by Rudyard Kipling.
Originally published in The Windsor Magazine (Ward, Lock & Bowden Ltd.) vol.1 #1 (Jan 1895).
Almost any pilot will tell you that his work is much more difficult than you imagine; but the Pilots of the Hugli know that they have one hundred miles of the most dangerous river on earth running through their hands—the Hugli between Calcutta and the Bay of Bengal--and say nothing. Their service is picked and sifted as carefully as the bench of the Supreme Court, for a judge can only hang the wrong man, but a careless pilot can lose a four thousand ton ship with crew and cargo in less time than it takes to reverse the engines.
There is very little chance of anything getting off again when once you touch in the furious current of the river, loaded with all the fat silt of the fields of Bengal, where soundings change two feet between tides, and new channels make or efface themselves in a season. Men have fought the Hugli for two hundred years, till now the river owns a huge building, with drawing, survey, and telegraph departments, devoted to its exclusive service, as well as a body of wardens, who are called the Port Commissioners.
They and their officers govern absolutely from the Hugli Bridge to the last buoy at Pilots Ridge, one hundred and forty miles away, and out in the Bay of Bengal, where the steamers first pick up the pilots from the brig.
A Hugli pilot does not bring papers aboard, or scramble up rope-ladders. He arrives in his best clothes, with a native servant or an assistant to wait on him, and he behaves as a man should who can earn ten thousand dollars a year after twenty years' apprenticeship. He has beautiful rooms in the Port Office at Calcutta, and generally keeps himself to the society of his own profession, for though the telegraph reports the more important soundings of the river daily, there is much to be learned between trip and trip.
Some million tons of shipping must find their way to and from Calcutta each twelvemonth, unless the Hugli were watched as closely as men watch the Atlantic cables, there is a fear that it might silt up, as it has silted up round the old Dutch and Portuguese ports twenty and thirty miles behind Calcutta. So the Port Office sounds and scours and dredges, and builds spurs and devices for coaxing currents, and labels all the buoys with their proper letters, and attends to the semaphores and the lights and the drum, ball and cone storm signals, and the pilots of the Hugli do the rest; but, in spite of all the care, the Hugli swallows a ship or two every year.
When Martin Trevor had followed this life from his boyhood; when he had risen to be a Senior Pilot, entitled to bring up to Calcutta the big ships; drawing over twenty-four feet, that can (or could till a few years ago) only pass by special arrangement; when he had talked nothing but Hugli and pilotage all his life, he was exceedingly indignant that his only son should decide upon following his father's profession. Mrs. Trevor had died when the boy was a child, and as he grew older, Trevor, in the intervals of his business, noticed that the lad was very often by the river-side—no nice place for a boy. Once, when he asked him if he could make anything out of the shipping, little Trevor replied by reeling off the list of all the house-flags in sight at the moorings.
"You'll come to a bad end, Jim," said Trevor. "Little boys haven't any business to know house-flags."
"Oh, Pedro at the Sailors' Home taught me. He says you can't begin too early."
"At what, please?"
"Piloting. I'm nearly fourteen now, and—and I know where all the shipping in the river is, and I know what there was yesterday over the Mayapur Bar, and I've been down to Diamond Harbour—oh, a hundred times, and I've—"
"You'll go to school, son, and learn what they teach you, and you'll turn out better than a pilot," said his father, but he might just as well have told a shovel-nosed porpoise of the river to come ashore and begin life as a hen. Jim held his tongue; he noticed that all the best pilots in the Port Office did that; and devoted his young attention and all his spare time and money to the river he loved.
Trevor's son became as well known as the Bankshall itself, and the Port Police let him inspect their launches, and the tug-boat captains had always a place for him at the tables, and the mates of the big steam dredgers used to show him how the machinery worked, and there were certain native row-boats that Jim practically owned; and he extended his patronage to the rail that runs to Diamond Harbour, forty miles down the river. In the old days nearly all the East India Company's ships used to discharge at Diamond Harbour, on account of the shoals above, but now ships go straight up to Calcutta, and they have only some moorings for vessels in distress there, and a telegraph service, and a harbour-master, who was Jim's most intimate friend.
He would sit in the Office and listen to the soundings of the shoals as they were reported every day, and attend to the movements of the steamers up and down (Jim always felt he had lost something if a boat got in or out of the river without his knowing it), and when the big liners with their rows of blazing portholes, tied up in Diamond Harbour for the night, Jim would row from one ship to the other through the sticky hot air and the buzzing mosquitoes and listen respectfully as the pilots conferred together.
Once, for a treat, his father took him down clear out to the Sandheads and the pilot brig, and Jim was joyfully sea-sick as she tossed and pitched in the bay. So he had to go down three or four times more with friendly pilots till he had cured his weakness. The cream of life though was coming up in a tug or a police boat from Diamond Harbour to Calcutta, over the "James and Mary," the terrible sands christened after a royal ship they sunk two hundred years ago. They are made by two rivers that enter the Hugli six miles apart and throw their own silt across the silt of the main stream, so that with each turn of weather and tide the sands shift and change like a cloud. It was here (the tales sound much worse when they are told in the rush and growl of the muddy waters) that the Countess of Stirling, fifteen hundred tons, touched and capsized in ten minutes, and a two thousand ton steamer in two, and a pilgrim ship in five, and another steamer literally in an instant, holding down her men with the masts and shrouds as she lashed over. When a ship touches on the "James and Mary," the river knocks her down and buries her, and the sands quiver all around her, and reach out under water and take new shapes.
Young Jim would lie up in the bows of the tug and watch the straining buoys kick and smother in the coffee-coloured current, while the semaphores and flags signal from the bank how much water there was in the channel, till he learned that men who deal with men can afford to be careless on the chance of their fellows being like them; but men who deal with things dare not relax for an instant. "And that's the very reason," old McEwen said to him once, "that the 'James and Mary' is the safest part of the river," and he shoved the big black Bandoorah, that draws twenty-five feet, through the Eastern Gat, with a turban of white foam wrapped round her foot and her screw beating as steadily as his own heart.
If Jim could not get away to the river there was always the big, cool Port Office, where the soundings were calculated and the maps were drawn; or the pilot's room, where he could lie in a long chair and listen to the talk about the Hugli; and there was the library, where if you had money you could buy charts and books of directions against the time that you actually steamed over the places themselves. It was exceedingly hard for Jim to hold the list of Jewish Kings in his head, and he was more than uncertain as to the end of the verb audio if you followed it far enough down the page, but he could keep the soundings of three channels distinct in his head, and, what is more confusing, the changes in the buoys from "Garden Reach" down to Saugor, as well as the greater part of the Calcutta Telegraph, the only paper he ever read.
Unluckily, you cannot peruse about the Hugli without money, even though you are the son of the best-known pilot on the river, and as soon as Trevor understood how his son was spending his time, he cut down his pocket money--and Jim had a very generous allowance. In his extremity he took counsel with Pedro, the plum-coloured mulatto at the Sailors' Home, and Pedro was a bad, designing man. He introduced Jim to a Chinaman in Muchuatollah, a nasty place in itself, and the Chinaman, who answered to the name of Erh-Tze, when he was not smoking opium talked pigeon-English to Jim for an hour.
"S'pose you take. Can do?" he said at last.
Jim considered the chances. A junk he knew would draw about eleven feet and the regular fee for the qualified pilot, outward, would be two hundred rupees. On the one hand he was not qualified, so he could not ask more than half. But, on the other hand, he was fully certain of the thrashing from his father for piloting without license. So he asked one hundred and seventy-five rupees, and Erh-Tze beat him down to a hundred and twenty; and that was like a Chinaman all over. The cargo of his junk was worth anything from fifty to a hundred thousand rupees, and Erh-Tze was getting enormous freight on the coffins of thirty or forty dead Chinamen, whom he was taking to be buried in their native country.
Rich Chinamen will pay fancy prices for this service, and they have a superstition that the iron of steamships is bad for the health of their dead. Erh-Tze's junk had crept up from Singapore, via Penang and Rangoon, to Calcutta, where Erh-Tze had been staggered by the pilot dues. This time he was going out at a reduction with Jim, who, Pedro said, was just as good as a pilot.
Jim knew something of the outside of junks, but he was not prepared when he went down that night with his charts, for the confusion of cargo and coolies and coffins and day-cooking places, and other things that littered the decks. Jim had sense enough to haul the rudder up a few feet, he knew that a junk's rudder goes far below the bottom, and he allowed a foot extra to Erh-Tze's estimate of the ship's depth. Then they staggered out into midstream very early, and never had the city of his birth looked so beautiful to Jim as when he feared he would not come back to see it.
Going down "Garden Reach" he discovered that the junk would answer to her helm if you put it over enough, and that she had a fair though Chinese notion of sailing. He took charge of the tiller by stationing three Chinese on each side of it, and standing a little forward, gathered their pigtails into his hands, three right and three left, as though they had been the yoke lines of a row-boat. Erh-Tze almost smiled at this: he felt he was getting good care for his money, and took a neat little polished bamboo to keep the men attentive, for he said this was no time to teach the crew pigeon-English. The more way they could get on the junk the better would she steer, and as soon as he felt a little confidence in her, Jim ordered the big rustling mat sails to be hauled up tighter and tighter. He did not know their names—at least any name that would be likely to interest a Chinaman—but Erh-Tze had not banged about the waters of the Malay Archipelago for nothing, and he went; he rolled forward with the bamboo, the sails rose like Eastern incantations.
Early as they were on the river, a big American kerosene ship was ahead of them in tow, and when Jim saw her through the driving morning mist he was thankful. She would draw all of seventeen feet, and if he could steer by her they would be safe. It is one thing to scurry up and down the "James and Mary" in a police-tug without responsibility, and quite another to cram a hard-mouthed old junk across the same sands alone, with the certainty of a thrashing if you come out alive.
Jim glued his eyes to the American, and saw that at Fultah she dropped her tug and stood down the river under sail. He all but whooped aloud, for he knew that the number of pilots who preferred to work a ship through the "James and Mary" without a tug was strictly limited. "If it isn't Father, it's Dearsley," said Jim, "and Dearsley went down yesterday with the Bancoora. If I'd gone home last night instead of going to Pedro, I'd have met father. He must have got his ship quick, but—father is a very quick man." Then Jim reflected that they kept a piece of knotted rope on the pilot brig that stung like a wasp; but this thought he dismissed as beneath the dignity of an officiating pilot, who needed only to nod his head to set Erh-Tze's bamboo to work.
As the American came round, just before the "Fultah Sands," Jim raked her with his spy-glass, and saw his father on the poop with an unlighted cigar between his teeth. That cigar, Jim knew, would be smoked on the other side of the "James and Mary," and Jim felt so entirely safe and happy that he lit a cigar on his own account. This kind of piloting was child's play. His father could not make a mistake if he tried; and Jim, with his six faithful pigtails in his two hands, had leisure to admire the perfect style in which the American was handled—how she would point her bowsprit jeeringly at a hidden bank, as much as to say, "Not to-day, thank you, dear," and bow down lovingly to a buoy as much as to say, "You're a gentleman, at any rate," and come round sharp on her heel with a flutter, and a rustle, and a slow, steady swing something like a woman staring round the theatre through opera-glasses.
It was hard work to keep the junk near her, though Erh-Tze set everything that was by any means settable, and used the bamboo very generously. When they were almost under her counter, and a little to the left, Jim would feel warm and happy all over, thinking of the nautical and piloting things he knew. When they fell more than half a mile behind, he was cold and miserable thinking of all the things he did not know or was not quite sure of. And so they went down, Jim steering by his father, turn for turn, over the Mayapur Bar, with the semaphores on each bank, signalling the depth of water, through the Western Gat, and round Makoaputti Lumps, and in and out of twenty places, each more exciting than the last, and Jim nearly pulled the six pigtails out for pure joy when the last of the "James and Mary" had gone astern, and they were walking through Diamond Harbour.
From there to the mouth of the Hugli things are not so bad—at least, that was what Jim thought, and held on till the swell from the Bay of Bengal made the old junk heave and snort, and the river broadened into the inland sea, with islands only a foot or two high scattered about it. The American walked away from the junk as soon as they were beyond Kedgeree, and the night came on and the river looked very big and desolate, so Jim promptly anchored somewhere in grey water, with the Saugor Light away off toward the east. He had a great respect for the Hugli, and no desire whatever to find himself on the Gasper Sand or any other little shoal. Erh-Tze and the crew highly approved of this piece of seamanship. They set no watch, lit no lights, and at once went to sleep.
Jim lay down between a red and black lacquer coffin and a little live pig in a basket. As soon as it was light he began studying his chart of the Hugli mouth, and trying to find out where in the river he might be. He decided to be on the safe side and wait for another sailing ship and follow her out. So he made an enormous breakfast of rice and boiled fish, while Erh-Tze lit fire-crackers and burned gilt paper with ostentation. Then they heaved up their rough-and-tumble anchor, and made after a big, fat, iron four-masted sailing ship, heavy as a hay-wain.
The junk, which was really a very weatherly boat, and might have begun life as a private pirate in Annam thirty years ago, followed under easy sail; and the four-master would run no risks. She was in old McEwen's hands, and she waddled about like a broody hen, giving each shoal wide allowances. All this happened near the outer Floating Light, some hundred and twenty miles from Calcutta, and apparently in the open sea.
Jim knew old McEwen's appetite, and often heard him pride himself on getting his ship to the pilot brig between meal hours, so he argued that if the pilot brig was get-at-able (and Jim himself had not the ghost of a notion where she would be), McEwen would find her before one o'clock.
It was a blazing hot day, and McEwen fidgeted the four-master down to "Pilots Ridge" with what little wind remained, and sure enough there lay the pilot brig, and Jim felt cold up his back as Erh-Tze paid him his hundred and twenty rupees and he went overside in the junk's crazy dinghy. McEwen was leaving the four-master in a long, slashing whale-boat that looked very spruce and pretty, and Jim could see that there was a certain amount of excitement among the pilots on the brig. There was his father too. The ragged Chinese gave way in a ragged fashion, and Jim felt very unwashen and disreputable when he heard the click of McEwen's oars alongside, and McEwen saying, "James Trevor, I'll trouble you to come along with me."
Jim obeyed, and from the corner of one eye watched McEwen's angry whiskers stand up all round his face like the frill of a royal Bengal tiger, while his face turned purple and his voice shook.
"An' is this how you break the regulations o' the Port o' Calcutta? Are ye aware o' the penalties ye've laid yourself open to?"
Jim said nothing. There was not very much to say; and McEwen roared aloud: "Man, ye've perrsonated a Hugli pilot, an' that's as much as to say ye've perrsonated ME! What did yon heathen give you for an honorarium?"
"Hundred and twenty," said Jim.
"An' by what manner o' means did ye get through the 'James and Mary'?"
"Father," was the answer. "He went down the same tide--and I—we—steered by him."
McEwen whistled and choked, perhaps it was with anger. "Made a stalkin' horse o' your father. Jim, boy, he'll make an example o' you."
The boat hooked on to the brig's chains, and McEwen said, as he rolled on "Yon's an enterprising cub o' yours, Trevor. Ye'd better put him to the regular business, or one o' these fine days he'll be acting as pilot before he's qualified, and sinkin' junks in the fairway. If ye've no other designs I'd take him in as my cub, for there's no denying he's a resourceful lad for all that he's an unlicked whelp."
"That," said Trevor, reaching for Jim's left ear, "is something we can remedy," and he led him below.
The little knotted colt that they keep for general purposes on the pilot-brig stung like hornets, but when it was all over Jim was an unlicked cub no longer. He was McEwen's property, and a week later, when the Ellora came along, he bundled over side with McEwen's enamelled leather hand-bag and a roll of charts and a little bag of his own.