The Rock Scorpions

And a skeleton

I have been reading stories from a marvellous 10 volume collection Entitled Stories by English Authors published in 1896.

I recently wrote about one of the stories from the series

The Rock Scorpions appear in the volume subtitled The Sea. I have been unable to determine where the The Rock Scorpions was first published. The author is listed as anonymous. The story does not have the characteristic of anonymous stories that come from an oral tradition like The Banshee, which is one of the stories from the volume subtitled Ireland. This story is written in a well crafted narrative style that is clearly the work of a single author.

The story satirises the double standards of Victorian society. Captain Hindhaugh thinks he is being cheated by the scorpions, so he steals their contraband tobacco that he was hired to deliver to their feluccas to avoid paying duty.

“To this day he is pleased with himself for having given the foreigners a lesson in the elements of morality…”

Part of the pleasure of reading these stories is discovering words and expression that are uncommon today.

The term “scorpion” or “rock scorpion” was British military slang for the civilian inhabitants of Gibraltar.

Feluccas are small fast sailing boats with lanteen or triangular sails that were common in the Mediterranean and are currently used in Egypt as small cruise ships for tourists.

The first line of the story is:

“The screw steamer Jenny Jones was lying alongside a coal hulk at Gibraltar one October afternoon.”

At this time, newer steam boats with propellers were replacing the paddle wheel steam ships. The term screw steamer (the propellers were called screws) was used to distinguish between paddle wheel and propeller driven steam boats.

“A hulk is a ship that is afloat, but incapable of going to sea. Hulk may be used to describe a ship that has been launched but not completed, an abandoned wreck or shell, and to refer to an old ship that has had its rigging or internal equipment removed, retaining only its buoyant qualities,” source Wikipedia.

Hulks have a wide variety of uses, for example:

Prison hulks were used as gaols (jails) especially during the Napoleonic and French Revolutionary wars and for prisoners waiting to be shipped to Australia.

Powder hulks for storing gunpowder were common.

And with the advent of steam ships, both paddle wheel and screw steamers would take on coal from hulks.

Jim McAulay🍁 says:

A skeleton walks into a bar and says, “I’d like a beer and a mop.”