Shall dip their flag to a slaver’s rag – to show that his trade is fair!’

  [First published in The Athenænum, 6 December 1890, and then collected in Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses (1892).]

  * * *

  the ballad of the bolivar

  Seven men from all the world, back to Docks again,

  Rolling down the Ratcliffe Road drunk and raising Cain:

  Give the girls another drink ’fore we sign away –

  We that took the ‘Bolivar’ out across the Bay!

  We put out from Sunderland loaded down with rails;

  We put back to Sunderland ’cause our cargo shifted;

  We put out from Sunderland – met the winter gales –

  Seven days and seven nights to the Start we drifted.

  Racketing her rivets loose, smoke-stack white as snow,

  All the coals adrift adeck, half the rails below,

  Leaking like a lobster-pot, steering like a dray –

  Out we took the Bolivar, out across the Bay!

  One by one the Lights came up, winked and let us by;

  Mile by mile we waddled on, coal and fo’c’sle short;

  Met a blow that laid us down, heard a bulkhead fly;

  Left the Wolf behind us with a two-foot list to port.

  Trailing like a wounded duck, working out her soul;

  Clanging like a smithy-shop after every roll;

  Just a funnel and a mast lurching through the spray –

  So we threshed the Bolivar out across the Bay!

  ’Felt her hog and felt her sag, betted when she’d break;

  ’Wondered every time she raced if she’d stand the shock;

  ’Heard the seas like drunken men pounding at her strake;

  ’Hoped the Lord ’ud keep his thumb on the plummer-block.

  Banged against the iron decks, bilges choked with coal;

  Flayed and frozen foot and hand, sick of heart and soul;

  ’Last we prayed she’d buck herself into judgment Day –

  Hi! we cursed the Bolivar knocking round the Bay!

  O her nose flung up to sky, groaning to be still –

  Up and down and back we went, never time for breath;

  Then the money paid at Lloyd’s caught her by the heel,

  And the stars ran round and round dancin’ at our death.

  Aching for an hour’s sleep, dozing off between;

  ’Heard the rotten rivets draw when she took it green;

  ’Watched the compass chase its tail like a cat at play –

  That was on the Bolivar, south across the Bay.

  Once we saw between the squalls, lyin’ head to swell –

  Mad with work and weariness, wishin’ they was we –

  Some damned Liner’s lights go by like a long hotel;

  ’Cheered her from the Bolivar swampin’ in the sea.

  Then a grayback cleared us out, then the skipper laughed;

  ‘Boys, the wheel has gone to Hell – rig the winches aft!

  Yoke the kicking rudder-head – get her under way!’

  So we steered her, pulley-haul, out across the Bay!

  Just a pack o’ rotten plates puttied up with tar,

  In we came, an’ time enough, ’cross Bilbao Bar.

  Overloaded, undermanned, meant to founder, we

  Euchred God Almighty’s storm, bluffed the Eternal Sea!

  Seven men from all the world, back to town again,

  Rollin’ down the Ratcliffe Road drunk and raising Cain:

  Seven men from out of Hell. Ain’t the owners gay,

  ’Cause we took the ‘Bolivar’ safe across the Bay?

  [First published in the St James’s Gazette, 29 January 1892, and then collected in Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses (1892).]

  * * *

  Kipling found London restrictive, however, and he tried to escape to South Africa and Australia. He also hoped to visit his great literary hero Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa. En route to South Africa he met a naval officer, Commander E.H. Bayly, who, when they landed, introduced him to the officers’ mess in Simonstown and stimulated his interest in writing more specifically about the Royal Navy. As a result of his time in South Africa, Kipling wrote his first story with a naval theme, ‘Judson and the Empire’.

  something of myself

  My need was to get clean away and re-sort myself. Cruises were then unknown; but my dependence was Cook. For the great J.M. himself – the man with the iron mouth and domed brow – had been one of my Father’s guests at Lahore when he was trying to induce the Indian Government to let him take over the annual pilgrimage to Mecca as a business proposition. Had he succeeded some lives, and perhaps a war or two, might have been saved. His home offices took friendly interest in my plans and steamer connections.

  I sailed first to Cape Town in a gigantic three-thousand-ton liner called The Moor, not knowing I was in the hands of Fate. Aboard her, I met a Navy Captain going to a new Command at Simon’s Town. At Madeira he desired to lay in wine for his two-year commission. I assisted him through a variegated day and fluctuating evening, which laid the foundations of life-long friendship.

  Cape Town in ’91 was a sleepy, unkempt little place, where the stoeps of some of the older Dutch houses still jutted over the pavement. Occasional cows strolled up the main streets, which were full of coloured people of the sort that my ayah had pointed out to me were curly-haired (hubshees) who slept in such posture as made it easy for the devils to enter their bodies. But there were also many Malays who were Muslims of a sort and had their own Mosques, and whose flamboyantly-attired women sold flowers on the kerb, and took in washing. The dry, spiced smell of the land and the smack of the clean sunshine were health-restoring. My Navy Captain introduced me to the Naval society of Simon’s Town, where the south-easter blows five days a week, and the Admiral of the Cape Station lived in splendour, with at least a brace of live turtles harnessed to the end of a little wooden jetty, swimming about till due to be taken up for turtle soup. The Navy Club there and the tales of the junior officers delighted me beyond words. There I witnessed one of the most comprehensive ‘rags’ I had ever seen. It rose out of a polite suggestion to a newly-appointed Lieutenant-Commander that the fore-topmast of his tiny gunboat ‘wanted staying forward.’ It went on till all the furniture was completely rearranged all over the room. (How was I to guess that in a few years I should know Simon’s Town like the inside of my own pocket, and should give much of my life and love to the glorious land around it?)

  We parted, my Captain and I, after a farewell picnic, among white, blowing sand where natives were blasting and where, of a sudden, a wrathful baboon came down the rock-face and halted waistdeep in a bed of arum-lilies. ‘We’ll meet again,’ said my Captain, ‘and if ever you want a cruise, let me know.’

  A day or so before my departure for Australia, I lunched at an Adderley Street restaurant next to three men. One of them, I was told, was Cecil Rhodes, who had made the staple of our passengers’ talk on The Moor coming out. It never occurred to me to speak to him; and I have often wondered why. . . .

  Her name was The Doric. She was almost empty, and she spent twenty-four consecutive days and nights trying, all but successfully, to fill her boats at one roll and empty them down the saloon skylight the next. Sea and sky were equally grey and naked on that weary run to Melbourne. Then I found myself in a new land with new smells and among people who insisted a little too much that they also were new. But there are no such things as new people in this very old world.

  [First published as Something of Myself (1937).]

  * * *

  judson and the empire

  Gloriana! The Don may attack us

  Whenever his stomach be fain;

  He must reach us before he can rack us . . .

  And where are the galleons of Spain?

  – Dobson.

  One of the many beauties of a democracy is its almost superhuman skill in developing troubles with other countries and finding its honour abraded in the process. A true democracy has a large contempt for all other lands that are governed by Kings and Queens and Emperors; and knows little and thinks less of their internal affairs. All it regards is its own dignity, which is its King, Queen, and Knave. So, sooner or later, its international differences end in the common people, who have no dignity, shouting the common abuse of the street, which also has no dignity, across the seas in order to vindicate their new dignity. The consequences may or may not be war; but the chances do not favour peace.

  One advantage in living in a civilised land which is really governed lies in the fact that all the Kings and Queens and Emperors of the Continent are closely related by blood or marriage; are, in fact, one large family. A wise head among them knows that what appears to be a studied insult may be no more than some man’s indigestion or woman’s indisposition, to be treated as such, and explained by quiet talk. Again, a popular demonstration, headed by King and Court, may mean nothing more than that so-and-so’s people are out of hand for the minute. When a horse falls to kicking in a hunt-crowd at a gate, the rider does not dismount, but puts his open hand behind him, and the others draw aside. It is so with the rulers of men. In the old days they cured their own and their people’s bad temper with fire and slaughter; but now that the fire is so long of range and the slaughter so large, they do other things; and few among their people guess how much they owe of mere life and money to what the slang of the minute calls ‘puppets’ and ‘luxuries.’

  Once upon a time there was a little Power, the half-bankrupt wreck of a once great empire, that lost its temper with England, the whipping-boy of all the world, and behaved, as every one said, most scandalously. But it is not generally known that that Power fought a pitched battle with England and won a glorious victory. The trouble began with the people. Their own misfortunes had been many, and for private rage it is always refreshing to find a vent in public swearing. Their national vanity had been deeply injured, and they thought of their ancient glories and the days when their fleets had first rounded the Cape of Storms, and their own newspapers called upon Camoens and urged them to extravagances. It was the gross, smooth, sleek, lying England that was checking their career of colonial expansion. They assumed at once that their ruler was in league with England, so they cried with great heat that they would forthwith become a Republic and colonially expand themselves as a free people should. This made plain, the people threw stones at the English Consuls and spat at English ladies, and cut off drunken sailors of Our fleet in their ports and hammered them with oars, and made things very unpleasant for tourists at their customs, and threatened awful deaths to the consumptive invalids of Madeira, while the junior officers of the army drank fruit-extracts and entered into most blood-curdling conspiracies against their monarch; all with the object of being a Republic. Now the history of the South American Republics shows that it is not good that Southern Europeans should be also Republicans. They glide too quickly into military despotism; and the propping of men against walls and shooting them in detachments can be arranged much more economically and with less effect on the death-rate by a hide-bound monarchy. Still the performances of the Power as represented by its people were extremely inconvenient. It was the kicking horse in the crowd, and probably the rider explained that he could not check it. So the people enjoyed all the glory of war with none of the risks, and the tourists who were stoned in their travels returned stolidly to England and told the Times that the police arrangements of foreign towns were defective.

  This, then, was the state of affairs north the Line. South it was more strained, for there the Powers were at direct issue: England, unable to go back because of the pressure of adventurous children behind her, and the actions of far-away adventurers who would not come to heel, but offering to buy out her rival; and the other Power, lacking men or money, stiff in the conviction that three hundred years of slave-holding and intermingling with the nearest natives gave an inalienable right to hold slaves and issue half-castes to all eternity. They had built no roads. Their towns were rotting under their hands; they had no trade worth the freight of a crazy steamer; and their sovereignty ran almost one musket-shot inland when things were peaceful. For these very reasons they raged all the more, and the things that they said and wrote about the manners and customs of the English would have driven a younger nation to the guns with a long red bill for wounded honour.

  It was then that Fate sent down in a twin-screw shallow-draft gunboat, of some 270 tons displacement, designed for the defence of rivers, Lieutenant Harrison Edward Judson, to be known for the future as Bai-Jove-Judson. His type of craft looked exactly like a flat-iron with a match stuck up in the middle; it drew five feet of water or less; carried a four-inch gun forward, which was trained by the ship; and, on account of its persistent rolling, was, to live in, three degrees worse than a torpedo-boat. When Judson was appointed to take charge of the thing on her little trip of six or seven thousand miles southward, his first remark as he went to look her over in dock was, ‘Bai Jove, that topmast wants staying forward!’ The topmast was a stick about as thick as a clothesprop; but the flat-iron was Judson’s first command, and he would not have exchanged his position for second post on the Anson or the Howe. He navigated her, under convoy, tenderly and lovingly to the Cape (the story of the topmast came with him), and he was so absurdly in love with his wallowing wash-tub when he reported himself, that the Admiral of the station thought it would be a pity to kill a new man on her, and allowed Judson to continue in his unenvied rule.

  The Admiral visited her once in Simon’s Bay, and she was bad, even for a flat-iron gunboat, strictly designed for river and harbour defence. She sweated clammy drops of dew between decks in spite of a preparation of powdered cork that was sprinkled over her inside paint. She rolled in the long Cape swell like a buoy; her foc’s’le was a dog-kennel; Judson’s cabin was practically under the water-line; not one of her dead-lights could ever be opened; and her compasses, thanks to the influence of the four-inch gun, were a curiosity even among Admiralty compasses. But Bai-Jove-Judson was radiant and enthusiastic. He had even contrived to fill Mr. Davies, the second-class engine-room artificer, who was his chief engineer, with the glow of his passion. The Admiral, who remembered his own first command, when pride forbade him to slack off a single rope on a dewy night, and he had racked his rigging to pieces in consequence, looked at the flat-iron keenly. Her fenders were done all over with white sennit, which was truly, white; her big gun was varnished with a better composition than the Admiralty allowed; the spare sights were cased as carefully as the chronometers; the chocks for spare spars, two of them, were made of four-inch Burma teak carved with dragons’ heads (that was one result of Bai-Jove-Judson’s experiences with the naval brigade in the Burmese war), the bow-anchor was varnished instead of being painted, and there were charts other than the Admiralty scale supplied. The Admiral was well pleased, for he loved a ship’s husband – a man who had a little money of his own and was willing to spend it on his command. Judson looked at him hopefully. He was only a Junior Navigating Lieutenant under eight years’ standing. He might be kept in Simon’s Bay for six months, and his ship at sea was his delight. The dream of his heart was to enliven her dismal official gray with a line of gold-leaf and, perhaps, a little scroll-work at her blunt barge-like bows.

  ‘There’s nothing like a first command, is there?’ said the Admiral, reading his thoughts. ‘You seem to have rather queer compasses though. Better get them adjusted.’

  ‘It’s no use, sir,’ said Judson. ‘The gun would throw out the Pole itself. But – but I’ve got the hang of most of the weaknesses.’

  ‘Will you be good enough to lay that gun over thirty degrees, please?’ The gun was put over. Round and round and round went the needle merrily, and the Admiral whistled.

  ‘You must have kept close to your convoy?’

  ‘Saw her twice between here and Madeira, sir,’ said Judson with a flush, for he resented the slur on his steamship. ‘She’s – she’s a little out of hand now, but she will settle down after a while.’

  The Admiral went over the side, according to the rules of the Service, but the Staff-Captain must have told the other men of the squadron in Simon’s Bay, for they one and all made light of the flat-iron for many days. ‘What can you shake out of her, Judson?’ said the Lieutenant of the Mongoose, a real white-painted ram-bow gunboat with quick-firing guns, as he came into the upper verandah of the little Naval Club overlooking the dockyard one hot afternoon. It is in that Club, as the captains come and go, that you hear all the gossip of all the Seven Seas.

  ‘Ten point four,’ said Bai-Jove-Judson.

  ‘Ah! That was on her trial trip. She’s too much by the head now. I told you staying that topmast would throw her out.’

  ‘You leave my top-hamper alone,’ said Judson, for the joke was beginning to pall on him.

  ‘Oh, my soul! Listen to him. Juddy’s top-hamper. Keate, have you heard of the flat-iron’s top-hamper? You’re to leave it alone. Commodore Judson’s feelings are hurt.’

  Keate was the Torpedo Lieutenant of the big Vortigern, and he despised small things. ‘His top-hamper,’ said he slowly. ‘Oh, ah yes, of course. Juddy, there’s a shoal of mullet in the bay, and I think they’re foul of your screws. Better go down, or they’ll carry away something.’

  ‘I don’t let things carry away as a rule. You see I’ve no Torpedo Lieutenant aboard, thank God.’

  Keate within the past week had so managed to bungle the slinging-in of a small torpedo-boat on the Vortigern, that the boat had broken the crutches on which she rested, and was herself being repaired in the dockyard under the Club windows.