The Amateur Emigrant Chapter 6 - The Stowaways

Robert Louis Stevenson (0:00)

Chapter 6 of The Amateur Emigrant This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Amateur Emigrant by Robert Louis Stevenson Chapter 6 The Stowaways On the Sunday, among a party of men who were talking in our companion steerage number 2 and 3, we remarked a new figure. He wore tweed clothes, well enough made, if not very fresh, and a plain smoking cap. His face was pale, with pale eyes and spiritually enough designed. But though not yet 30, a sort of backyardly degeneration had already overtaken his features. The fine fat nose had grown fleshy towards the point. The pale eyes were sunk in fat. His hands were strong and elegant. His experience of life evidently varied. His speech full of pith and verve, his manners forward but perfectly presentable. The lad who helped in the second cabin told me, in answer to a question, that he did not know who he was, but thought by his way of speaking, and because he was so polite, that he was someone from the saloon. I was not so sure, for to me there was something equivocal in his air and his bearing. He might have been, I thought, the son of some good family who had fallen early into dissipation and run from home. But making every allowance, how admirable was his talk. I wish you could have heard him tell his own stories.

They were so swingingly said forth in such dramatic language, and illustrated here and there by such luminous bits of acting that they could only lose in any reproduction. They were tales of the P&O Company, where he had been an officer, of the East Indies, where in former years he had lived lavishly, of the Royal Engineers, where he had served for a period, and of a dozen other sides of life, each introducing some vigorous thumbnail portrait. He had to talk to himself that night. We were all so glad to listen. The best talkers usually address themselves to some particular society. There they are kings. Elsewhere came followers, as a man may know Russian and yet be ignorant of Spanish. But this fellow had a frank headlong power of style, and a broad human choice of subject that would have turned any circle in the world into a circle of hearers. He was a homeric talker, plain, strong, and cheerful, and the things and the people of which he spoke became readily and clearly present in the minds of those who heard him. This, with a certain added colouring of rhetoric and rhodo montade, must have been the style of Burns, who equally charmed the ears of duchesses and hostilers. Yet freely and personally as he spoke, many points remained obscure in his narration. The engineers, for instance, was a service which he praised highly. It is true there would be trouble with the sergeants, but then the officers were gentlemen, and his own in particular one among ten thousand. It sounded so far exactly like an episode in the rakish topsy-turvy life as such a one as I had imagined. But then came incidents more doubtful, which showed an almost impotent greed after gratuities, and a truly impotent disregard for truth. And then there was the tale of his departure. He had wearied, it seems, of Woolwich, and one fine day with a companion slipped up to London for a spree. I have a suspicion that spree was meant to be a long one, but God disposes all things. And one morning near Westminster Bridge, whom should he come across but the very sergeant who had recruited him at first? What followed? He himself indicated cavaliery that he had resigned. Let us put it so. But these resignations are sometimes very trying.

At length, after having delighted us for hours, he took himself away from the companion, and I could ask Mackay who or what he was. That said Mackay. Why, that's one of the stowaways.

No man, said the same authority, who has anything to do with the sea, would ever think of paying for a passage. I give the statement as Mackay's without endorsement, yet I am tempted to believe that it contains a grain of truth. And if you add that the man shall be impudent and thievish, or else dead broke, it may even pass for a fair representation of the facts. We gentlemen of England, who live at home at ease, have, I suspect, very insufficient ideas on the subject. All the world over, people are stowing away in coal holes and dark corners, and when ships are once out to sea, appearing again, begrimed and bashful upon the deck. The career of these sea tramps partakes largely of the adventurers. They may be poisoned by coal gas, or die of starvation in their place of concealment, or when found, they may be clapped at once and ignominiously into irons, thus to be carried to their promised land, the port of destination, and alas brought back in the same way to that from which they started, and there delivered over to the magistrates and the seclusion of a county jail. Since I crossed the Atlantic, one miserable stowaway was found in a dying state amongst the fuel, uttered but a word or two, and departed for a farther country than America.