A Romance of the Sea.

Cromwell Argus, Volume IV, Issue 186, 3 June 1873, Page 7

A Romance of the Sea.

(By a correspondent of the 2\ew Tori• Tribune.) The new steamer Victoria, of the Anchor line, which arrived in New York a short time ago from Glasgow, brought hack to her native shores Maggie aim,s Billy Armstrong. She has served before the mast in several British ships. Her sex having been at last discovered, she found herself in Glasgow, and in petticoats a?rain, about the time the Victoria was to sail. As an old sailor, she had gone to the shipping master of the port, and he brought her case before the managers of the Anchor line, who gave her a free passage home. During the passage I have had many conversations with our romantic fellow-1 raveliev, and 1 subjoin an account of her story as nearly as possible in her own words. Site is nineteen years old, of medium si?:o, with a play of humour about her eyes that partially redeems the plainness of her determined, somewhat masculine face. Bo high has she held female virtue through all her vicissitudes that, when a steerage passenger of the Victoria insulted a woman in her presence, she very calmly struck out from the shoulder and knocked him down. “ My name,” she says, “ is Maggie Armstrong, though I call myself Billy when 1 put on my pantaloons. 1 was horn in the state of New Jersey, America. My father is a far mer, five miles from Trenton, and he has told me hundreds of times that 1 could do more work than any man. T was always of a wild, passionate nature. 1 used fo hate men when I was at home. I thought they ought not to get move wages than a woman, and often wished 1 was a man. Ivly mother died eight years ago, and left another little sister and me. Father kept a housekeeper until I was able to do Ids work, which 1 did till tire Ist of last April, when he took a notion to get married. This new wife ho got in New York. She; came to our house, and thought to ride me and everythin'', hut I soon taught her lor mistake. 1 left the house, and went and hired out to a neigbeuring fa,nm r’s. My father came after me, and took me homo, and I stayed eight days lead ng a cat-and deg life with my step-mother. I thought I could not endure that long, so I took a strange notion I into my head. I was upstairs one day along | with one of my schoolmates. I was engaged cleaning and folding my father’s clothes. 1 And I said to her that if 1 was to dress my-

R "lf ill his clothes, ho would have a job to find me. Hhe laughed, and said he would. There was a silence between us for a few minutes, and without saying anything more about it to her, 1 secretly determined to try it. At two o’clock that night, or the next morning I mean, I went-upstairs and dressed myself in my father’s clothes. I took the scissors and cut my hair as short as J could, and then went downstairs again, and I look 2odol. out of one of the bureau drawers (for 1 know it was no use going away without money) ; then 1 went to the station and took the 4.25 train for New York. I wandered about the city a good deal, stopping at a small hotel in Warren-street, I think. I hadn’t begun to make up my mind what to do—for I had never been in Now York before—when one of those runners hailed me and wanted me to ship on a freight steamer, which ho said was going to London and back to New York in a month. That seemed to suit me, as I was curious to sec London. He shipped mo as engineers’ steward. I never was seasick once ; in fact, I never was so well before in my life as I have been at sea. I always used to have Jersey headaches in the summer time at home; but no more feverishness now. Ail the engineers were well pleased with my work ; but they informed me that the ship was not going back to New York, but to China, wnen she left London ; so I was discharged at my own request in London, the head engineer presenting me with 10s., for being a good clean lad. With this and my wages—lss. and what was left of my 25d01., I was enabled to live in London three weeks. I went all over the city and saw no end of things. As soon as I learned that the steamer was going to China, I made up my mind that 1 had got to get back to America as a sailor, if ever I got back at all. So I used, during my spare hours on the steamer, to practise going aloft ; or, it they were stowing sails or doing anything of the kind, I was sure to be on hand. I used to go into the wheelhouse, u o, and learn to steer, and before we got to Lie Banks of Newfoundland I knew all the compass. “ When, therefore, I shipped on board the barque Princess, bound for Ivliddlesboro’, it was not as an apprentice, but an ordinary seaman, for £2 ss. a month. I had bought a sailor's chest, and recruited my sailor wardrobe with a set of oilskins. These I had taken from the Sailors’ Home boarding house to the forecastle of the Princess, and my life as a common tar began. There were only eight ot us in the forecastle, and as 1 was always the first to reef the topsails and furl the sails in a gale of wind, we got along very well. I was discharged, finally, with the rest, at ivliddlesboro’, alter a three weeks’ run. 'lhen I thought 1 should like to see Shields, which is only six miles distant. I wont there and tried to ship again ; but there arose a great difficulty. Unfortunately, I had lost my discharge. The captain of a barque,— the Eskdale, of Whitby, bound for Italy,—would take me as an apprentice, but not as an ordinary seaman ; that is, not at first, for he did take me when he found that he could not get any apprentices. We left Shields loaded with coal for Genoa. We had head winds and bad weather in the English Channel, but the Mediterranean was fair enough to make up for it. We were in Genoa nine weeks in all, and it was after we had been there six weeks that I was found out not to be a man. It happened in this way : There was a hi ute of a sailor in the forecastle, who was always imposing on me. When we were shovelling coal in the hold, he made me fill two baskets to his one. I was telling this to the rest ot the crew after we were done work. He gave me the lie, and the result was a knock-down between us. He was the bigger, mid he got the better of me, and I began crying. This led to suspicions of my sex. I stoutly maintained that I was a man, but it was no use. The ahair got to the captain’s ears. The captain’s wife was on board, and to him and to her I was forced at length to confess my whole story. 1 was soon habited as a woman again, and engaged as stewardess in the cabin for the homeward run. Stopping some weeks at Malaga for cargo, the barque landed finally at Aberdeen, whence I came by train to Glasgow.” Dining the passage trom Glasgow to New York, the hero ami heroine of the foregoing story has conducted hcisolf in a quiet way—except in the matter of knocking down the steerage passenger for insulting a woman ; and as lor that, you never saw a quieter or modes ter knock down in your life. Maggie starts at once for New Jersey and her father.