look after my surviving ram the rest of the way to South America for a pound, and gave him an order for that amount, payable in case the ram was delivered there in good condition. three months afterwards he turned up in Liverpool with this order, almost illegible with many kinds of dirt, and got his money.

Owing to our lack of papers the captain thought we might not get pratique, and said, half jokingly, that if not, he would smuggle me ashore at night. However, we got pratique without any trouble, and soon were taking in water from some tank-like boats that came alongside A glance around the island showed me the point of the saying that they hang a man in St. Vincent if they catch him leaning against a tree. Apparently there was not a tree or a shrub about the place, it is a barren, sterile rock ; so when a pock-marked Portuguese, who was in charge of one of the tanks, wanted to buy my now useless fodder, I named a good price for about thirty bags, which were all that could be easily got at. He would not give my price till about ten minutes before the ship started, and even then wanted to dump the bags into his lighter before "shelling out' ; he had to work like a demon to get them off in time. I went ashore in the boat of a coaling clerk, of which there is quite a small colony; they live in chummteries and dress in white drill. The rest of the population is mostly West Coast niggers. with a sprinkling of Portuguese officials, and halt castes of various shades of blackness. I have never met with such a jolly and hospitable set of fellows as those coaling clerks. I don't think there was one among them who was not a good sort. I put up at the Franco-Italian Hotel, the only one there, a big rambling building, with a large open patio in the middle. I was the only guest staying there, and the fare was chiefly goat, red plantains, and thin wine ; but there was plenty of trade done in the bar. especially at night, when the place was crowded with Portuguese, half castes, and a sprinkling of ship's officers of various nationalities. Round the door outside were generally a few small children, whining for alms, and smoking cigarettes some of them carrying still smaller urchins, generally stark naked, astride on the side of their hips.

The first evening I went down to the bar for company. A couple of Portuguese were playing cards at one of the small tables. It was amusing to watch them. Throughout the game each card was raised high in the air, and banged down on the table with an excited exclamation. When they finished, one of them, from the Argentine, who had lost a finger in the last revolution, began to show his strength at the well-known game of resting your elbow on the table, opposite your opponent's, taking his hand palm to palm, and trying to press it down. He easily vanquished all his opponents. I could not understand his talk, but could see what the game was, so seating myself opposite him, held out my hand. He was one of the strongest men I ever met. I could not move him an inch, neither, for that matter could he me. We sat motionless for several minutes looking into each others faces, our locked arms shaking with the strain, then the little table under our elbows tilted over, so we reckoned it was a tie.

My original idea that there was not a tree on the island was wrong there is a solitary tree in the middle of the island, and I went a pilgrimage to see it on the following day with my friends the coaling clerks on donkeys, and a right merry time we had, though some of the fellows with thin drill trousers spent much of the time cursing their rough-paced steeds. In justice I ought to add that there are a few saplings struggling for existence amid the hot, dry dust of the main street.

Sometimes I used to drop in to the nigger dances. The chief dance was a kind of waltz, performed very rapidly, and, every few steps, one knee of each dancer was suddenly dipped almost to the ground, and this without interrupting the speed of the dance. The dense mob of wildly whirling and dipping figures made a lively, though grotesque picture.

St. Vincent lies only a few miles from Senegambia, and the boats from the Gold Coast touch there, often carrying invalided officials from that awful climate-shrunken wrecks of men, who know they are going to die, and are content. The fevers seem to take all the spirit out of their victims.

One of these wrecks, an English officer did good work before he went under. Probably the account has never been published before. He was the only white man in the district, and was very ill with fever, when word came that there was to be a huge sacrifice of slaves at some ceremony in the hinterland. The route there lay through a fever-haunted district, which. in his weakened condition, it meant almost certain death for him to traverse. He was too weak to walk, and most men would have just let things slide ; but this Englishman got himself borne on a litter by natives doing forced marches, and in three days reached his up-country destination. He was dying then, but by sheer pluck and bluff, for he had but few men with him, he stopped the sacrifice and reached the coast again, to be buried at sea near St. Vincent.

Hearing one day the captain of an English bound cattle boat was ashore. I looked him up, and, after a drink or two, he agreed to give me a cabin passage to Liverpool for £10. This boat was packed, both on deck and below, with hundreds of steer's. Of course the hatchways had to be kept open for ventilation, so if we met dirty weather we had to run before the wind, as with open hatchways we dared not take any seas. When, on such a boat, a beast dies below decks, it is an awful job to drag him out along the narrow alleyways to heave him overboard. I have heard that sometimes the carcase has to be cut up below, and thrown out piecemeal, though I did not see this done.

Most of the beasts were lame with foot-rot when we landed, through standing for a month in the wet muck of the pens that were only occasionally cleaned out.

At Christmas I landed in Liverpool. When at Cape Verde I had got three spears, with Obi charms attached, some eight or ten feet in length, which had come from the adjoining coast of Senegambia. The Liverpool streets, on the way to the station, were crowded, and with these spears, a gun, and a sailor's hat, I must have looked like the advance guard of a circus. Of course I got the insurance on the sheep, and also forty -fourpounds out of the sixty pounds freight was returned by the shipping company. It was like this :-I had returned in a boat belonging to a rival line, and had noticed the outside fittings of their pens were of 2¹/₂in. planking, while those of the Merida were only 1¹/₂in. A Liverpool merchant, who was taking apart share in the shipment, pointed out to the shipping company that, had their fittings been of the same strength, the pens might not have been wrecked and the sheep killed and as the market for pedigree rams in Buenos Ayres was reported good when the Merida reached that port, these slighter fittings might reasonably be held to have lost us a good profit, which we should have made had our rams been shipped by the line with the stronger pens, and that, therefore, he thought that they should return the freight-money. The shipping company thought otherwise. After a lot of correspondence they agreed to return two-thirds of it-viz., £44, with a view to receiving future shipments from us.

I continued taking shares in shipments until March, 1898 when I took out another lot myself. I fell sick in the tropics, of what I now believe to have been chicken-pox. There was fever and red eruptions like gigantic flea-bites, each capped with a kind of water-blister. I did not know what was the matter with me but the chief engineer used to stand afar off, and cheerfully diagnose my case as one of smallpox. The skipper's cheif concern seemed To be that we might be quarantined. The medicine chest was a very primitive affair, with a few simple drugs that looked stale enough to have made twenty passages, prominent among them blue mercury pills. The sailor is a great drug taker. He seems to like medicine next to whisky, and will come aft to be dosed on the slightest provocation, and the more drastic the remedy the more he seems to apreciate it. In the chest were two small books, stained and yellow with age ; you read these books to find out what was the matter with you, and to know what to take. About an inch of space was devoted to the symptoms of each disease, while another inch explained the treatment. Many of the symptoms were common to several ailments, and if you were lucky enough you struck the right one. I read through the book, chasing my disease, as it were, from page to page, and narrowed the quest down to some half-dozen, and eventually to two ailments. According to the book. I might have either erysipelas or chicken-pox there seemed no way of deciding which except by spinning a coin. I forget which treatment I adopted but it consisted chiefly in smearing myself every day with sulphur ointment. which the book said you were not to wash off for three days. I was glad when the three days were up. I felt very bad for some time, but when we sailed in the Rio Plata was nearly well again, though a number of little pits in the skin showed where the scars had been.

1) Lloyd's register entry for SS Merida
Call sign: KRBN Official Number: 94373
Master: Captain F.E. Tompsett, appointed to the vessel in 1892
Rigging: steel single screw steamer; 1 steel deck and web frames; well deck; 5 bulkheads, partly cemented & partly asphalted; cellular double bottom 248 feet long, 455 tons; Aft Peak Tank 35 tons
Tonnage; 2,280 tons gross, 1,722 under deck and 1,487 net
Dimensions: 290 feet long, 38.1 foot beam and holds 19.2 feet deep; Poop 29 feet long; Quarter Deck 88 feet; Bridge 118 feet; Forecastle 31 feet
Construction: 1888, E. Withy & Co. in West Hartlepool
Propulsion: triple expansion engine with 3 cylinders of 21 1/2, 35 1/2 & 58 1/2 inches diameter respectively; stroke 39 inches; operating at 160 p.s.i.; 212 nominal horsepower; 2 single ended boilers; 6 ribbed furnaces; grate surface 80 sq. ft.; heating surface 3,168 sq. ft.; engine built by Blair & Co. Ltd. in Stockton
Owners: Bucknall Nephews
Port of registry: London

Details supplied by Gilbert Provost

The MERIDA was a 3 masted, single funnelled ship and also rigged for sail. Placed on the Indian rice ports service with tramping out of season. Accommodation for officers and 12 passengers aft. Launched on 10th Feb.1888 for Henry Bucknall & Sons. 1890 transferred to Bucknall Nephews. March 1908 sold to Orbe y Gobeo, renamed VALLE. Owners restyled as Cia Cantabrica de Nav, Bilbao. 17th Jan.1917 torpedoed and sunk in Bay of Biscay by German submarine UC.18. [Merchant Fleets by Duncan Haws, vol.16, Ellerman Lines]

Return to Out-Trails Index

Adverts From the Book

Chapter One New Zealand 1894

Chapter Two Norway 1895

Chapter Four Argentina & Uruguay

Chapter Five Return To England

Chapter Six Back to New Zealand

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