With Mrs. Langtry’s departure, Eddy’s countenance relapsed into its prior state, which is best described as a look of pained torpor. At the time, I thought perhaps he favoured his father’s mistress over his mother and sisters, and was desolate to see her go, but that was only because I didn’t see his goodbyes to the others. Later I understood that he adored the feminine, that most of his childhood had been spent in the society of women (his father being absent much of the time for the same reason, but to a rather different end), and that the thought of three years aboard a man-of-war was more than he could bear.
The ship spent a month in the English Channel, undergoing trials. These showed her to be a good enough steamer but sluggish under sail, even for a warship. A forecastle gun was taken off to improve her trim. In the end she was pronounced generally satisfactory, like a dull student who graduates through sheer persistence.
But a new ship is never truly known until her mettle has been tested in a gale. Captain Scott did his best to push her into a thunderstorm or two, but we found nothing a sailor would call a hard blow. The weaknesses in Bacchantes character were to remain hidden for two years—until unmasked by a tempest in the Indian Ocean.
Whilst the trials proceeded, the Princes spent a lot of time ashore. Their father was on the South Coast officiating in various capacities, chief of which was to lay the foundation stone for the new Eddystone Light.
It was late September when we lost sight of Lands End. It would be my last glimpse of England for three years.
The booming voice of Reverend Dalton, both royal tutor and Acting Chaplain, was soon heard everywhere on board. “Look, dear boys!” he cried, trying to stir some romance of the sea in their pedestrian hearts. “Look, a shoal of porpoises coming to welcome us!”
We ran south to Gibraltar, then set course for the Canary Islands. As the youngest of the sub-lieutenants and the one most often detailed to the Princes’ routine supervision, I was responsible for delivering them to, and collecting them from, their forenoon lessons with the polymathic parson. This afforded me snatches of Dalton’s erudition—tail-ends of historical lectures, fragments of verse and prose by modern and classical authors.
Dalton was often moved by natures displays to literary allusion, a source of merriment among the ratings and the more philistine officers. On balmy shipboard evenings his voice could be heard like a distant gun, firing a volley of Milton or Keats, or the ornate sentiments of Charles Kingsley. George might say, “What a jolly pretty sunset!” And the tutor would declaim: “The evening skies are fit weeds for widowed Eos weeping over the dying sun.” Eddy seldom said a word.
Dalton was a tall, vigorous man, about forty when we sailed. He had light hair, starting to bleach a little, and what he proudly referred to as “sea-blue” eyes, considering himself a born mariner on their account. These beamed owlishly through large round spectacles. Perhaps to make up for the receding foliage on his crown, he affected long sidewhiskers that ran from temple to collar—not exactly a full muttonchop; more a chop with the tenderloin devoured.
Like me, he was a country parsons son, which fostered a certain camaraderie between us. Beneath his severity and pedantry he was a sincere, kindly man. A confirmed bachelor, so it seemed, he surprised everyone by marrying a midshipman’s sister not long after the voyage, a very Casaubon with a bride half his age. At about the same time the Palace rewarded him for his loyalty, his patience, and for the circumspect chronicle of the voyage he penned under the Princes’ names, by making him Canon of Windsor.
Dalton had taken a First in Theology at Cambridge and another degree in Classics. He was an untiring teacher who went to extraordinary lengths to instil in his royal charges some of the boundless curiosity, energy, and natural sympathy he himself possessed. Prince George soaked up what took his fancy, leaving what didn’t (languages, for one), but with Prince Eddy the tutor’s Herculean efforts were not merely fruitless but overwhelming, a vast bolus of knowledge the boy could never hope to swallow, let alone digest. This contributed, I believe, to the disastrous turn of events I shall relate in due course.
Despite his learning, Dalton was hardly as conventional as many judged him. Once established on board, he began to voice libertarian opinions, for the most part harmless but often outspoken and eccentric. In later years he became a sympathizer with the “New Thought,” a friend of Carpenter, Shaw, and other sandal-wearing, vegetarian exponents of Hindu mysticism, sexual reform, homespun clothing, and the utopia of William Morris. Such a fellow was rara avis on a warship. Certain senior members of the wardroom made it clear they found him a prig and crashing bore. They also resented his royal connections—feeling unable to speak freely when he was present—and it was even hinted he was the sort of man to listen at keyholes and pass intelligence to the Palace.
Dalton’s chief tormentor at the wardroom dinner table was Smyth, Lieutenant of Marines, who had a quick but entirely practical mind and pale brown, almost yellow, eyes—eyes as hard and discomfiting to his subordinates as those of a wolf. Smyth soon discovered that a sure way to rag poor Dalton was to cap his deviations into humour.
“It is often remarked,” Dalton essayed one night off Tenerife, “that people resemble their dogs. This is less remarkable than generally supposed, for what can it be but narcissism, the same unconscious self-regard that results in the resemblance one often sees between husband and wife? The long-chinned man chooses the long-chinned woman, and she him, without either being aware they are drawn by their own echo in another’s person. More remarkable, I’d argue, is the likeness between a man’s profession and his surname. From my personal acquaintance alone I can adduce a banker named Banks, a politician named Tory, a painter called Prime, a policeman named Grab, and two undertakers, one Body and the other Death!”
“Speak up, Padre!” Smyth struck in before a polite murmur could escape the diners. “Since childhood I’ve suffered from a disorder of the ears, requiring a regular sluicing out. The man who treats me is a Dr. Wax.”
This was met with brays of laughter, while Dalton’s observations had fallen on the same stony ground that greeted his weekly sermon.
Sad news was awaiting me at the telegraph office in Tenerife. My dear father had died. Consumptive for many years, he had not looked well when I’d sailed four months before, but I need hardly say that this was a shock. How cruel of the fates that he should go while I was far away, his last moments unknown to me! My next thought was for my mother. There being no possibility of compassionate leave, all I could do was send condolences and flowers by wire, and write a long letter which went through many drafts before I could bring myself to post it.
Not far beyond Tenerife lay doldrum weather, holding us limp-sailed on a bald ocean beneath a brassy sky. A laziness fell upon ship and sea. Even the flying-fish seemed torpid, skimming just inches from the surface like little glass-winged birds. Prince George caught some and dried the wings for bookmarks.
Bacchante flumped about for several days, her head all round the compass, while I drifted through my duties grief-stricken, in doldrums of my own. Then Captain Scott ordered fires lit, and we steamed to the West Indies at half speed, the stiff new engines sending pulses of vibration through Bacchantes frame. Every glass and metal object rattled, my outline in the shaving mirror was blurry as a ghost’s, and there was a leaden smell of baking paint from funnels and steampipes.
This was my first crossing of an ocean, an immensity that cannot be grasped in abstract. In quiet moments I stood often at the taffrail and gazed, as into a cold fire, at the churned glass flowing from the stern day upon day for weeks, reflecting there upon the great size of the world and the smallness, brevity, and loneliness of our places in it.
Landfall at Barbados on Boxing Day could hardly have brought a greater contrast to these musings. Swarms of shore-boats, filled with laughing washerwomen, descended on us in a loud flotilla. On still nights, the rhythmic gruntle and squeak of frogs carried across the water. And when we went ashore even Eddy wa
s intrigued by the hummingbirds—little flashes of crimson and emerald darting in the sun like fairy arrows.
When I was a youngster my uncle and namesake, the late Francis Morris, had tried to infect me with his mania for ornithology. Seeing these tiny and outlandish living things—more insects than birds, now hanging in mid-air like hoverflies, with a blur of wingbeats and a sound like a spinning top, now darting after one another in aerial combat—I fancied that I knew a little of the wonder Uncle Frank had known. It was a joyful counterpart to that melancholy awe I’d felt whilst gazing at our wake across the boundless sea in contemplation of my father’s death. First, a gloomy intimation of the world’s vast indifference, then a vision of its exquisite delicacy. At twenty, such moments mark one deeply; they are the moorings of our lives.
• • •
“Look well, boys. You’ll see the hummingbird only in the Americas—North, Central, and South.” Dalton’s stentorian tones carried down the wooded path behind the Governor’s residence, where bearded figs and Spanish moss festooned majestic trees. “Observe how the males fight. They are quite capable of impaling each other on those needle beaks, though they rarely succeed, for they are masters of evasion. Note the fearless aggression, the quick resort to violence, and you understand why the tiny hummingbird was, for the mighty Aztecs, an emblem of the God of War, who quaffed human blood the way these little creatures sip nectar from the hearts of flowers.”
“I say, sir! How did the God of War drink blood?” This had piqued the interest of Prince George. “I mean he wasn’t real, was he?”
“Don’t take everything I say so literally, P.G. Of course he wasn’t real. Diaz describes a terrifying statue on top of a great pyramid in the Aztec city. Blood was offered to it, wrung from the palpitating hearts of human victims.” Dalton opened and shut his palm in a squeezing motion to illustrate. “All this you would already know, boys, had you been reading your Prescott! Better get on with it—you have a test on Friday.”
“I say!” replied George. Eddy, as usual, said nothing.
In Dalton’s programme for the Princes’ development, he emphasized study at sea, and strenuous physical culture when ashore. The New Year—1880—found us on St. Vincent, where we scrambled up the Soufrière volcano. A few days later we climbed Diablotin on Dominica, an ascent of five thousand feet.
Dalton did not, at this stage in the voyage, share confidences with me, but I couldn’t help overhearing a remark he made to another officer. Eddy, he noted, had just turned sixteen, but it was George, younger by a year and a half, who was “Eddy’s mainstay and chief incentive to exertion.”
There were many Caribbean ports of call, excursions, dinners. Trinidad stands out in my mind for its primaeval woods, covering most of the island. As we steamed into the Gulf of Paria, the hills were so green that from a distance they seemed cloaked in moss from their summits to the water’s edge, but as we drew nearer this resolved into a feathery mass of great trees.
We saw tropical hardwoods I knew only from planks in timber yards—mahogany, conocaste, silk-cotton, locust—and smaller trees whose costly fruits appear sometimes in London markets. A black man led the way through the forest gloom, swinging a cutlass through saplings and lianas as if they were so much asparagus. He showed us the trees that yield indiarubber, and bade us drink from the famous bejuco de agua, or water vine.
“Know your plants, boys,” Dalton intoned, “when you help yourselves to a free drink in the woods. And abstain from the vice of alcohol, or you may end up like the indiarubber man!”
“The rubber man?” said George.
“Quite so. An inexperienced traveller hereabouts, having slaked his thirst from a water-holding vine of the forest, had a nip of rum when he got home to his plantation. Shortly afterwards he died in great agony. He had drunk, boys, from Mimusops balata, the juice of which coagulates and sets in alcohol. A postmortem revealed a solid rubbery cast of his intestines.”
“I don’t believe it!” said Eddy, his first utterance of the day. “It’s all made up, like Gulliver’s Travels.”
“And how are we finding our Swift, may one enquire?”
“I don’t believe a word of it, sir.”
“Ah, you’re in good company there, Eddy. You and the Bishop of Connemara.”
Summer found us in Bermuda, where Dalton gave a lecture proposing the island as the true setting of Shakespeare’s Tempest. Meanwhile Bacchante was installed at Moresby’s dockyards for a thorough scraping and a refit to set aright all the little troubles that show themselves on a maiden voyage.
Our course then lay south, via Brazil and the Argentine Republic to Tierra del Fuego. The plan was to enter the Pacific by the Straits of Magellan during the southern summer, when those waters are most tractable. Dalton had drawn up a great pedagogical tour that would take us to Chile and Peru, up the Andes to the Cyclopean ruins of Cuzco, then to the natural splendours of North America, principally the Yosemite Valley and Vancouver’s Island, which we hoped to reach by May. From there we should proceed to China and Japan via the Sandwich Islands—in those days ruled by King Kalakaua, a friend of the Prince of Wales.
We began our run to Brazil in a great calm, only a few flecks of cloud above a sea of hyacinth blue. Although we made at best two or three knots under full sail, we were in no haste and boilers were unlit. Jellyfish floated around us, and a great mass the size of a house kept rolling itself out of the water, sinking, then rising again. Some thought it a colossal jellyfish, but Dalton pronounced it a monstrous squid risen from unimaginable depths.
Mother Carey’s chickens wheeled in pairs, their breasts glancing yellow in the sunlight and their movements so graceful they seemed aware of us admiring their display The seamen tempted smaller birds to alight on deck for morsels of food, whereupon the ships cat, an old whiskerando named Gladstone, came prowling along the rail.
I painted these lazy scenes, and amused the Princes by dashing off charcoal caricatures with my right foot (a trick I mastered on youthful sketching trips with Ivry, being blessed with unusually long and supple toes). At night our wake was another Milky Way beneath the stars, and a white whale began to accompany us when we got up steam, turning and frolicking in our bow-wave as if bored with quiet seas. Such whales are rarely seen outside the polar oceans, and his presence struck me as a strange coincidence, for just recently I’d found in Bacchantes library a curious romance called, with disingenuous simplicity, The Whale. It was written by an American who seemed to have spent a long time in the foul business of high-seas blubber-boiling, the last vocational resort of crooks, drunkards, lunatics, and renegade Quakers (the tribe to which we Henderson’s belong). Yet the author was evidently a man of wide learning and rhetorical gifts.
The first time I read his tale of a madman’s vendetta against Leviathan, it seemed, for all its Shakespearean and Biblical magniloquence, to be about a man trying to kill a whale. On a second reading the following year (for it was one of few volumes aboard Bacchante neither endorsed nor purged by the censorious Dalton, hence doubly precious) I concluded that whatever the confounded Whale was about it was certainly not about a man trying to kill a whale. What have we here? thought I, like Trinculo: a man or a fish?
Calm weather stayed with us to the equator. Here in mid-ocean we were to rendezvous with other Navy ships to form a Training Squadron, whose joint purpose was to prepare for war and preserve peace by a brandishing of cannon and a showing of the flag.
As we approached the fabled Line, Captain Scott took advantage of low seas to practise with his Whitehead torpedoes. We had only six of these costly weapons aboard (£500 apiece!) and the intention was merely to run the torpedo at a target without detonating. But something caused one to go off, killing a large number of fish, which were taken on for the galley.
The Chief Engineer then entertained the Princes by laying out charges with electrical fuses attached to chunks of salt pork. Whenever one of these was seized by a shark, the charge was detonated and the monster’s
head blown off. Such is the wonderful vitality of these fish that their headless bodies swam on and writhed for many minutes, until devoured by their fellows. At length Captain Scott ordered the Chief to desist, ostensibly to save supplies, but I believe Dalton had protested at seeing the Lords creatures so wantonly slaughtered.
At last a dark smear lay across the rising sun—the smoke of the Inconstant, hull down, arriving at our rendezvous from the Cape Verde Islands. One by one the great ships showed themselves above the curving earth: the Inconstant (our flagship), the Tourmaline, the Carysfort, and the Cleopatra. By nightfall all members of the Squadron were assembled at their stations on the dozing sea.
“What know ye of Poseidon, son of Time, sunken Ruler of Atlantis? And of Amphitrite, Queen of the Oceans, she who girds the Earth?” asked Dalton of his charges, who made no response beyond a furrowing of smooth young brows. “Tomorrow we cross the Line.” He wagged a finger. “And you will meet them face to face!” Beyond that he would say nothing of what the morning held in store for all on board who had never strayed below the Equator until that day.
Neptune (as the bluejackets preferred to call Poseidon) and Amphitrite arrived about ten o’clock along the port side, dripping and bedizened in seaweed and shells and bits of stinking tentacle and fishes’ tails, risen from their watery palace far beneath the waves. The King of the Sea bore a marked resemblance to a thickset bluejacket by the name of Goodfellow. Beside him, with rouged cheeks, a bosom of scallop shells, and long tresses of hempen hair, sat his shy and fluttering Queen (a diminutive boatswain’s yeoman).
George wore an amused, insouciant expression. Eddy’s face lit up briefly at the feminine figure, then faded. His heavy lids fell, he pursed his mouth and began to tremble.
The two Princes were blindfolded and taken below with the rest of the initiates, more than two hundred all told, myself among them. King and Queen, tridents in hand, were enthroned on some crates over the engine-room hatchway, where Captain Scott rendered homage, handing over a tribute of jam, clay pipes, pickles, tinned sardines, and cake.
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