for the first time that voyage an attempt was made to confine a portion of our farm-stock within a pen, instead of allowing them to roam at their own sweet will about the decks. for the skipper still cherished the idea that milk for tea and coffee might be obtained from the two goats that would be palatable, if only their habit of promiscuous grazing could be stopped. so the carpenter rigged up a tiny corral beneath the fo’c’s’le deck, and there, in penitential gloom, the goats were confined and fed, like all the rest of the animals, on last voyage’s biscuit and weevily pease. under these depressing conditions there was, of course, only one thing left for self-respecting goats to do—refuse to secrete any more milk. they promptly did so; so promptly, in fact, that on the second morning the utmost energies of[120] the steward only sufficed to squeeze out from the sardonic pair about half-a-dozen teaspoonfuls of doubtful-looking fluid. this sealed their fate, for we had far too much stock on board to waste any portion of our provender upon non-producers, and the fiat went forth—the drones must die. some suggestion was made by a member of the after guard as to the possibility of the crew not objecting to goat as a change of diet; but with all the skipper’s boldness, he did not venture to make the attempt. the goats were slain, their hides were saved for chafing gear, sheaths for knives, &c., but, with the exception of a portion that was boiled down with much disgust by the cook and given to the fowls, most of the flesh was flung overboard. then general complaints arose that while musk was a pleasant perfume taken in moderation, a little of it went a very long way, and that two musk deer might be relied upon to provide as much scent in one day as would suffice all hands for a year. i do not know how it was done, but two days after the demise of the goats the deer also vanished. still we could not be said to enjoy much room to move about on deck yet. we had 200 fowls and forty ducks roaming at large, and although many of the former idiotic birds tried their wings, with the result of finding the outside of the ship a brief and uncertain abiding-place, the state of the ship’s decks was still utterly abominable. a week of uninterrupted fine weather under the blazing sun of the bay of bengal had made every one but the skipper heartily sick of sea-farming, and consequently it was with many pleasurable anticipations[121] that we noted the first increase in the wind that necessitated a reduction of sail. it made the fellows quite gay to think of the clearance that would presently take place. the breeze freshened steadily all night, and in the morning it was blowing a moderate gale, with an ugly cross sea, which, with the belle’s well-known clumsiness, she was allowing to break aboard in all directions. by four bells there were many gaps in our company of fowls. such a state of affairs robbed them of the tiny modicum of gumption they had ever possessed, and every little breaking sea that lolloped inboard drove some of them, with strident outcry, to seek refuge overboard. presently came what we had been expecting all the morning—one huge mass of water extending from the break of the poop to the forecastle, which filled the decks rail high, fore and aft. proceedings were exceedingly animated for a time. the ducks took very kindly to the new arrangement at first, sailing joyously about, and tasting the bitter brine as if they rather liked the flavour. but they were vastly puzzled by the incomprehensible motions of the whole mass of water under them; it was a phenomenon transcending all their previous aquatic experiences. the fowls gave the whole thing up, floating languidly about like worn-out feather brooms upon the seething flood of water, and hardly retaining enough energy to struggle when the men, splashing about like a crack team in a water-polo match, snatched at them and conveyed them in heaps to a place of security under the forecastle. that day’s breeze got rid of quite two-thirds of our feathered[122] friends for us, what with the number that had flown or been washed overboard and those unfortunates who had died in wet heaps under the forecastle. the old man was much annoyed, and could by no means understand the unwonted cheerfulness of everybody else. but, economical to the last, he ordered the steward to slay as many of the survivors each day as would give every man one body apiece for dinner, in lieu of the usual rations of salt beef or pork. this royal command gave all hands great satisfaction, for it is a superstition on board ship that to feed upon chicken is the height of epicurean luxury. dinner-time, therefore, was awaited with considerable impatience; in fact, a good deal of sleep was lost by the watch below over the prospect of such an unusual luxury. i went to the galley as usual, my mouth watering like the rest, but when i saw the dirty little maltese cook harpooning the carcasses out of the coppers, my appetite began to fail me. he carefully counted into my kid one corpse to each man, and i silently bore them into the forecastle to the midst of the gaping crowd. ah me! how was their joy turned into sorrow, their sorrow into rage, by the rapidest of transitions. she was a hungry ship at the best of times, but when things had been at their worst they had never quite reached the present sad level. it is hardly possible to imagine what that feast looked like. an east indian jungle fowl is by no means a fleshy bird when at its best, but these poor wretches had been living upon what little flesh they wore when they came on board for about ten days, the scanty ration[123] of paddy and broken biscuit having been insufficient to keep them alive. and then they had been scalded wholesale, the feathers roughly wiped off them, and plunged into a copper of furiously bubbling seawater, where they had remained until the wooden-headed maltese judged it time to fish them out and send them to be eaten. they were just like ladies’ bustles covered with old parchment, and i have serious doubts whether more than half of them were drawn. i dare not attempt to reproduce the comments of my starving shipmates, unless i gave a row of dashes which would be suggestive but not enlightening. old nat the yankee, who was the doyen of the forecastle, was the first to recover sufficiently from the shock to formulate a definite plan of action. “in my ’pinion,” he said, “thishyer’s ’bout reached th’ bottom notch. i kin stan’ bein’ starved; in these yer limejuicers a feller’s got ter stan’ that, but i be ’tarnally dod-gasted ef i kin see bein’ starved ’n’ insulted at the same time by the notion ov bein’ bloated with lugsury. i’m goin’ ter take thishyer kid full o’ bramley-kites aft an’ ask th’ ole man ef he don’t think it’s ’bout time somethin’ wuz said an’ done by th’ croo ov this hooker.” there was no dissentient voice heard, and solemnly as a funeral procession, nat leading the way with the corpuses delicti, the whole watch tramped aft. i need not dwell upon the interview. sufficient that there was a good deal of animated conversation, and much jeering on the skipper’s part at the well-known cussedness of sailors, who, as everybody knows (or think they know), will growl if fed on all the delicacies of the season served[124] up on 18-carat plate. but we got no more poultry, thank heaven. and i do not think the officers regretted the fact that before we got clear of the bay the last of that sad crowd of feathered bipeds had ceased to worry any of us, but had wisely given up the attempt to struggle against such a combination of trying circumstances.
the herd of swine, however, throve apace. to the manner born, nothing came amiss to them, and i believe they even enjoyed the many quaint tricks played upon them by the monkeys, and the ceaseless antagonism of the dogs. but the father of the family was a sore trial to our energetic carpenter. chips had a sneaking regard for pigs, and knew more than anybody on board about them; but that big boar, he said, made him commit more sin with his tongue in one day than all the other trying details of his life put together. for denis’s tusks grew amazingly, and his chief amusement consisted in rooting about until he found a splinter in the decks underneath which he could insert a tusk. then he would lie down or crouch on his knees, and fidget away at that sliver of pine until he had succeeded in ripping a long streak up; and if left undisturbed for a few minutes, he would gouge quite a large hollow out of the deck. no ship’s decks that ever i saw were so full of patches as ours were, and despite all our watchfulness they were continually increasing. it became a regular part of the carpenter’s duties to capture denis periodically by lassoing him, lash him up to the pin-rail by his snout, and with a huge pair of pincers snap off those fast-growing tusks as[125] close down to the jaw as possible. in spite of this heroic treatment, denis always seemed to find enough of tusk left to rip up a sliver of deck if ever he could find a quiet corner; and the carpenter was often heard to declare that the cunning beast was a lineal descendant of a survivor of the demon-possessed herd of gadara.
in the case of the pigs, though, there were compensations. by the time we arrived off mauritius, a rumour went round that on friday a pig was to be killed, and great was the excitement. the steward swelled with importance as, armed with the cabin carving-knife, he strode forward and selected two of the first litter of piglets, the bombay born, for sacrifice. he had plenty of voluntary helpers from the watch below, who had no fears for the quality of this meat, and only trembled at the thought that perchance the old man might bear malice in the matter of the fowls and refuse to send any pork in our direction. great was the uproar as the chosen ones were seized by violent hands, their legs tied with spun-yarn, and their throats exposed to the stern purpose of the steward. unaware that the critical eye of chips was upon him, he made a huge gash across the victim’s throat, and then plunged the knife in diagonally until the whole length of the blade disappeared. “man alive,” said chips, “ye’re sewerly daft. thon’s nay wye to stick a pig. if ye haena shouldert the puir beastie a’am a hog mysel’.” “you mind your own business, carpenter,” replied the steward, with dignity; “i don’t want anybody to show me how to do my work.” “gie me nane o’[126] yer impidence, ye feckless loon,” shouted chips. “a’am tellin’ ye thon’s spilin’ guide meat for want o’ juist a wee bit o’ knowin’ how. hae! lat me show ye if ye’re thick heid’s able to tak’ onythin’ in ava.” and so speaking, he brushed the indignant steward aside, at the same time drawing his pocket-knife. the second pig was laid out, and chips, as delicately as if performing tracheotomy, slit his weasand. the black puddings were not forgotten, but i got such a distaste for that particular delicacy from learning how they were made (i hadn’t the slightest idea before) that i have never been able to touch one since.
chips now took upon himself the whole direction of affairs, and truly he was a past-master in the art and mystery of the pork-butcher. he knew just the temperature of the water, the happy medium between scalding the hair on and not scalding it off; knew, too, how to manipulate chitterlings and truss the carcass up till it looked just as if hanging in a first-class pork shop. but the steward was sore displeased. for it is a prime canon of sea etiquette not to interfere with another man’s work, and in the known incapacity of the cook, whose duty the pigkilling should ordinarily have been, the steward came next by prescriptive right. however, chips, having undertaken the job, was not the man to give it up until it was finished, and by universal consent he had a right to be proud of his handiwork. that sunday’s dinner was a landmark, a date to reckon from, although the smell from the galley at suppertime on saturday and breakfast-time on sunday made[127] us all quite faint and weak from desire, as well as fiercely resentful of the chaffy biscuit and filthy fragments of beef that were a miserable substitute for a meal with us.
but thenceforward the joy of good living was ours every sunday until we reached home. ten golden epochs, to be looked forward to with feverish longing over the six hungry days between each. and when off the western islands, chips tackled the wicked old madrassee sow single-handed, in the pride of his prowess allowing no one to help him although she was nearly as large as himself—ah! that was the culminating point. such a feast was never known to any of us before, for in spite of her age she was succulent and sapid, and, as the irish say, there was “lashins and lavins.” when we arrived in the east india docks, we still had, besides the two progenitors of our stock, eight fine young porkers, such a company as would have been considered a most liberal allowance on leaving home for any ship i have ever sailed in before or since. as for denis and jenny, i am afraid to estimate their giant proportions. they were not grossly fat, but enormously large—quite the largest pigs i have ever seen—and when they were lifted ashore by the hydraulic crane, and landed in the railway truck for conveyance to cellardyke, to taste the joys of country life on captain smith’s farm, there was a rush of spectators from all parts of the dock to gaze open-mouthed upon these splendid specimens of ship-bred swine. but few could be got to believe that, eleven months before, the pair of them had[128] been carried on board in one sack by an undersized man, and that their sole sustenance had been “hard-tack” and pea-soup.
