_HE SEES THE EQUATOR._
We crossed the equator a little before noon on a Tuesday. Though I had
learnt at school all about the imaginary line that girdles the earth,
yet I was stupid enough to believe what Kennet and the others told me:
namely, that if I ascended to the foretop with a telescope, and pointed
it steadily over the starboard cat-head, I should obtain a good view of
the equator. No more was necessary than to ascertain at what hour the
ship was likely to cross the line, so as to save the anxiety of looking
for the circle when it might still be some distance below the edge of the
sea. On the morning of this Tuesday Kennet arrived on the poop with a
telescope in his hand, and said—
“Poole and I are going into the foretop to view the equator. It should be
in sight now from that height, for I heard the chief mate tell Mrs. Moore
that if this air held we should be crossing it about half-past eleven.
Will you come along with us, Rockafellar?”
“Yes,” said I; “I should like to see the equator. It will be something to
talk about when I get home.”
We went forward and got into the fore-shrouds on the lee-side, that our
going aloft might not be noticed from the poop. When we were in the top,
Poole steadied the glass against the topmast rigging, and instantly cried
out “Beautiful!”
“Is it in sight?” I exclaimed eagerly.
“Oh, lovely! oh, divine!” he said in a voice of rapture, with his eye
glued to the glass. “Kennet, my dear, come and take a look.”
He held the glass, and Kennet peered.
“Ha!” shouted the long-nosed youth, drinking in a deep breath: “a noble
picture, by George! I wonder if the captain would let ’uth go athore upon
it? Wouldn’t a ride on a camel be jolly along that ththrait road.”
They were as grave as a pair of judges, saving the rapture which they
endeavoured to express with their countenances.
“I say, Poole, let’s have a look!” said I, thirsting with curiosity.
“Make way for him, Kennet,” cried Poole.
I put my eye to the telescope, which the midshipman continued to hold
steady against the rigging, and sure enough, just a little way over the
horizon, was the equator, a thin, very well-defined line, showing against
the light azure of the sky like a delicate ruling in ink.
“Thee it?” cried Kennet.
“Yes,” said I, eagerly staring; “but it’s up in the air, Poole.”
“Refraction, man, refraction,” he answered; “it always shows like that.”
I sent a glance with my naked eye, and then peered again through the
telescope.
“When shall we be able to see it without a glass?” I asked.
[Illustration: “I PUT MY EYE TO THE TELESCOPE.”]
“That’ll depend upon the thtate of the weather,” answered Kennet.
“But do we sail _under_ it?”
“Oh, hang it, Rockafellar!” cried Poole, “you’re not at school now,
little boy! Who’s to answer such questions? Let’s down on deck, or the
mate’ll be singing out.”
As I descended the shrouds I saw some sailors at work in the waist,
grinning very hard.
“Seen it, sir?” bawled one of them.
“Yes,” said I.
“No chance, I hope,” he sung out, “of its fouling our mast-heads, is
there, sir? Otherwise it’ll sweep every spar overboard.”
“No, it looks to be too high up in the air to hurt us,” I answered, and
trudged aft, followed by a half-smothered chorus of laughter.
The mate stood at the head of the poop ladder.
“Where have you been, sir?” he exclaimed.
“Up in the foretop, sir,” I answered.
“And what job carried you there, young gentleman?”
“I have been viewing the equator, sir,” I responded.
“Who showed it to you?” said he, with a twinkling eye.
“Mr. Kennet and Mr. Poole, sir,” said I.
He beckoned, with a solemn motion of his forefinger, to Kennet, who
approached.
“Have you the equator handy about you, young gentleman,” he inquired.
Kennet coloured up, and said he had left it in his telescope.
“Bring it here, sir,” said the mate, “and let Mr. Poole attend, that we
may have the benefit of his learning.”
The midshipman disappeared, and shortly after returned, with the glass
under his arm and Poole at his heels.
“Now then, young gentlemen,” said the mate, “be good enough to show
Master Rockafellar the equator from the poop point of view.”
Poole looked very sheepish; Kennet hung his long nose over one of the
middle lenses, which he unscrewed.
“Now, let’s have a good geographical explanation, if you please, Mr.
Poole,” said the mate.
“There’s the line, Rockafellar,” said Poole, taking the lens, and
pointing to a hair stretched across it, secured by a drop of gum at
either extremity.
It was now my turn to colour up. I had been handsomely gulled, and the
worst of it was the sailors forward knew it.
“Never mind, Master Rockafellar,” said the mate kindly; “older birds than
you have been caught by that kind of chaff. You can take the equator
below, Mr. Kennet,” and, smothering a laugh between his teeth, he walked
aft.
I was afterwards told that this was a very ancient trick; but, old as it
was, a joke at my expense was made out of it, fore and aft; since for
many days it never came to my passing two or more of the sailors but that
one would sing out—
“Bill, seen the line?”
“No, Jack; where is it?”
“In Rockafellar’s eye, bully!”
However, to my great satisfaction, in due course this piece of humour
grew stale, and was dropped.
I had read, when at home, a good deal about the customs practised by
sailors on crossing the equator, and was not a little disappointed to
find that the crew went on with their work as unconcernedly as though the
Line were a thousand miles distant. I had been haunted by visions of a
fine theatrical show, and had secretly longed for the hour that was to
exhibit Neptune with a crown on his head, and a beard of oakum on his
chin, attended by his wife, his physician, and the several courtiers who
made up his train of state. I had followed, with boyish eagerness, the
accounts of the ceremony in the works of Marryat and in other novels, and
was much dejected on being told by Mr. Cock that this sort of skylarking
was out of date.
“And well for you, young gentleman, maybe,” said he, “that it is so;
for you’re a green hand, do you see, and it was always upon the like of
you that the forecastle tomfoolery was poured out thickest. How would
you relish, think you, being lathered with a mixture of tar and slush
and filth; next, having your cheeks scraped with jagged bits of iron
cask-hoops till they bled; then plunged backwards into water enough to
drown you, and left to scramble out like a half-dead rat, amidst roars
of laughter from the unfeeling Jack? No, no; I’m as fond as any man of
honest skylarking, but there was always too much of Old Nick in the
temper of the shaving and ducking custom to please my humour: and it’s
a very good job, I think, that the mouldy bit of barbarity was long ago
flung overboard.”
The ship was often brought to a stand by calms during our passage of the
equator, and these intervals were very monotonous and hard to bear.
The midshipmen’s berth was so insufferably hot that during my watch below
I was unable to remain in it, and would come on deck and hang about under
the break of the poop where the side-wings of the saloon, or cuddy, made
a recess, and where one was kept cool by the fanning of light draughts of
air sent circling betwixt the rails by the swaying of the folds of the
hauled-up main-course.
It was at this time that an old gentleman named Catesby—a passenger—who
had lived in Australia for many years, related to some of us lads an
extraordinary experience that had befallen him during a voyage he made
to India when a young man. The old East-Indiaman was then afloat; pirates
were also abundant; there was no steam then to be met with at sea, and
the excitement and romance of the ocean were at their height. The old
gentleman had known a relative of mine, and took a fancy to me, and would
frequently bring a handful of almonds and raisins or some sweet biscuits
from his pockets—purloinings from the dessert on the cuddy table—and slip
the delicacies into my hand with a merry manner of cautiously looking
around him as though he was afraid of the captain seeing him. I remember
that he delightfully killed several long hot hours one day by telling
two or three of us lads the story of his early adventure. I see him now
with a cigar drooping between his lips as he went on reciting, and recall
the stare of admiration and expectation we fixed upon his face as he
proceeded.
The name which he said he always gave to his story when he told it to his
friends was:
“LA MULETTE.”
All day long there had been a pleasant breeze blowing from
abeam; but as the sun sank into the west the wind fined into
light, delicate curls of shadow upon the sea that, at the hour
of sundown when the great luminary hung poised like a vast
target of flaming brass upon the ocean-line, turned into a
surface of molten gold through which there ran a light, wide,
long-drawn heave of swell, regular as a respiration, rhythmic
as the sway of a cradle to the song of a mother.
The ship was an Indiaman named the _Ruby_; the time long ago,
as human life runs, in this century nevertheless, when the old
traditional conditions of the sea-life were yet current—the
roundabout Indian voyage by way of the Cape—the slaver sneaking
across the parching parallels of the Middle Passage—the
piccaroon in the waters of the Antilles dodging the fiery
sloop whose adamantine grin of cannons was rendered horribly
significant to the eye of the greasy pirate by the cross of
crimson under whose meteoric folds the broadside thundered.
I was a passenger aboard the _Ruby_, making the voyage to India
for my pleasure. The fact was, being a man of independent
means, I was without any sort of business to detain me at home.
Your continental excursion was but a twopenny business to me.
Here was this huge ball of earth to be circumnavigated whilst
one was young, with spirits rendered water-proof by health.
Time enough, I thought, to amble about Europe when Australia
began to look a long way off. So this was my third voyage. One
I had made to Sydney and Melbourne, and a second to China; and
now I was bound to Bombay with some kind of notion beyond of
striking into Persia, thence to Arabia, and so home by way of
the classic shores of the Mediterranean.
Well, it happened this 18th of June to be the captain’s
birthday. His name was Bow; he would be fifty-three years old
that day he told us, and as he had used the sea since the age
of thirteen he was to be taken as a man who knew his business.
And a better sailor there never was, and never also was there
a person who looked less like a sailor. If ever you have seen
a print of Charles Lamb you have had an excellent likeness of
Captain Bow before you—a pale, spare creature of a somewhat
Hebraic cast of countenance, with a brow undarkened by any
stains of weather. His memory went far back; he had served as
mate in John Company’s ships, had known Commodore Dance who
beat Linois and spoke of him as a perfect gentleman; deplored
the gradual decay of the British sailor, and would talk with
a wistful gleam in his eye of the grand and generous policy
of the Leadenhall Street Directors in allowing to their
captains as much cubic capacity in the ships they commanded for
their own private use and emolument as would furnish out the
dimensions of a considerable smack.
It was his birthday and long ago all of us passengers had made
up our minds to celebrate the occasion by a supper, a dance
on deck, and by obtaining permission for Jack forward to have
a ball on condition that we should be allowed to ply him with
drink enough to keep his heels nimble and no more. We were in
the Indian Ocean climbing north, somewhere upon the longitude
of Amsterdam Island, so formidable was the easting made in the
fine old times. The latitude, I think, was about 12° south, and
desperately hot it was, though the sun hung well in the north.
Spite of awnings and wet swabs the planks of the deck seemed
to tingle like burning tin through the thin soles of your
boots. If you put your nose into an open skylight the air that
rose drove you back with a sense of suffocation, so heavily
was the fiery stagnation of it loaded with smells of food and
of the cabin interior, though there never was a sweeter and
breezier cuddy, with its big windows and windsail-heels when
the thermometer gave the place the least chance. But when the
sun was nearly setting, some sailors quietly came aft and fell
to work to make a ball-room of the poop. They took the bunting
out of the signal locker and stretched it along the ridge-ropes
betwixt the awning and the rail until it was like standing
inside a huge Chinese lantern for colour. They hung the ship’s
lamps along in rows, roused up the piano from its moorings in
the cuddy, embellished the tops of the hencoops with red baize,
and in fifty directions not worth the trouble of indicating,
so decorated and glorified the after-end of the ship that when
the lamps came to be lighted with streaks of pearl-coloured
moonshine glittering upon the deck betwixt the interstices of
the signal flags, and movement enough in the tranquil lift of
the great fabric to the swell to fill the eye with alternations
of swaying shadow and gleam, this ball-room of almond-white
plank and canvas ceiling of milky softness and walls of radiant
banners was more like some fairy sea-vision than a reality,
especially with the glimpse you caught of the vast silent ocean
solitude outside with its sky of hovering stars and a stillness
as of a dead world in the atmosphere—such a contrast, by
heaven! to the revelry within the shipboard pavilion, when once
the music had struck up and the forms of women in white gowns
fluffing up about them like soapsuds were swimming round the
decks in the embrace of their partners, that a kind of shudder
would come into you with the mere thinking of the difference
between the two things.
The music was good; there was a steerage passenger, a lady,
who played the piano incomparably well; then there was a
cuddy passenger who blew upon the flute very finely indeed.
A military officer returning to India after a long spell of
sick-leave at home had as light, delicate and accomplished
a hand on the fiddle as any of the best of the first violins
which I have heard in the crackest of orchestras. When the
committee of passengers had been talking about and arranging
for this band the chief officer told them that if they thought
there would not be instruments enough there was a man forward,
a fellow named Ratt, who played the fiddle exquisitely, and,
if we wished it, he would make one of the instrumentalists.
We consented, and for several days previous to this night
you might have heard Ratt rehearsing in the ’tween decks,
scraping in a way that made the military gentleman returning
from sick-leave look somewhat grave. He spoke of Ratt with a
foreboding eye, and what he feared happened. The man could
indeed play, but he had no sense of _time_. All went wrong with
the first dance-air that was struck up. The tune he made was
right enough; but it was always darting ahead and bewildering
the others and finally the band came to a stop, though Ratt
continued to play several bars, whilst the military gentleman
in great temper was shouting to him to go away. I should have
felt sorry for the poor fellow had he not been saucy, for he
had dressed himself with extraordinary care, greased every
separate hair upon his head as though it had been a rope-yarn
and had arrived aft with a sailor’s expectation of seeing
plenty of fun and getting plenty of drink. It ended in the
chief mate grasping him by the collar and tumbling him down the
poop ladder. I afterwards heard that he went forward and in a
towering passion threw his fiddle overboard, swearing that he
would never play upon anything again but the Jew’s harp and
then only for hogs to dance to; there was no longer any taste
left amongst human beings, he said, for good music.
The merriment aft was scarcely affected by this instant’s
failure. The moment Jack had been tumbled off the poop the
instrumentalists began afresh and the decks were once more
filled with sliding and revolving couples. I had slightly
sprained my ankle that morning by kicking against a coil of
rope and was unable to dance; but this was no deprivation to me
on a burning hot night, with no place for the draughts out of
the fanning canvas to come through, and the smell of blistered
paint rising in a lukewarm breathing off the sides of the ship
as though the sun still stood over the main-truck. So squatting
myself on a hencoop I sat gazing at the merry, moving, radiant
picture and listening to the music and to the laughter of the
girls which came back from the canvas roof of the poop in
echoes soft and clear as the notes of the flute.
There were thirty-two cabin passengers in all, and we had a
poopful, as you will suppose. There were more than a dozen
girls, dark and fair, most of them pretty enough. There
were a few young married ladies too and a little mob of
dignified mammas. The men were of the old-fashioned mixture,
a few military officers, a sprinkling of Civil Service young
gentlemen, fierce old men with white whiskers and gleaming
eyes, with peppercorns for livers and with a capacity of
putting on the tender aspects of Bengal tigers when anything
went wrong—merchants, judges, planters—I can scarce remember
now what they were. There were lanterns enough to make a bright
light, and some of them being of coloured glass threw bars of
ruby and of emerald against the yellow radiance of the clear
flame and the ivory streaks of moonlight. Far aft was the wheel
with the brass upon it reflecting the lustre till it glowed
out against the blackness over the stern like a circle of dull
fire upon the liquid obscurity. Grasping the spokes of it was
the figure of a seaman, smartly apparelled in flowing duck and
a grass hat on “nine hairs”; his shape, dim in the distance,
floated up and down against a bright star or two; but there was
little need for him to keep his eye on the course. The calm was
dead as dead could be. Half-an-hour since the ship’s head was
north-west and now it was west, and the swell was under the bow
with a strange melancholy sob of water breaking into the pauses
betwixt the music and sounding like the sigh of a weeping
giant somewhere in the blackness over the side.
And black the water was spite of the air being brimful of the
soft silver of the moonlight. On either hand the planet’s
wake the ocean ran in ebony to the indigo of the night sky;
but you only needed to steal to the break of the poop clear
of the awning to mark how gloriously the luminary was limning
the ship as if she had no other magic for the deep that night.
Every sail was a square of pearl, every shroud and back-stay,
every brace and halliard a rope of silver wire, the yards of
ivory, with hundreds of stars of delicate splendour sparkling
and flashing in the dew along the rails. The Jacks had rigged
up lanterns forward and were cutting capers on the forecastle
and in the waist to some queer music that was coming out
of the darkness upon the booms. It was strange enough to
see their whiskered faces revolving in the weak, illusive
light, to witness apparitions of knobs and warts and wrinkles
storm-darkened to the hue of the shell of a walnut showing
out for an instant to the glare of a lantern. There was great
laughter that way and a jovial growling of voices. I believe
the sailors had got, with the captain’s leave, some of the
women of the steerage passengers to dance with, and their
happiness was very great; for give Jack a fiddle, and a girl
to twirl to the sawing of it, and a drink of rum and water to
fill up the short measures of his breathing-times, and he will
ask for no other paradise ashore or afloat.
Much was made of old Captain Bow. He looked as if he had taken
all day to dress himself, so skewered was he in a garb of the
old school; tail-coat, a frill, a collar half way the height of
the back of his head, buff waistcoat, tight pantaloons; shoes
like pumps, and a heavy ground-tackle of seals dangling from
the rim of his vest.
“Captain shows nobly to-night, sir,” said the chief mate to me.
“Ay!” said I, “little enough of the salt in _him_ you’d think.”
“He dances well enough for an old shellback,” said the mate.
“A man needs a ship for a dancing-master to teach him how to
spread his toes as the Captain does.”
“Aren’t you dancing?” I asked.
“No, it’s my watch on deck. I’ve got the ship to look after.
But it’s little watching she wants. Oh, blow, my sweet breeze,
blow!” he whispered, with a pensive cock of his eye at the sea
through a space between the flags. “It isn’t to be the only
birthday aboard us, I allow, Mr. Catesby. If the cockroaches
below aren’t celebrating some festival of their own, then are
we manned with marines, sir. Phew! the Hooghley of a dead night
with bodies foul of the cable and the gangway ladder is a joke
to this. What’s become of the wind? What’s become of the wind?”
and he stole away to the wheel softly whistling between his
teeth.
It was too sultry to eat; the very drink you got was so warm
that you swallowed it only for thirst, and put down the glass
with a sort of loathing. When I took a peep through the after
skylight and saw the tables laid out for supper for the special
birthday feast that was to be eaten, my tongue did cleave to
the roof of my mouth, and I felt as if I should never be able
to eat another blessed morsel of food this side the grave.
Every dish looked exhausted with perspiration; the hams were
melting, the fowls shone like varnish, much that had come solid
to the table was now fluid. However I was one of the committee
and it would not do for me to be absent, so when the bell rang
to announce supper and the music stopped, I stepped up to the
wife of a colonel and, giving her my arm, fell in with the
procession and entered the cabin.
It is a picture I need but close my eyes to vividly witness
anew. There were two tables, one athwartships well aft, and the
other running pretty nearly down the whole length of the cabin.
The interior was lighted with elegant silver lamps, and along
the length of the ceiling there was a beautiful embellishment
of ferns, goldfish in globes, and so forth. On either hand went
a range of berths, the bulkheads richly inlaid, the panels
hand-painted, and there was many another little touch full
of grace and taste. Far aft, at the centre of the athwartship
table—his quaint, old-fashioned figure showing like a cameo
upon the dull ground of the bulkhead behind him—sat the
captain, talking to right and left, with a dry, kind smile
lying wrinkled upon his face like the meshes of a South African
spider’s web. On either side of him went a row of passengers,
down to the foot of the table that was over against the cuddy
front. The ladies’ dresses were handsome; we were an assemblage
of rich folks for the most part, and had thoroughly overhauled
our wardrobes that we might do fitting honour to this very
interesting occasion. Jewels sparkled in white ears, and upon
white wrists and fingers. We were not lacking in turbans and
feathers, in thick gold chains, immense brooches bearing
the heads of the living or of the departed. There was much
popping of champagne corks, much rushing about of stewards,
much laughter, and a busy undertone of talk. The memory of the
picture dwells in me with an odd pertinacity. I had shared
in more than one festive scene on board ship in my time, but
in none do I recall the significance which the framework of
vast ocean solitude outside, of the deep mystery of the wide
moonlit shadow, and the oppressive peace of the tropical night,
communicated to this one. It might have been the number of
the folks assembled; their gay, and in many instances, even
splendid attire, the essentially shore-going qualities of the
merry-making, clearly defining themselves in the heart of the
deep—like the sight of a house in a flood. In fact the scene
completely dominated all shipboard habits, and the thoughts
which grew out of them. It made every heave of the fabric upon
the weak, black, invisible swell a sort of wonder as though
some novel element were introduced; the familiar creak of a
bulkhead, the faint jar of the rudder upon its post caused one
to start as one would to such things ashore.
“You are refusing everything the stewards offer you, Mr.
Catesby,” said the colonel’s lady by my side. “You are in love.”
“I am in a fever, madam,” I replied: “the tropics usually
affect me as a profound passion. In fact I feel as if I could
drown myself.”
“Why make a voyage to India, then, Mr. Catesby? Is there not
the North-West Passage left to explore, with the great Arctic
Circle to keep ye cool?”
“Madam,” said I, “I perceive your husband in the act of rising
to make a speech.”
A short, fiery-faced Irishman, with whiskers like silver wires
projecting cat-like from his cheeks, stood up to propose the
captain’s health. Glasses were filled, and the little colonel
blazed away. When he had made an end (old Bow steadfastly
watching him all the while with a smile of mingled incredulity
and delight), the skipper’s health was drunk with cheers and
to the song of “He’s a jolly good fellow,” the air of which
was caught up by the ship’s company forward, and re-echoed to
the cuddy with hurricane lungs from the forecastle. Then old
Bow rose straight and unbending in his tightly-buttoned coat
on to his thin shanks; but at that moment there was a movement
of a little group of the stewards at my end of the table; the
colonel’s lady by my side was whispering with animation to
what was in those days called a “griffin,” a handsome young
fellow seated on her left; and being half dead with heat, and
in no temper to listen to old Bow, whose preliminary coughs and
slow gaze around the table threatened a very heavy bestowal
of tediousness, I slipped off my chair, sneaked through the
jumble of stewards, and in a moment was ascending the poop
ladder, breathing with delight the night atmosphere of the sea,
that tasted cold as a draught of mountain water after the hot,
food-flavoured air of the cuddy.
Forward the sailors had come to a stand, and were talking,
smoking, drinking, and eating by the will-of-the-wisp glare of
the few lanterns which hung that way. There was nobody aft,
saving the helmsman and the second officer, who had turned out
to relieve the chief mate that he might join the supper party.
He lay over the rail abreast of the wheel, and I could hear
him quietly singing. The lanterns burnt brightly; against the
brilliant atmospheric haze of moonshine to larboard—_larboard_
was then the word—the bunting which walled the poop glistened
like oiled paper. The monotonous voice of old Bow was still
returning thanks; again and again his deep sea notes were
broken by loud cheers. The life below, the speechifying and the
huzzaing there, the brightness of the light, the frequent chink
of glasses, put a wild sort of mocking look into the emptiness
of this deck with its lanterns swaying to the roll of the ship,
and the motionless figure of the steersman showing unreal, like
some image of the fancy, down at the end of the vessel, through
the vista of bunting and kaleidoscopic light and white awning
framing a star-studded square of dark ether over the taffrail.
Yet I still wanted air. The poop was smothered up with flags
and canvas; the cross-jack was furled, spanker brailed up,
and the mainsail hung from its yard in festoons to the grip
of its gear. There was no wing of canvas therefore near the
deck to fan a draught along, and so it came into my head to
jump aloft and see what sort of coolness of dew and dusk were
to be had in the maintop. I got on to the rail and laid hold
of the main shrouds, and leisurely travelled up the ratlines.
Methought it was as good as climbing a hill for the change of
temperature the ascent gave me. The iron of the futtock shrouds
went through and through me in a delicious chill, and with the
smallest possible effort I swung myself over the rim of the
top and stood upon the platform, rapturously drinking in the
gushings of air which came in little gusts to my face out of
the pendulum beat of the great maintopsail against the mast to
the tender swing of the tall fabric.
If ever you need to know what a deep sense of loneliness is
like, go aloft in a dead calm when the shadow of the night
lies heavy upon the breathless ocean, and from the altitude of
top, cross-tree or yard, look down and around you! The spirit
of life is always strong in the breeze or in the gale of wind.
There are voices in the rigging: there is the organ note of the
billow flung foaming from the ship’s side; there is a tingling
vitality in the long floating rushes of the fabric bursting
through one head of yeast into another. All this is company,
along with the spirit shapes of the loose scud flying wild, or
the sociable procession of large, slow clouds. But up aloft
in such a clock-calm as lay upon the deep that night you are
_alone_! and the lonelier for the distant sounds which rise
from the decks—the dim laugh, the faint call, liker to the
memories of such thing than the reality.
The body of the ship lay thin and long far beneath me like a
black plank, pallid aft with the spread of awning, with an
oblong haze of light in the main hatch where the grating was
lifted, and dots of weak flame from the lanterns forward,
resembling bulbous corposants hovering about the forecastle
rail. The ship’s hull, by the broad raining of the moonshine,
was complexioned to the aspect of the leaf of the silver
tree when lighted by the stars. Yet as she slightly rolled,
breaking the black water from her side into ripples, you saw
the phosphor starting and winking in the ebony profound there,
like the reflection of sheet-lightning. Exquisitely lulling
was the tender pinion-like flapping of the light, moonlit
canvas, soaring spire-fashion in ivory spaces high above my
head, with the pattering of dew falling from the cloths as they
swayed. A sound of thin cheering from the cuddy floated to me;
presently a fiddle struck up somewhere forwards, and a manly
voice began _Tom Bowline_. Now, thought I, if they would only
strip the poop of its awning, that I might see them dancing by
the lantern light when supper was over, and they had fallen to
caper-cutting afresh! What a scene of pigmy revelry _then_!
What a vision of Lilliputian enjoyment!
I seated myself Lascar-fashion and lighted a cigar. Could I
have distinguished the figure of a midshipman below I should
have hailed him, and sent down the end of a line for a draught
of seltzer and brandy. But the repose up here, the dewy
coolness, the royal solitude of the still, majestic night, with
sentinel stars drowsily winking along the sea-line, and the
white planet of the moon sailing northwards into the west amid
the wide eclipse of its own soft silver glory, were all that my
fevered being could pray for.
It is as likely as not that after a little I was nodding
somewhat drowsily. I recollect that my cigar went out, and
that on sucking at it and finding it out I would not be at
the trouble of lighting it again. I say I might have been
half-asleep sitting, still Lascar-fashion, with my back against
the head of the lower-mast, when on a sudden, something—soft,
indeed, but amazingly heavy—struck me full on the face and
chest, and fell upon my knees where it lay like a small
feather-bed. But for my back being supported, I must have been
stretched at full length and, for all I know, knocked clean
overboard, or, worse still, hurled headlong to the deck.
[Illustration]
I was so confounded by the shock and the blow that for some
moments I sat goggling the object, that lay as lead upon my
knees, like a fool. I then threw it from me, and stood up. It
fell where a slant of moonshine lay clear upon the side of the
top, and I perceived that it was a big sea-bird, as large as a
noddy, white as snow saving the margin of its wings, which were
of a velvet black. It had a long, curved beak, and I gathered
from the look of one of its pinions, which overlaid the
body as though broken, that its width of wing must have come
proportionately very near to that of the albatross. I could see
by the moonshine that the eyes were closing by the slow drawing
down of a white skin. The creature did not stir. I stood
staring at it full five minutes, gripping the topmast rigging
to provide against its rolling me out of the top should it rise
suddenly and strike out with its wings, but there was no stir
of life in it. It was then that I caught sight of something
which seemed to glitter in the thick down upon its breast like
a dewdrop on thistledown. It was a little square case of white
metal, apparently a tobacco-box, secured to the bird’s neck.
By this time the passengers had come up from supper, and were
dancing again on the poop. I could see nothing for the awning,
but the music was audible enough, and I could also catch the
sliding sounds of feet travelling over the hard planks, and the
gay laughter of hearts warmed by several toasts. The Jacks were
also at work forward. An occasional note of tipsy merriment, I
would think, rose up from that part of the ship; but there was
no lack of earnestness in the toe and heeling there; the slap
of the sailors’ feet upon the decks sounded like the clapping
of hands; and I could just catch a glimpse of the figure of the
fiddler in the obscurity which overlaid the booms quivering and
swaying as he sawed, as though the noise he made was driving
him crazy.
I seized the big bird by the legs and found its weight by
no means so considerable as I should have supposed from the
blow it dealt me. So, tightly binding its webbed feet with my
pocket-handkerchief, that they might serve me as a handle,
I dropped with this strange, dead sea-messenger through the
wide square of the lubber’s hole into the main shrouds, and
leisurely descended. The chief mate stood at the head of the
starboard poop ladder as I reached the rail.
“Hillo!” he called out, “good sport there, Mr. Catesby. What
star have you been shooting over pray? And what _is_ it, may I
ask? _turkey?_”
A shout of this sort was enough to bring everybody running
to look. The music ceased, the dancing abruptly stopped. In
a moment I was surrounded by a crowd of ladies and gentlemen
shoving and exclaiming as they gathered about the skylight upon
which I had laid the big sea-fowl.
“What is it, Mr. Catesby? My stars! a handsome bird surely,”
exclaimed Captain Bow.
“Oh, Captain,” cried a young lady, “is the beautiful creature
dead really?”
“See!” shouted a military man, “the creature’s breast is
decorated with a crucifix. No, damme, it’s a trick of the
light. What is it, though?”
“A silver pouncebox, I declare,” exclaimed a tall, stout lady,
with a knowing nod of the feather in her head.
“A sailor’s nickel tobacco-box more like, ma’am,” observed the
mate, “with some castaway’s writing inside, or that bird’s a
crocodile.”
“Let’s have the story of the thing, Mr. Catesby,” said the
captain.
I briefly stated that I had ascended to the maintop to breathe
the cool air up there and that whilst I was nodding the bird
had dashed against me and fallen dead across my knees.
“Oh, how dreadful!” “Oh how interesting!” “Oh, I wonder the
fright didn’t make you faint, Mr. Catesby!” and so on, and so
on from the young ladies.
“Shall I cast the seizing of the box adrift, sir?” said the
mate.
“Ay,” responded the captain.
The officer with his knife severed the laniard of sennit and
made to lift the lid of the box. But this proved a long job,
inexpressibly vexatious to the thirsty expectations of the
onlookers owing to the lid fitting so tightly as to resist, as
though soldered, the blade of the knife. When opened at last,
there was disclosed, sure enough, inside, a piece of paper
folded, apparently a leaf from a logbook.
“Bring a lantern, some one,” roared the mate.
Some one held a light close to the officer, who exclaimed,
after opening the sheet and gazing at it a little, “Any lady or
gentleman here understand Spanish?”
“I do,” exclaimed the handsome young “griffin” who had sat next
to the colonel’s lady at table.
“Will you kindly translate this then?” said the mate, handing
him the letter.
“It’s French,” said the young fellow; “no matter; I can read
French.”
He ran his eye over the page, coughed, and read aloud as
follows:—
“_La Mulette_, June 12th, 18—. This brig was dismasted in a
hurricane ten days since. Three of us survive. At the time
of our destruction our latitude was 8° south, and longitude
81° 10’ east. Should this missive fall into the hands of any
master or mate of a ship he is implored in the name of God and
of the Holy Virgin to search for and to succour us. He will be
richly——”
“Last words illegible,” said the young fellow, holding the
paper close to his nose.
“Humph!” exclaimed Captain Bow. He hummed over the latitude and
longitude, and addressing the mate said, “The wreck should not
be far off, Mr. Pike.”
“Oh, captain, _will_ you search for the poor, poor creatures?”
cried one of the younger of the married ladies.
“Twelfth of June the date is, hey?” said the captain, “and this
is the eighteenth. In six days the deluge, madam—at sea. Well,
we shall keep a bright look-out, I promise you. D’ye want to
keep the bird, Mr. Catesby?”
“No,” said I, “the box will suffice as a memorial.”
“Then, Mr. Pike, let it be hove overboard,” said the captain.
“Strike up ‘_Tom Bowline_’ for its interment,” cried the little
Irish Colonel, “‘_Faithful below he did his duty_’ you know.
Nearly knocked poor Catesby overboard, though. What is it, a
Booby?”
“How _can_ ye be so rude, Desmond?” said his wife.
“’Tis the bird I mane, my love,” he answered.
The girls would not let it be hove overboard for a good bit.
They hung over the snow-white creature caressing its delicate
down and strong feathers with fingers whose jewels glittered
upon the plumage like raindrops in moonlight. However ere long
the music started anew. The people that still hovered about the
bird drew off, and the mate sneaking the noble creature to the
side quietly let it fall.
Well, next day, I promise you, this incident of the bird gave
us plenty to talk about. In fact it even swamped the memory of
the dance and the supper, and again and again you would see
one or another of the ladies sending a wistful glance round
the sea-line, in search of the dismasted brig—as often looking
astern as ahead, whilst one or two of the young fellows amongst
us crept very gingerly aloft, holding on as they went as though
they would squeeze all the tar out of the shrouds, just to
make sure that there was nothing in sight. However, there was
a professional look-out kept forward. I heard the captain give
directions to the officer of the watch to send a man on to
the fore-royal yard from time to time to report if there was
anything in view; but as to altering his course with the chance
of picking up the Frenchman, _that_ was not to be expected in
old Bow, whose business was to get to Bombay as fast as the
wind would blow him along; and indeed, seeing that the _Ruby_
had already been hard upon four months from the river Thames,
you will suppose that, concerned as we might all feel about the
fate of _La Mulette_, the softest-hearted amongst us would have
been loth to lose even a day in a search that was tolerably
certain to prove fruitless—as the mate proved to a group of us
whilst he stood pointing out our situation and the supposed
position of the brig upon a chart of the Indian Ocean lying
open upon the skylight.
We got no wind till daybreak of the morning following
the dance, and then a pleasant air came along out of
south-south-east, which enabled the _Ruby_ to expand her
stunsails and she went floating over the long sapphire swells
of the fervid ocean under an overhanging cloud of cloths which
whitened the water to starboard of her, till it looked like
a sheet of quicksilver draining there. This breeze held and
shoved the ponderous bows of the Indiaman through it at the
rate of some four or five miles in the hour. So we jogged
along, till it came to the fourth day from the date of my
adventure in the maintop. The fiery breeze had by this time
crept round to off the starboard bow, and the ship was sailing
along with her yards as fore and aft as they would lie. It was
a little before the hour of noon. The captain and mates were
ogling the sun through their sextants on either hand the poop,
for the luminary hung pretty nearly over the royal truck with
a wake of flaming gold under him broadening to our cutwater,
so that the _Ruby_ looked to be stemming some burning river of
glory flowing through a strange province of dark blue land.
Suddenly high aloft from off the maintop-gallant-yard—whose arm
was jockeyed by the figure of a sailor doing something with the
clew of the royal—came a clear, distant cry of “Sail ho!” and I
saw the man levelling his marline-spike at an object visible to
him a little to the right of the flying-jibboom end.
“Aloft there!” bawled the mate, putting his hand to the side of
his mouth, “how does she show, my lad?”
“’Tis something black, sir,” cried the man, making a binocular
glass of his fists. “’Tis well to the starboard of the dazzle
upon the water. It is too blinding that way to make sure.”
“Something black!” shouted the little colonel, whose Christian
name was Desmond, “_La Mulette_, Captain Bow, without doubt.
Anybody feel inclined to bet?”
Some wagering followed, whilst I stepped below for a telescope
of my own, and then went forward and got into the fore-rigging,
with the glass slung over my shoulders. There was no need to
ascend above the top. I levelled the telescope when I gained
that platform, and instantly saw the object with a handbreadth
of the gleam of the blue sea past her, showing that she was
well this side of the horizon from the elevation of the
foremast, and that she would be visible from the poop in a
little while. There was but a very light swell on; the spires
of the _Ruby_ floated steadily through the blue atmosphere. I
had no difficulty in commanding the object therefore, and the
powerful lenses of my telescope brought her close. It was a
wreck, a sheer hulk indeed, and without a shadow of a doubt _La
Mulette_. Her masts were gone, though a fragment of bowsprit
remained. Whole lengths of her bulwark were apparently crushed
flat to the covering-board; nevertheless, the hulk preserved
a sort of rakish aspect, a piratical sheer of long, low side.
“Let her prove what she will,” thought I, “I am a Dutchman if
yonder craft hasn’t carried a bitter and poisonous sting in her
head and tail in her time.”
They had “made” eight bells on the poop, and the mellow chimes
were sounding upon the quarter-deck, and echoing in the silent
squares of canvas, as I descended the rigging and made my way
aft. I told Captain Bow that the craft ahead was a hulk, and
without doubt _La Mulette_; on hearing which the passengers
went in a rush to the side and stood staring as though the
object was close aboard, some of them pointing and swearing
they could see her, though at the rate at which we were shoving
through it she was a fair hour and a half yet behind the
horizon from the altitude of the poop.
However, when I came up from tiffin some little while before
two o’clock, the hulk lay bare upon the sea over the starboard
cat-head, with a light like the flash of a gun breaking from
her wet black side to the languid roll of her sunwards, and a
crowd of steerage-passengers and sailors forward staring at
her. At any time a wreck at sea, washing about in the heart of
some great ocean solitude, will appeal with solemn significance
to the eye of one sailing past it. What dreadful tragedy has
she been the little theatre of? you wonder. You speculate upon
the human anguish she memorializes, upon the dark and scaring
horrors her shape _may_ entomb. But it is a sight to appeal
with added force to people who have been at sea for many long
weeks, without so much as the glimpse of a sail for days at a
time to break the enormous monotony of the ocean, or to furnish
a fugitive human interest to the ever-receding sea-line—that
most mocking of all earthly limitations.
“Anybody see any signs of life aboard of her?” asked Captain
Bow. “My sight is not what it was.”
There were many sharp young eyes amongst us, and some powerful
glasses; but there was nothing living to be seen. She looked
to have been a vessel of about two hundred and fifty tons. Her
copper sheathing rose to the bends, and was fresh and bright.
She had apparently been pierced for ten guns, but this could
be only conjecture, seeing that her bulwarks had been torn to
pieces by the fall of her spars. There was a length of topmast,
or what-not, riding by its gear alongside of her, with a raffle
of canvas and running rigging littering the fore-part. Her
wheel stood and her rudder seemed sound. She was flush-decked,
but all erections such as caboose, companion, and so forth were
gone. Yet she sat with something of buoyancy on the water, and
her rolling was without the stupefaction you notice in hulls
gradually filling. As her stern lifted, the words, _La Mulette,
Havre_, rose in long, white letters upon the counter, with a
sort of ghastliness in the blank stare of them by contrast with
the delicate blue of the sea. Old Bow hailed her loudly; then
the mate roared to her with the voice of a bull, but to no
purpose. I said to the second mate, who stood alongside of me
at the rail—
“Yonder to be sure is the ship from which the sea-bird brought
the letter the other night. There were three living men aboard
her a few days ago. Are they below, think you?”
“Been taken off, sir, I expect,” he answered. “Or dead of
hunger, or thirst, and lying corpses in the cabin. Or maybe
they drowned themselves. Mr. Pike’s hail was something to bring
a dying man out of his bunk to see what made it. No, sir,
yonder’s an abandoned craft or a coffin anyway.”
Some ladies standing near overheard this, and at once went to
work to induce the captain to bring the _Ruby_ to a stand,
and send a boat. I listened to them entreating him; he shook
his head good-naturedly, with a glance into the north-western
quarter of the sea. “Oh, but, dear captain,” the ladies
reasoned, “after that letter, you know, as though you were
appointed by Providence to receive it—surely, surely, you will
not sail away from that wreck without making quite sure there
is nobody on board her! Only conceive that the three poor
creatures may be dying in the cabin, that they may have heard
your cry and Mr. Pike’s, that they may be able even to _see_
this ship through a porthole, and yet be too weak to crawl on
deck to show themselves!” What followed was lost to me by the
second mate beginning to talk:—
“She’ll have been a French privateer,” he said to me. “What
a superb run, sir! Something in her heyday not to be easily
shaken of a merchantman’s skirts. Of course she’ll have thrown
all her guns overboard in the hurricane. Does the capt’n
mean to overhaul her, I wonder,” he continued, throwing a
look aloft. “He’ll have to bear a hand and make up his mind
or we shall be losing her anon in yonder thickness. Mark the
depression in the ocean line nor’-west, sir. D’ye notice the
swell gathers weight too, and there’s a dustiness in the face
of the sky that way that’s better than a hint that the Bay of
Bengal is not so many leagues distant ahead as it was a month
ago.”
He was rattling on in this fashion, more like one thinking
aloud than talking to a companion, when there was a sudden
clapping of hands among the ladies who surrounded the captain,
and at the same moment I heard him tell the mate to swing the
topsail to the mast and get one of the starboard quarter-boats
manned. All was then bustle for a few minutes, the mate
bawling, the sailors singing out at the ropes, men manœuvring
with the boats’ gripes and falls. I went up to the captain.
“Who has charge of the boat?” said I.
“Second mate,” he answered.
“May I accompany him, captain?”
“Certainly, Mr. Catesby. I will only ask you, should you board
her, to look alive. The weather shows a rather suspicious front
down there,” indicating with a nod of his head the quarter to
which the second mate had called my attention. “But, bless my
heart! there’ll be nothing to see, nothing worth sending for.
It is only to please the ladies, you know.”
I sprang into the boat as she swang at the davits.
It was a trip, a treat, a pleasant break for me; besides, my
being the first to receive the letter gave me a kind of title
as it were to the adventure.
“There’s room for others,” said the second mate standing erect
in the stern sheets with a wistful glance at a knot of pretty
faces at the rail.
There was no response from male or female. “Lower away now
lively, lads,” cried the mate. Down sank the boat, the blocks
were dexterously unhooked, out flashed the oars and away we
went.
I couldn’t have guessed what weight there was in this ocean
swell till I felt the volume of it from the low seat of the
ship’s quarter-boat. The _Ruby_ looked to be rolling on it as
heavily again as she seemed to have been when I was on her
deck, and the beat of her canvas against the mast rang in
volleys through the air like the explosion of batteries up
there. The wreck came and went as we sank and soared, and I
caught the second mate eying her somewhat anxiously as though
theorizing to himself upon the safest dodge to board her.
She was farther off than I should have deemed possible, so
deceptive is distance at sea, and though the five seamen pulled
cheerily, the job of measuring the interval between the two
craft, what with the voluminous heave of the swell running at
us, and what with the roasting sunshine that lay like a sense
of paralysis in one’s back bone, proved very tedious to my
impatience to come at the hulk and explore her. As we swept
round under her stern, supposing that her starboard side would
be clear of wreckage, I glanced at the _Ruby_ and saw that they
were clewing up her royals, and hauling down her flying jib
with hands on the cross-jack-yard rolling the sail up. There
were spars and a litter of trailing gear on either side the
hulk; every roll was a spiteful snapping at the ropes with a
drag of the floating sticks which sometimes made the water foam.
“We must board her astern,” said the mate “and stand by for a
handsome dip of the counter.”
Our approach was very cautious; indeed it was necessary to
manœuvre very gingerly indeed. We got on to the quarter, and
watching his chance the bow oarsman cleverly sprang through
the crushed rail as the deck buoyantly swang down to the heave
of the boat, carrying the end of the painter with him; the
mate followed, and I after a tolerably long interval, wanting
perhaps the nerve and certainly the practised limbs of the
sailors. In truth I may as well say here that I should have
stuck to the boat and waited for the mate’s report but for
the dislike of being laughed at when I returned. I very well
knew I should not be spared, least of all by those amongst the
passengers who would have forfeited fifty pounds rather than
quitted the ship.
The hull had a desperately wrecked look inboards with the
mess of ropes, staves, jagged ends, crushed rails, rents
manifesting the fury of the hurricane. I swept a glance along
in expectation of beholding a dead body, or, if you will, some
scarcely living though yet breathing man; but nothing of the
kind was to be seen. The mate hung his head over the companion
hatch from which the cover had been clean razed and peered
down, then shouted and listened. But no other sound followed
than the long moan and huge washing sob of the swell brimming
to the wash-streak with a dim sort of choking, gurgling noise
as of water streaming from side to side in the hold.
“Hardly worth while exploring those moist bowels, I think,
sir,” said the mate.
“Oh, yes,” said I, “if we don’t take a peep under deck what
will there be to tell? This is a quest of the ladies’ making,
remember, and it must be a complete thing or ‘stand by’ as you
sailors say.”
“Right you are, sir,” said he, “and so here goes,” and with
that he put his foot upon the companion ladder and dropped into
the cabin.
I followed at his heels, and both of us came to a stand at the
bottom of the steps whilst we stared round. There was plenty of
light to see by streaming down through the skylight aperture
and the hatch. The cabin was a plain, snuff-coloured room with
a few sleeping berths running forward, a rough table somewhat
hacked and cut about as if with the slicing of tobacco, a row
of lockers on either hand, a stand of firearms right aft and
some twenty cutlasses curiously stowed in a sort of brackets
under the ceiling or upper deck. Hot as it was above, the
cabin struck chill as though it were an old well. Indeed you
saw that it had been soused over and over again by the seas
which had swept the vessel, and there was a briny, seaweedy
flavour in the atmosphere of it that made you think of a cave
deep down in a sea-fronting cliff. We looked into the sleeping
berths going forward to where a moveable bulkhead stopped the
road. It was not easy to walk; the increasing weight of the
swell was defined by the heavy though comparatively buoyant
rolling of the hull. The deck went in slopes like the roof of
a house from side to side with now and again an ugly jerk that
more than once came near to throwing me when a sudden yawn
forced the dismasted fabric into a swift recovery.
“There’s nobody aft here, anyway,” said the mate; “no use
troubling ourselves to look for her papers, I think, sir.”
“No; but this is only one end of the ship,” I answered. “There
may be a discovery to make forward. Can’t we unship that
bulkhead there, and so get into the ’tween-decks?”
We laid hold of the frame, and after peering a bit, for this
part of the cabin lay in gloom, we found that it stood in
grooves, and without much trouble we slided it open, and the
interior to as far as a bulkhead that walled off a bit of
forecastle lay clear before us in the daylight shining through
the main-hatch. Here were a number of hammocks dangling from
the deck, and some score or more of seamen’s chests and bags
in heaps, some of them split open, with quantities of rough
wearing apparel scattered about, in so much that I never
could have imagined a scene of wilder disorder, nor one more
suggestive of hurry and panical consternation and delirious
headlong behaviour.
“Nobody here, sir,” said the mate.
“No,” I answered; “I suppose her people left her in their
boats, and that one of the wretches who were forced to remain
behind wrote the letter we received the other night.”
“At sea,” said the mate, “there is no imagining how matters
come about. I allow that the three men have been taken off
by some passing vessel. Anyway, we’ve done our bit, and the
capt’n, I expect, ’ll be waiting for us. Thunder! how she
rolls,” he cried, as a very heavy lurch sent us both reeling
towards the side of the craft.
“Hark!” cried I, “we are hailed from the deck.”
“Below there!” shouted a voice in the companion hatch. “They’ve
fired a gun aboard the Indiaman, sir, and have run the ensign
up half-mast high. The weather looks mighty queer, sir.”
“Ha!” cried the mate; “come along, Mr. Catesby.”
We walked cautiously and with difficulty aft, gained the
companion ladder and ascended. My instant glance went to
the _Ruby_. She had furled her mainsail and fore and mizzen
topgallant-sails, hauled down her lighter staysails and big
standing jib, and as I glanced at her a gun winked in a
quarter-deck port, and the small thunder of it rolled sulkily
up against the wind. In fact, whilst we were below, the breeze
had chopped clean round and the _Ruby_ was to leeward of the
wreck, with a very heavy swell rolling along its former course,
the wind dead the other way, beginning to whiten the ridges on
each huge round-backed fold, and a white thickness—a flying
squall of vapour it looked to me, with a seething and creaming
line of water along the base of it as though it was something
solid that was coming along—sweeping within half-a-mile of
the wreck right down upon us. The mate sent a look at it and
uttered a cry.
“Haul the boat alongside,” he shouted to the fellows in her.
“Handsomely now, lads. Stand by to jump into her,” he cried to
the seaman who had been the first to spring on board the wreck
with the end of the line.
They brought the boat humming and buzzing to the counter;
the sailor standing on the taffrail plumped into her like a
cannon-shot; ’twas wonderful he didn’t scuttle her. The mate
whipping the painter off the pin or whatever it was that it
had been belayed to, held it by a turn whilst he bawled to
me to watch my chance and jump. But the wreck lying dead in
the trough was rolling in a quite frenzied way, like a see-saw
desperately worked. Her movements, combined with the soaring
and falling of the boat, were absolutely confounding. I would
gather myself together for a spring and then, before I could
make it, the boat was sliding as it might seem to me twenty or
thirty feet deep and away.
“Jump, for God’s sake, sir!” cried the mate.
“I don’t mean to break my neck,” I answered, irritable with the
nervous flurry that had come to me with a sudden abominable
sense of incapacity and helplessness.
As I spoke the words, sweep! came the white smother off the sea
over us with a spiteful yell of wind of a weight that smote
the cheek a blow which might have forced the strongest to turn
his back. The hissing, and seething, and crackling of the
spume of the first of the squall was all about us in a breath,
and, in the beat of a heart, the _Ruby_, and the ocean all her
way vanished in the wild and terrifying eclipse of the thick,
silvery, howling, steam-like mist.
“By ——, I have done it _now_!” cried the mate.
The end of the painter had been dragged from his hand or he had
let it fall! And the wind catching the boat blew her over the
swell like the shadow of a cloud. The seamen threw their oars
over and headed for us, their faces pale as those of madmen.
“They’ll never stem this weather,” cried the mate; “follow me,
Mr. Catesby, or we are dead men.”
He tore off his coat, kicked off his boots and went overboard
without another word.
_Follow him!_ To the bottom, indeed! but nowhere else, for I
could not swim a stroke. But that was not quite it. Had I had
my senses I might have grasped the first piece of wreckage I
could put my hand upon and gone after him with it to paddle
and hold on to till I was picked up. But all this business
coming upon us so suddenly, along with the sudden blinding of
me by the vapour, the distracting yelling of the wind and the
sickening bewilderment caused by the wreck’s violent rolling,
seemed to have driven my wits clean out of my head. The boat
was scarcely more than a smudge in the thickness, vanishing and
showing as she swept up and rushed down the liquid acclivities,
held with her bow towards the hulk by the desperately-plied
oars of the rowers. The mate was borne down rapidly towards
her. I could just see three of the sailors leaning over the
side to drag him out of the water; the next instant the little
fabric had vanished in the thickness, helplessly and with
horrible rapidity blown out of sight the moment the men ceased
rowing to rescue their officer.
I do not know how long all this may have occupied; a few
minutes maybe sufficed for the whole of the tragic passage. I
stood staring and staring, incredulous of the truth of what had
befallen me, and then with an inexpressible sickness of heart I
flung myself down upon the deck under the lee of a little space
of bulwark, too dizzy and weak with the horror that possessed
me to maintain my footing on that wildly swaying platform.
I had met in my travels with but one specimen of such weather
as this; it was off the Cape of Good Hope to the westward; the
ship was under topmast and topgallant studding sails, when,
without an interval of so much as twenty seconds of calm, she
was taken right aback by a wind that came with the temper of
half a gale in it, whilst as if by magic a fog, white and dense
as wool, was boiling and shrieking all about her.
For some time my consternation was so heavy that I sat
mechanically staring into that part of the thickness where the
boat had disappeared, without giving the least heed to the sea
or to the wreck. It was _then_ blowing in earnest, the ocean
still densely shrouded with flying vapour, and an ugly bit of a
sea racing over the swell that rolled its volumes to windward.
A smart shock and fall of water on to the forecastle startled
me into sudden perception of a real and imminent danger. The
fore-scuttle was closed, but the main and companion hatchways
yawned open to the weather; there were no bulwarks worth
talking of to increase the wreck’s height of side, and to
hinder the free tumbling of the surge on to the decks, so if
the wind increased and the sea grew heavier, the hulk must
inevitably fill and go down like a thunderbolt!
It would be idle to try to express the thoughts which filled
me. I was like one stunned: now casting an eye at the sea to
observe if the billows were increasing, now with a heart of
lead watching the water frothing upon the deck, as the hull
heaved from one side to the other; then straining my sight
with a mad passion of eagerness into the vapour that shut off
all view of the ocean to within a cable’s length of me. There
was nothing to be done. Even could I have met with tarpaulins,
there was no sailor’s skill in me to spread and secure them
over the open hatches. However, when an hour had passed in this
way, I took notice of a small failure of the wind, though there
was no lightening of the impenetrable mist. The folds of the
swell had diminished, and the sea was running steadily; the
hull with her broadside dead in the trough, rose and fell with
regularity, and though at long intervals the surge struck her
bow, and blew in crystals over the head, or tumbled in scores
of bucketfuls upon the deck, nothing more than spray wetted the
after-part of her.