6: The Mariner
“His mother would have been horrified had she known
. . . the state of things in his delightful sleeping quarters.”
. . . arranged for him to travel with a local small boat owner. During this journey Edward may have learned the Spirit’s own tale of adventure for on a voyage in 1874 she had become becalmed off the southern end of Macquarie Island, a sub Antarctic island located in the Southern Ocean, approximately half way between Australia and Antarctica.
The captain, a member of the Royal Geographical Society, took the opportunity to explore the island by sending the first mate and a small party of men ashore at Caroline Cove.
The party climbed to the top of the plateau and reported finding a skeleton in a hut made from ship’s wreckage near a makeshift flagpole on top of the plateau. The ship was never identified. Such tales, of course, only added to Edward’s sense of adventure!
Eventually he arrived at Glasson dock and, with his kitbag slung casually over his shoulder, and looking, so he imagined, the very image of an old sea hand, he found his way to the Spirit, pausing briefly to admire her before stepping on board.
The moment his foot hit the deck he was straightaway brought up short and put in his place by one of the crew who had been secretly quizzing him on the quayside without him noticing. Looking him up and down somewhat disrespectfully, then spitting over the side, he would have roughly demanded to know what a whipper-snapper like Edward wanted.
That aside, Edward reported to and was taken under the wing and protection of the bosun who, apart from the captain and mate, was the most experienced member of the crew.
Welsh born Captain Evan Hughes came from Borth in Cardigan-shire, a village which produced many fine sea captains including his own father, while his wife, Mary Jane, came from a family of Welsh sea captains. One of her sisters also married a ship’s captain, Evan Jenkins who commanded the William Price ships the Rose Hill, the Holt Hill and the Bidston Hill.
Captain Hughes had become a captain shortly before taking command of the Hannah 1874-77. In 1877 he became captain of another Price ship, the Hugh Ewing, and had just been given command of the Spirit of the South, so he and Edward were new to the ship.
The crew of fourteen were all English or Welsh, which was fortunate because it meant Edward would have no problems understanding them. They consisted of the mate, carpenter, steward and six able bodied seamen (ABs) one of whom was the boatswain, or bosun, and three ordinary seamen (OS). Their ages varied between seventeen and sixty, half being under twenty-one and the fifteen year old apprentice - Edward!
He was lucky for the bosun was a fair and likeable man. As foreman of the crew he planned the day’s work and assigned tasks, and inspected and maintained all areas of the vessel including cleaning, painting, and maintaining the vessel’s hull, superstructure, deck equipment and stowage of cargo, and orders were passed by the officers to him which he passed on to the crew.
This was good basic training for a mariner with ambitions of becoming a ship’s master and Edward soon learnt the position was the first step up the merchant navy hierarchy and the first promotion to aim for.
Accommodation on the lower decks was austere and cramped but he was lucky because the apprentice had his own accommodation. It was no more than a tiny box-like cabin in what was called the half-deck just behind the mainmast which supposedly had room for two apprentices.
Entered through a small hatch opening on the deck, steep iron steps led down to a space six foot square with two narrow shelves on a bulkhead which served as bunks - one above the other with boards along the outer edges to prevent the sleeper falling out in rough weather.
He soon became familiar with the smell, damp and dirt but fortunately, since only one apprentice would be serving on board, his ‘cabin’, if it could be called such, gave him a little more space.
The cabin in the waist of the vessel was dark for it had no porthole, heating or lighting apart from smelly paraffin lamp swinging in gimbals. Water leaked in generously during heavy rain and when heavy seas were shipped the cabin deck was often awash. The cabin, ice cold in wintry climes became an oven in the tropics, when he would often go up to sleep on deck.
He soon discovered it had a goodly complement of cockroaches, bed-bugs and rats, which probably accounted for the smell, but it was all his, and gave him room on the spare bunk to store his gear and books and spread out wet clothes to dry when necessary, which was often. His mother would have been horrified had she known but he, no doubt, allowed her to remain in ignorance about the state of things in his delightful sleeping quarters.