Tom Cringle's Log Read online

  OTHER NAUTICAL FICTION

  PUBLISHED BY MCBOOKS PRESS

  By Alexander Kent

  Midshipman Bolitho

  Stand into Danger

  In Gallant Company

  Sloop of War

  To Glory We Steer

  Command a King’s Ship

  By Captain Frederick Marryat

  Frank Mildmay OR The Naval Officer

  Mr Midshipman Easy

  Newton Forster OR The Merchant Service

  By W. Clark Russell

  Wreck of the Grosvenor

  By Rafael Sabatini

  Captain Blood

  Copyright © 1999 by McBooks Press

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without the written permission of the publisher. Requests for such permissions should be addressed to: McBooks Press, 120 West State Street, Ithaca, NY 14850.

  Book and cover design by Paperwork.

  Cover painting is The Prisoners of Cabrera by Francois Musin, 1820-1888, courtesy of Fine Art Photographic Library Ltd.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Scott, Michael, 1789-1835.

  Tom Cringle’s log / by Michael Scott.

  p. cm. — (Classics of nautical fiction series)

  ISBN 0-935526-51-X (pbk.)

  I. Title, II. Series.

  PR5299.S6T66 1998

  98-38971

  Tom Cringle’s Log was first published serially in Blackwood’s Magazine, beginning in 1829. This text is based on the 1869 edition published by William Blackwood and Sons in Edinburgh and London. A few corrections were made for consistency and clarity, but most of the original spelling and punctuation remain intact.

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  Printed in the United States of America

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  PREFACE

  PLUMBING the sea of literature that has washed over our libraries to bring back an authentic record of time, place, and manner of life is likely to teach us more than we set out to find. In the case of Tom Cringle’s Log, we approach the 19th century world of the West Indies through the eyes of Michael Scott, a British colonial and traveller.

  With that, we take in the encounters of native Brits, accustomed to a cool, often cloudy climate, with the astonishing weather, terrain, and vegetation of the tropics. We share in the ongoing struggle—by turns, challenging, vicious, tedious, even ludicrous—to establish an outpost of one society’s culture, mores and habits on the altogether alien soil which is home to another. And perhaps most significantly, we confront the complicated interactions of white Europeans with the Other—especially the black Other, but to a lesser degree, with Jews, Indians, and Spaniards.

  Scott, whose Log first appeared anonymously in Blackwood’s Magazine, was gifted with impressive powers of description. Through them, we find sweeping pictures of ocean-going ships and untouched island paradises, as well as minor details of period architecture, of table settings and—in great precision—of clothing. But true to his time, his training, and his station in life, when Scott turns his description on the blacks in his story, by and large, they suffer in any comparison with the dominant whites. Almost no level is too low for him to assume in making a black character appear inferior: “his blubber-lips,” “his hair, if hair it could be called,” his “tarnished” clothing, his “dingy paws.” To Scott, these characters are almost all buffoons. His delineations of their dialogue is right out of the vaudeville hall, and his assessments of motivation and character are stereotypical, and hence suspect, in the extreme. Even when he paints a person of color in complimentary terms, Scott’s praise is couched in an understanding between the author and an audience of his contemporaries of the subject’s fundamental inferiority.

  Yet blacks are not the only characters Scott tars with his vivid brush, though the black players in his story are portrayed with a disdain which is axiomatic. Similar prejudices are brought to bear on his depictions of women. Drawing upon the favored conventions of his time, Scott portrays his female characters as “delicate” and “infantile.” They weep; they are tender; they are weak; and “they don’t improve by age.” Scott describes the features of a beautiful woman in the terms of a statue or a fine painting, emphasizing material qualities and marginalizing the immaterial. Bound within sexist, racist and imperialist Christian frameworks, the Other of Scott’s log emerges as cliché and caricature rather than with any actual human characteristics.

  Tom Cringle’s Log has been hailed as “one of the most accurate pictures of West Indian life, both afloat and on shore, during the early part of the 19th century.” Certainly, if we have learned anything in the intervening two centuries, it is that accuracy is closely connected to the eye and mind of the beholder. But our access to real accuracy is in learning more—always more—about the way things were.

  S.K. LIST AND SARAH C. PATTEN

  PREFATORY NOTICE

  FROM THE 1869 EDITION

  THE FEW particulars which we know with regard to the Author of Tom Cringle’s Log may be compressed almost into a sentence. The name of the writer of that series of papers (which first appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine) was Michael Scott. He was born in Glasgow, on the 30th October 1789, and attended the High School and University there. In October 1806 he sailed for Jamaica, where he remained in the management of various estates till 1810, when he joined a mercantile house in Kingston, Jamaica. It was in the course of his employment in this establishment, and of the numerous visits which he had occasion to pay to the neighbouring islands and to the Spanish Main, that he acquired that familiarity with the character of West Indian society, with the wild and adventurous nature of a nautical life, and with the scenes and aspects of a tropical climate, which afterwards imparted so much of truth and vivacity to his sketches. Arriving in this country in 1817, he married in 1818; but again returned to Jamaica, and did not finally settle in Scotland till 1822. In 1829 he addressed to the late Mr Blackwood some fragments, under the pseudonym of Tom Cringle, in which—brief and slenderly connected as they were—that publisher at once discerned the traces of original talent, and of great powers of description. He urged him to proceed, and to weave his materials into a connected form, uniting them by some common link, which, without subjecting the writer to the strict rules of narrative composition, would keep up a personal and continuous interest in the movement of the story. The anticipations of Mr Blackwood as to the popularity of these remarkable sketches were completely fulfilled. Their truth of local painting, placing the reader at once amidst the wonders and the terrors of a torrid clime—their strong contrasts, and ever-shifting rapidity of narration—the broad and often extravagant flood of humour which was shed over all these particulars of the reckless life, of the sea and the plantations, instantly attracted public attention and favour. No series of papers which has appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine ever enjoyed more general or continued popularity: they were characterised by the Quarterly Review* as the most brilliant series of magazine papers of the time; and by Coleridge, in his Table Talk as “most excellent.” When reprinted in two volumes, an unusually large edition was almost immediately disposed of; on the Continent they have been generally read and admired; and in Germany more than once translated.

  During the publication of these sketches, Mr Scott preserved his incognito even towards his publisher. Mr Blackwood died without knowing, except by report from other sources, the real name of their author. Mr Scott himself died at Glasgow, on the 7th November 1835.

  * No. C., p. 377

  CHAPT
ER I.

  THE LAUNCHING OF THE LOG.

  “While rapidly the marksman’s shot prevailed,

  And aye as if for death some lonely trumpet wailed.”

  Gertrude of Wyoming.

  DAZZLED BY the glories of Trafalgar, I, Thomas Cringle, one fine morning in the merry month of May, in the year one thousand eight hundred and so and so, magnanimously determined in my own mind that the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland should no longer languish under the want of a successor to the immortal Nelson, and being then of the great perpendicular altitude of four feet four inches, and of the mature age of thirteen years, I thereupon betook myself to the praiseworthy task of tormenting, to the full extent of my small ability, every man and woman who had the misfortune of being in any way connected with me, until they had agreed to exert all their interest, direct or indirect, and concentrate the same in one focus upon the head and heart of Sir Barnaby Blueblazes, vice-admiral of the red squadron, a Lord of the Admiralty, and one of the old plain K.B.’s (for he flourished before the time when a gallant action or two tagged half of the letters of the alphabet to a man’s name, like the tail of a paper kite), in order that he might be graciously pleased to have me placed on the quarterdeck of one of his Majesty’s ships of war without delay.

  The stone I had set thus recklessly a-rolling had not been in motion above a fortnight, when it fell with unanticipated violence, and crushed the heart of my poor mother, while it terribly braised that of me, Thomas; for as I sat at breakfast with the dear old woman one fine Sunday morning, admiring my new blue jacket and snow-white trousers, and shining well-soaped face, and nicely brushed hair, in the pier glass over the chimney-piece, I therein saw the door behind me open, and Nicodemus, the waiting-man, enter, and deliver a letter to the old lady, with a formidable-looking seal.

  I perceived that she first ogled the superscription, and then the seal, very ominously, and twice made as if she would have broken the missive open, but her heart seemed as often to fail her. At length she laid it down—heaved a long deep sigh—took off her spectacles, which appeared dim, dim—wiped them, put them on again, and, making a sudden effort, tore open the letter, read it hastily over, but not so rapidly as to prevent her hot tears falling with a small tiny tap tap on the crackling paper.

  Presently she pinched my arm, pushed the blistered manuscript under my nose, and, utterly unable to speak to me, rose, covered her face with her hands, and left the room weeping bitterly. I could hear her praying in a low, solemn, yet sobbing and almost inarticulate voice, as she crossed the passage to her own dressing room. “Even as thou wilt, O Lord—not mine, but thy holy will be done; yet, oh! it is a bitter bitter thing for a widowed mother to part with her only boy.”

  Now came my turn, as I read the following epistle three times over, with a most fierce countenance, before thoroughly understanding whether I was dreaming or awake—in truth, poor little fellow as I was, I was fairly stunned.

  “Admiralty, such a date.

  DEAR MADAM,—It gives me very great pleasure to say that your son is appointed to the Breeze frigate, now fitting at Portsmouth for foreign service. Captain Wigemwell is a most excellent officer, and a good man, and the schoolmaster on board is an exceedingly decent person, I am informed; so I congratulate you on his good fortune in beginning his career, in which I wish him all success, under such favourable auspices. As the boy is, I presume, all ready, you had better send him down on Thursday next, at latest, as the frigate will go to sea, wind and weather permitting, positively on Sunday morning.

  “I remain, my dear Madam,

  “Yours very faithfully,

  “BARNABYBLUEBLAZES, K.B.”

  However much I had been moved by my mother’s grief, my false pride came to my assistance, and my first impulse was to chant a verse of some old tune, in a most doleful manner. “All right—all right,” I then exclaimed, as I thrust half a doubled-up muffin into my gob; but it was all chew chew, and no swallow—not a morsel could I force down my parched throat, which tightened like to throttle me.

  Old Nicodemus had by this time again entered the room, unseen and unheard, and startled me confoundedly, as he screwed his words in his sharp cracked voice into my larboard ear. “Jane tells me your mamma is in a sad taking, Master Tom. You ben’t going to leave us, all on a heap like, be you? Surely you’ll stay until your sister comes from your uncle Job’s? You know there are only two on ye—You won’t leave the old lady all alone, Master Thomas, will ye?” The worthy old fellow’s voice quavered here, and the tears hopped over his old cheeks through the flour and tallow like peas, as he slowly drew a line down the forehead of his well-powdered pate with his forefinger.

  “No—no—why, yes,” exclaimed I, fairly overcome; “that is—oh Nic, Nic,—you old fool, I wish I could cry, man—I wish I could cry!” and straightway I hied me to my chamber, and wept until I thought my very heart would have burst.

  In my innocence and ignorance, child as I was, I had looked forward to several months’ preparation; to buying and fitting of uniforms, and dirks, and cocked hat, and swaggering therein, to my own great glory, and the envy of all my young relations; and especially I desired to parade my fire-new honours before the large dark eyes of my darling little creole cousin, Mary Palma; whereas I was now to be bundled on board at a few days’ warning, out of a ready-made furnishing shop, with lots of ill-made, glossy, hard-mangled duck trousers, the creases as sharp as the backs of knives, and—”Oh, it never rains but it pours,” exclaimed I; “surely all this promptitude is a little de plus in Sir Barnaby.”

  However, away I was trundled at the time appointed, with an aching heart, to Portsmouth, after having endured the misery of a first parting from a fond mother and a host of kind friends; but, miserable as I was, according to my preconceived determination, I began my journal the very day I arrived, that nothing connected with so great a man should be lost, and most weighty did the matters therein related appear to me at the time; but, seen through the long vista of, I won’t say how many years, I really must confess that the Log, for long long after I first went to sea in the Breeze, and subsequently when removed to the old Kraaken line-of-battle ship, both of which were constantly part of blockading squadrons, could be compared to nothing more fitly than a dish of trifle, anciently called syllabub, with a stray plum here and there scattered at the bottom. But when, after several weary years, I got away in the dear old Torch, on a separate cruise, incidents came fast enough with a vengeance—stern, unyielding, iron events, as I found to my heavy cost, which spoke out trumpet-tongued and fiercely for themselves, and whose tremendous simplicity required no adventitious aid in the narration to thrill through the hearts of others. So, to avoid yarn-spinning, I shall evaporate my early Logs, and blow off as much of the froth as I can, in order to present the residuum free of flummery to the reader—just to give him a taste here and there, as it were, of the sort of animal I was at that time. Thus:

  Thomas Cringle, his Log-book.—

  Arrived in Portsmouth, by the Defiance, at ten a.m., on such a day. Waited on the Commissioner, to whom I had letters, and said I was appointed to the Breeze. Same day, went on board and took up my berth; stifling hot; mouldy biscuit; and so on. My mother’s list makes it fifteen shirts, whereas I only have twelve.

  Admiral made the signal to weigh, wind at S.W., fresh and squally. Stockings should be one dozen worsted, three of cotton, two of silk; find only half a dozen worsted, two of cotton, and one of silk. Fired a gun and weighed.

  Sailed for the fleet off Vigo, deucedly sea-sick; was told that fat pork was the best specific, if bolted half raw; did not find it much of a tonic;—passed a terrible night, and for four hours of it obliged to keep watch, more dead than alive. The very second evening we were at sea, it came on to blow, and the night fell very dark, with heavy rain. Towards eight bells in the middle watch, I was standing on a gun, well forward on the starboard side, listening to the groaning of the maintack, as the swelling sail, the foot of which stretch
ed transversely right athwart the ship’s deck in a black arch, struggled to tear it up, like some dark impalpable spirit of the air striving to burst the chains that held him and escape high up into the murky clouds, or a giant labouring to uproot an oak, and wondering in my innocence how hempen cord could brook such strain—when just as the long-waited-for strokes of the bell sounded gladly in mine ear, and the shrill clear note of the whistle of the boatswain’s mate had been followed by his gruff voice, grumbling hoarsely through the gale, “Larboard watch, ahoy!” the look-out at the weather gangway, who had been relieved, and beside whom I had been standing a moment before, stepped past me, and scrambled up on the booms. “Hillo, Howard, where away, my man?” said I.

  “Only to fetch my—”

  Crack!—the maintack parted, and up flew the sail with a thundering flap, loud as the report of a cannon-shot, through which, however, I could distinctly hear a heavy smash, as the large and ponderous blocks at the clew of the sail struck the doomed sailor under the ear, and whirled him off the booms into the sea, where he perished, as heaving-to was impossible, and useless if practicable, as his head must have been smashed to atoms.

  This is one of the stray plums of the trifle; what follows is a whisk of the froth, written when we looked into Corunna, about a week after the embarkation of the army:—

  MONODY ON THE DEATH OF SIR JOHN MOORE.

  Farewell, thou pillar of the war,

  Warm-hearted soldier, Moore, farewell,

  In honor’s firmament a star,

  As bright as e’er in glory fell.

  Deceived by weak or wicked men,

  How gallantly thou stoodst at bay,

  Like lion hunted to his den,

  Let France tell, on that bloody day.

  No boastful splendour round thy bier,

  No blazoned trophies o’er thy grave;