“Bless me eyes,” said the white-whiskered Old-Timer, “it's just sixty-six years since I lay in Apia harbour in Her Majesty's twelve-gun brig Elk.” We had been yarning about Samoa as it was in the days when it was still a No-man's Land, and when three Great Powers were alternately coaxing and bullying the natives, and now and again setting up a short-reign king, and now and again hurling shot and shell into the hapless islanders’ bush villages.

“The old Elk—she was a comfortable little ship if ever there was one. You know, in those days there were hellships in the Royal Navy just as in the merchant marine. They'd flog a man as soon as look at him, in some British men-o'-war. There was the Iris for one, that fine-looking frigate that was out in these waters in the days of the Maori War. The Elk was in these parts at the same time, but how different she was, a little brig of four hundred tons, with a crew of about a hundred and thirty. No flogging in her. She had a captain who didn't believe in it, but he got good discipline for all that.”

This veteran of two services, James Capper, well on towards his nineties told me of the days when he was a carefree barefooted young bluejacket jumping around up in the branches of that little brig-of-war. He had come out to New Zealand before the mast in the ship Rose of Sharon, and after a turn at whaling along the Hawke's Bay coast he signed on in the Elk at Auckland for the term of a cruise; she was going to the South Seas. “This was early in 1859. I served in her for eighteen months. A few months after we left Auckland we were lying in Apia Bay. The hands were busy cleaning and painting the brig and boating off water from one of the beautiful clear mountain streams that ran through the beach town. The Elk was making ready to sail for Sydney, her headquarters on the South Pacific station.

“We were busy getting the ship in order,” said my old sailor friend, “when we saw a whaleboat under sail come in through the reef entrance and make for the beach. The boat, running in before the fine breeze, passed close to the brig. We thought it must be a trader coming in on some urgent job from one of the other islands; perhaps a native war had broken out. Presently a boat came off to us from the shore, with the two consuls, British and American, and they had a conference with our captain and went ashore again. Signals went up recalling our pinnace and cutter, which were bringing off water. A few moments later the bos'n's pipe went shrilling and then the order was bawled, ‘All hands lay aft!'

“We dropped every job we were at and doubled aft, and mustered in front of our Captain, Campion. He was standing on the midship gun grating in the gangway. He said:

”'My lads, I've just received some very important news, and I want you to work as you've never worked before in your lives. It's to save human life. A brig has foundered out there and there are fourteen people adrift on a raft. Now, my lads, we must go out and find them.'

“That was Captain Campion's way. He got us going good and willing straight off. I see him now, in my mind's eye—a burly man, rather stout, clean-shaven except for mutton-chop whiskers, bluff and hearty of manner. He turned to the first lieutenant, Mr. Hume—'Nobby’ Hume we called him, a rather peppery customer and a splendid seaman—and told him to get the ship under way.

The Brig to the Rescue.

“The bos'n's pipe, and the bos'n's mates', went again like birds, and there was the roar we were all ready for: ‘Hands unmoor ship!’ Both anchors were down. We manned the windlass, and the ship's fiddler couldn't fiddle fast enough for us, racing those hooks up. The fiddler was a Scot, and he played all the lively reels and strathspeys, ‘Miss McLeod's Reel,’ and all the rest of them. We got the ‘devil's claw’ to work—them two hooks that grappled the cable like grim death and kept it from slipping—and we manned the quarter-deck capstan too and rove messengers, and kept reeving new messengers, and the anchors were soon a-trip, the fiddler squatting on one of the guns sawing away like a wild fellow.

“Then it was ‘Hands make sail!’ That was a glorious job always. We made good quick work of it with our big crew, though everything had to be done by hand, of course—no mechanical labour-savers in those days. Our topsails—big three-reef sails—were loosed and hoisted, and then the others, and in less than half-an-hour from the time we got the first word we were standing out through the reef entrance

(Drawing by A. H. Messenger.)
H. M. Brig “Elk” sailing out of Apia, Samoa.

page 18 page 19 under topgallant-sails, with a good fresh breeze.

The Story of the Ellenita.

“As soon as we got out clear of Apia reef and well to sea, look-outs were posted aloft on both masts; and we were all on the alert for a sight of the driftaways. Then we were told that the missing people were from an American brig called the Ellenita, which had sunk somewhere to the north of Savaii Island. The whaleboat that brought the news had come from Savaii, where the captain and some of the crew had landed in a boat. The captain's name was Hayes. That was the first we heard of the afterwards celebrated Bully Hayes, but it was not his first coming to the South Seas. He had been sailoring in the Pacific since about 1853. This Jost vessel of his, the Ellenita, was a brig of some three hundred tons. We heard all about the wreck later. He got a vessel somehow at San Francisco, and hoisted the flag of some fancy little republic called New Grenada. Nine or ten people, one of them a woman, had taken passage in the brig for Sydney. Hayes gave some of them the slip, he sailed without them. It was all of a piece with the tricks he played in the Pacific Islands afterwards. His last day in San Francisco was a Sunday. He persuaded several of the passengers to go to church with him. He left them there—left them in the lurch, waiting at the church, and got away to sea that night, taking all their baggage with him. There was one woman passenger; he didn't leave her behind. His crew were a tough lot some of them, all whites, thirteen men and a boy.

The brig sprang a leak. There was no carpenter on board, and the ship gradually filled and sank. The pump was choked by some bags of beans that swelled. There was only one boat fit for use. Hayes and some of the brig's people got into her, most of the others left the sinking brig on a raft they had knocked together. Boat and raft were provisioned, and each had a mast and sail. Hayes took a couple of the passengers with him— one was the woman—and several of the crew, and took the raft in tow. He told the people on the raft that he would stand by them, but in the night, so the story went, he cut the raft adrift and left them there; perhaps it broke away, at any rate he had disappeared when daylight came. He reached Savaii, and that was how we got the news.

A Great Raft Voyage.

“Well, there we were cruising along to the north and west of Savaii Island, keeping a sharp look-out for that missing raft, look-outs on both masts all day and night, and we burned flares. Our master—as they called a navigating lieutenant—calculated that the drift of the raft would be in the direction of Wallis Island, a French island, lying all by itself to the west. We zigzagged towards the island, and called there, but saw no signs of the raft. Our captain concluded at last that we had missed it; and that there was little or no hope for it. At Wallis Island, or Futuna, a whaleboat crew of natives came off. Captain Campion asked them to keep a good look-out for the raft, and they would be rewarded when he returned from Sydney to Samoa. We continued on to the west and called at Ovalau, in Fiji, and then on to Sydney.

“After all, those driftaways were saved. The raft was blown right down to Wallis Island, and all landed there, alive but in a very famished and exhausted state, after nineteen days at sea. It must have been the most wonderful drift of a raft in the South Seas, because all on board survived it.”

The Elk's Happy Crew.

The old sailor reverted to the comfort of the life in the old gun-brig. It was comparative comfort, of course, taking the ordinary sea life of that day as the datum-point. Everything depended on the captain in such a ship.

“We were a happy crowd,” said Capper. “You should have seen the lads laying aft for their tot of rum, the regular midday grog ration. They came slapping along on their bare feet, dancing along to the big tub with the polished brass hoops, and the fiddler playing away at a lively reel, perched up there on a gun in the waist. I tell

(Rly. Publicity photo.)
Picturesque Waiwera, a popular hot springs resort near Auckland.

you it was the real thing, that old Jamaica rum. I do believe there'd have been mutinies in some of the old ships if it hadn't been for that regular rum ration. You know, a sailor would stand a lot for his grog.

“As I told you, there was no flogging in our ship; Captain Campion detested it. He was one of those officers who were trying to rid the navy of a brutal, degrading practice. But there were some that didn't hold with him. I remember our bo's'n was so disgusted because the captain wouldn't order a flogging for a certain man he—the bo's'n—wanted punished that he laid his warrant on the quarterdeck capstan. The Captain put him under arrest for it. But discipline wasn't really any slacker because there was no flogging.”

That gun brig the Elk enjoyed a curious sort of fame in Auckland and Sydney, 1859–1860. Her figurehead was the talk of the waterfront. Never was there a ship's figurehead like it. It was the stuffed head and neck of an American elk, skin and all, mounted as for a hall. The captain was immensely proud of it. But he only used it when lying in port; it was for harbour show. He unshipped it when he went to sea and put a fiddlehead in its place. The elk-head he took into his cabin for the cruise.

“You should have seen the way,” said my old sailor, “the skipper went round the ship's bows in one of the boats every morning in port, making sure that the precious head with the big antlers was all right. He'd pull round to see that the yards were squared nicely, and everything in its place, but he gave most of his attention

Leading New Zealand Newspapers.

to the old elk. He'd be specially particular about it on Sunday mornings, because we were sure to have a lot of visitors in the afternoon, going round the ship.

“When we were lying in Sydney after that South Sea cruise, some scoundrels got up to a lark with our figurehead. Imagine the horror of the captain when he pulled round the ship, as usual, and found that a bunch of carrots had been hung just under the elk's nose! They were from another ship, of course; our own lads thought almost as much of the old fellow as the captain himself did. We had something to say about it on shore the first time we met those jokers. I tell you there was a fight or two over those carrots before we sailed from Sydney.”

That South Sea cruise under the White Ensign was one of a great many episodes of the ‘Sixties which the sturdy old sailor told in our leisurely talks. He had an uncommonly good memory for details of names, places, and conversations. After his Navy experience he joined the Waikato Militia for the Maori War, and served in the fighting from Mauku—the battle of Titi Hill—right through to Orakau. Then a turn on the West Coast goldfields, like so many old sailors, and back to the salt sea again. When he died in Wellington a few years ago, aged just over ninety, his last request was that his ashes should be scattered on the ocean he had sailed for so many years, and this filial duty his sons carried out in the waters of Cook Strait.

The changes time brings! Half-acentury ago no one with any pretensions to respectability would have dreamt of smoking in the street, and few clubs or private houses possessed smokerooms. To-day as many pipes and cigarettes are smoked out of doors as indoors, and every club and every large private residence rejoices in its smokeroom. But public taste is more fastidious than of old in the choice of tobacco, and the best brands now command the largest sale. This is especially noticeable in New Zealand where “toasted” has become so highly popular. Go where you will, you'll find the five famous toasted brands, Cut Plug No. 10 (Bullshead), Navy Cut No. 3 (Bulldog), Cavendish, Riverhead Gold and Desert Gold on sale. “Once a smoker always a smoker,” it is said, and it's no less true than once a smoker of toasted always a smoker of toasted. For there's nothing to compare with it for flavour and bouquet, also for purity and harmlessness. The toasting eliminates the nicotine! But beware of “imitation” toasted. It's no good!^*

(Courtesy, Great Western Railway.)
Building the First Locomotive.

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