The Bonadventure: A Random Journal Of An Atlantic Holiday - free ebook by Edmund Blunden

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The Bonadventure: A Random Journal Of An Atlantic Holiday

Edmund Blunden

32 chapters

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32 chapters

THE BONADVENTURE

THE BONADVENTURE

THE WAGGONER and other poems by Edmund Blunden JOHN CLARE Poems chiefly from MSS. selected and edited with a biographical note by Edmund Blunden and Alan Porter THE SHEPHERD and other poems of Peace and War by Edmund Blunden awarded the Hawthornden Prize, 1922 Third Edition THE BONADVENTURE A Random Journal of an Atlantic Holiday By EDMUND BLUNDEN “There ships divide their wat’ry way, And flocks of scaly monsters play; There dwells the huge Leviathan, And foams and sports in spite of man.” Isaac

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I

I

On the eleventh of January my uncertainty was ended by the apparition (and in the village of Staizley it is no less) of a girl with a telegram. Her walk of three miles or thereabouts, from our nearest telegraph office, brought her to my gate at three in the afternoon; and with her customary awed speechlessness she gave me her message. It was from “Kingfisher,” the decoded entity of which was the great shipping owner to whom I owed my arrangements; and in response I hastily attempted to leave a s

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II

II

My instructions were to present myself next morning, without fail, at the shipping offices of Messrs. Wright, Style and Storey, in Cardiff. Mary’s double accordingly hurried me through my breakfast and led the way to Paddington. I urged myself to realize that I was going upon holiday; but, it cannot be withheld, the thought of this particular pleasure had a serious tinge. Paddington itself, to such an islander as I am, had some of the credit of this. To me, that large terminus is, as a jumping-o

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III

III

The shipping office itself left no clear impression upon me, the next morning, when I attended the business of signing on; but the visit gave me my first view of the crew of the Bonadventure , which was welcome. Many of them were coloured men, as ever, dressed in eye-catching smartness. I reflected on the extent to which the market of boots of two colours must depend on these firemen. Among the others, a Cornishman of odd automatic gait, whose small head balanced a squarish black hat, moved abou

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IV

IV

My theory of repentance during the first few days at sea was to be fact. At the start, I seemed to myself to be perfectly steady. The breeze blew cold; I thought it even pleasant; and without over-exercise, I took my last views of English coasts, and watched ships ahead of us blackly smudging a vaporous sky. I attended dinner, and began to swell with vanity. By this time the ship was rolling (after all yesterday’s kind assurances). There was no mistake about it: and my vanity and observation wer

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V

V

My prospect brightened with the weather. “Things are looking bad,” observed the chief engineer with an anxious glance at me. “Why?” I said more anxiously. “There’s three teaspoons missing,” he answered, satisfied at having played his joke. The morning, though the wind blew hard against us, was sunny and cheerful; the light blue sky flying here and there the streamer of a shining cloud, the moon going down ahead of us, the drove of gulls still pleasing themselves in glistening whims of flight amo

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VI

VI

A swell running in its long undulations accompanied us until we had passed Madeira, beyond its horizons. Mugs of tea slid suddenly and swiftly across the saloon table; complaints were made at every meal, and the mate hinted, with dreadful implications for my benefit, that a special memorandum would be presented to Father Neptune, expected on board shortly. Other hints of the passenger’s future trials were made. We were bound for the Plate, but we might be sent thence to Australia. That addition,

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VII

VII

The Bonadventure entered the tropics, calm, hot, blue expanse. I do not know why, but our passing into that zone was for me contemporary with an access of wild and vivid dreams. These were odd enough to cause me to record what remained of them in the morning, and as they still seem prominent in my recollections of my sea-going, I make a note of some of them. Now, it was no other than the great Lord Byron, pursuing me with a knife, applauded by two ladies. The basis of actuality, at least, was th

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VIII

VIII

The flying-fishes could have dispensed with the Bonadventure . During the night, sixteen or so had come aboard, to be seized by the apprentices for breakfast; I saw with surprise how one had been driven and wedged between the steam-pipes. In looks, when they were out of their element, despite their large mild eyes, their long “wings” closed into a sort of spur, being light spines webbed with a filmy skin, despite too the purple-blue glowing from the dark back, they did not seem remarkable. But u

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IX

IX

Mary, what news?– The lands, as I suppose, Are drenched with sleet or drifted up with snows, The east wind strips the slates and starves the blood, Or thaws and rains make life a sea of mud. You close each door, draw armchairs nigh the fire, But draughts sneak in and make you draw ’em nigher– No matter: still they come: play parlour gales And whisk about their hyperboreal tails; Bed’s the one hope, and scarcely tried before Next morning’s postman thunders at the door. Meanwhile

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X

X

The South-East Trade was blowing fresh next day, if a damp clammy rush of hot air deserves the term. The threatened heavy rains of the Doldrums had not come; the heavy heat subdued talk at table. Cloud and sultry steamy haze had hung about us during the morning; at two or thereabouts the first land seen by the Bonadventure since her first day’s stubborn entry into the English Channel came into view. My view was at first none at all; but encouraged by Bicker and with his glasses I could make out

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XI

XI

A note of a train of thought forced upon me hereabouts may find a place here, as it was set down. ( Feb. 4. ) It was nothing more nor less than the appearance at dinner to-day of a bully stew and a sort of ration lime juice, which drove my thoughts, always willing to be driven in that direction, towards a nervous period of 1916, my initiation into trench warfare. The meal was something of a facsimile; and soon after it, by a coincidence, I was sitting under the scissors of a volunteer barber muc

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XII

XII

Following a roaster of day, with a slack wind astern covering the deck forward with showers of cinders like shot, I admired the moonlight and the sweet night air before I turned in to sleep soundly. I woke thinking I heard the usual swabbing of decks beginning, but this was incorrect. It was quite dark, and I began to think with gratitude of a second innings of sleep; but when I looked at my watch it was after seven. The din of water outside, mingled with the rushing of a mighty wind, persuaded

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XIII

XIII

We came into grey waters, and also into a grey sort of day, overcast and moody. In the evening the wind was strong from the land, and laden with that earthy scent which had so surprised me when I first encountered it; a languid, rich and beguiling perfume, that is tomb-like and unnerving in its suggestion, rising over us. It made out for me the spirit of Tom Hood’s last song, if it was his last song; the one beginning “Farewell, life, my senses swim”; its first verse ending “I smell the Mould ab

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XIV

XIV

A most placid morning. The sky ahead was silvered with the smoke of unseen Buenos Aires, the water so gleaming that the flat coast lined with trees, to starboard, appeared to be midway suspended between one mother-of-pearl heaven and another. The new pilot arrived in this early tranquillity, and the ship resumed her way up the channel marked out by buoys of several shapes. The sun increased in power all too fast. I stood on the bridge to hear the pilot and the mates giving their directions: we c

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XV

XV

Could this be Saint Valentine’s Day? Here in a dreary looking dock with a surplus of sun but a seeming lack of oxygen, and only a sort of amphibious race as company? Newspapers were at any rate valentine enough. They were read with real care, football results being perhaps the consolation most sought. Hosea showed me the way into the town. We turned out over the docks, out at last from a kingdom of coal-dust, over a swing bridge; took a tram, and were soon at the shipping agents’ offices. He spe

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XVI

XVI

There was a feeling (based on observation) aboard the Bonadventure that the discharge of the ship was not being carried out with all possible speed, owing to the prevailing mysterious influences of the offices in the town. Delays were many. This augury of a long sojourn in our present berth depressed many of us: I had already observed, or judged, that whatever the earlier mariners may have thought of seafaring, the modern sailor’s idea in sailing is to get back home as early as possible. We soon

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XVII

XVII

I borrowed a Shakespeare from the second chaplain at the Mission to escape from what seemed the dullness of our stay in South Basin, Buenos Aires. Mead had taken over my own copy of the Tragedies, and by this time had most of Hamlet and Macbeth by heart, so that our conversation frequently ran by tags. Of Bicker we saw little. Highly favoured, he would depart on most afternoons to the English suburb, where he had friends; and it was impossible not to regard him, as he regarded himself, as a man

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XVIII

XVIII

There were differences of opinion about the precise distance between Buenos Aires and Bahia Blanca, in which it seemed the authority of the steward was not accepted. Travelling light, however, the Bonadventure seemed little concerned about fifty miles either way. A current assisted in this turn of speed. It was enjoyable to be out of sight of land once more, in a morning coolness, with seagulls piping in our wake; although they were yellowish waters that were rolling by. The second pilot went do

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XIX

XIX

I slept heavily, and when I got up, the Bonadventure had moved into the channel towards Ingeniero White, and was lying at anchor outside that place. The scenery about us was of pleasing ugliness, worthy of George Crabbe’s poetical painting. To seaward there lay long stretches of mud, or banks of a sort of grass–long layers of brown and green ending at the frontier of a blue-grey rainy sky; and the land was low, featureless (save for a mountain height in the hazy interior) and dark. Close to our

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XX

XX

We did not get away so quickly as had been thought, and as every one seemed to wish. Heavy skies came on, giving the slack waters a leaden look. The air, though it was not hot, was close; and the fine dust from the grain which carpeted all the decks began to sit heavy on the lungs. Among the business outstanding remained that of stowing 7,500 bags in the bunker hatch–slower work, clearly, than the loading in bulk which had until now been the method with the Bonadventure . Bicker and Mead, as the

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XXI

XXI

The breakfast steaks were leathery past anticipations. The flies in the cabin were thousands strong. But the Bonadventure was homeward bound, and a general spirit of liveliness prevailed. Conversation was running much upon the value of the mark, for it was to Hamburg that we were believed to be going. Base hopes were expressed that the rate of exchange might be a thousand to the pound. No one imagined that this would some day be surpassed by eleven thousand. The Argentine had been expensive; the

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XXII

XXII

I have mentioned a scarcely concealed feeling in the saloon against the omniscience of the wireless operator. That was not all the opposition to which this youth of the glazed locks was subject. He was understood, while the ship was at sea, to receive news issued daily, and frequently when a subject was being discussed by the ship’s officers he sat there in possession of the facts but with serene indifference to the general interest. In this, he was carrying out the regulations, I imagine; but h

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XXIII

XXIII

A literary epoch began. Bicker, our authentic poet, and not an opportunist like Mead, had been proposing a magazine for some little time past. On a Saturday afternoon, he decided to produce the first number for the Sunday following. The circulation was to be six: there being no aids aboard such as the clay or hectograph, each copy had to be written by hand throughout. Into this labour I, with the editor’s satirical comments upon my profession, was at once pressed. Material in prose and verse was

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XXIV

XXIV

It blew from the north-east strong against us always, and we were travelling more slowly. The sun returned, however, among those ethereal white clouds which to perfection fulfil the poet’s word “Pavilions”; we ran on into a dark sea ridged and rilled with glintering silver, yet seemed never to reach it, remaining in a bright blue race of waters scattered, port and starboard, with white wreaths, waters leaping from the heavy flanks of the ship in a seethe of gossamer atoms and glass-green cascade

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XXV

XXV

Whilst thou by art the silly Fish dost kill, Perchance the Devils Hook sticks in thy Gill. Flavel’s New Compass for Sea-men, 1674. I must have made a good many references here and there to the steward, old Mouldytop, and it occurs to me that he deserves a paragraph to himself. Of this ship, whom her most faithful lovers called a dirty ship, with her short funnel pouring a greasy smoke over her graceless body when even coal-dust rested–of this grimy tramp, playing a sufficient part in t

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XXVI

XXVI

We crossed the line at six in the morning, and in drizzling rain. There was not much comment, except upon the rain; the good thing about the damp cloudy weather was that we were spared the more furious heat, though the atmosphere had been oily and sultry. With the steamy clouds swarming about us I could picture a past life hereabouts which might justly have aroused man’s wrath; the sailing days, when to take advantage of whatever brief breeze might visit the sleepy doldrums, the sailors had to b

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XXVII

XXVII

Glittering bright, northern weather outside. “Channel weather,” as it was described at breakfast. Whatever it might be, I was Jonah; fine, Jonah bringing a head wind; wet, Jonah bringing the wet; the ship rolling, it was Jonah’s additional weight on the port side that was doing it; and so on. The suggestion arose that the villain should be offered to the first whale sighted; but “We should have more respect for the whale,” said Phillips. Nor could I be sure that I was not blamed for all finger m

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XXVIII

XXVIII

By some mystical means, the mates had charmed away from our Las Palmas visitors at small cost or none an unusual supply of cigars and cigarettes. These brightened up the melancholy purser, who was now approaching the end of his employment. There were still, however, many things to amuse his leisure. How often the table talk had come to the subject of hell and its occupants! The latter seemed to be–after the landlubbers–shipowners, ship’s chandlers, ship’s tailors, and Customs men. Curious pictur

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XXIX

XXIX

On Easter Day the sun–it was an old proverb–will dance; and this time he was in the mood. We lay in a basin like other tramps; beyond, there clustered red roofs with blessed ungainly angles, a pleasing sight after those southern flat ones of grey. Farther off, the church spire climbed above the trees, and though many people in their Sunday dress were walking that way, more were taking their rounds beside these docks. It was as certainly good to be here as that spring was here. The chirrup of spa

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XXX

XXX

With little to do, I fought a sort of pillow fight with Meacock, our weapons being sacks well stuffed; he won, of course, but it was a popular bout. Then there were acrobatic performances on the stays of the funnel. The need I had for training appeared on our last night in Emden Port, when my sleep was nipped in the bud by the entry of Bicker and Mead. Both had the clear spirits raised, in two senses; both thickened voices already thick enough. They were disguised (Mead’s fancy, I warrant) as me

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XXXI

XXXI

Short seas running and a squally wind abeam made the light ship jerk and roll. The early sun was hidden in the dull purple of a racing sleet-cloud, which passed over the Bonadventure and swept on to lash the dunes of Holland lying dim blue along the yellow horizon. The engines beat out a cheerful tattoo and sent the ship, wobbling as she went, at eleven knots through the green water. The wind grew westerly but not sisterly; the melancholy began to expatiate on the short text, “The Longships,” bu

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