_HE SEES A STRANGE LIGHT._
Well, the sailors made a great pet of this immense monkey, who proved a
very inoffensive, gentle, well-tamed creature, abounding in such tricks
as a rough forecastle would educate a monkey in. The Jacks tried him
with a pipe of tobacco, and he was observed to take several whiffs with
an air of great relish, though he put the pipe down long before the bowl
was empty. Once, seeing a man shaving, he imitated the fellow to such
perfection as to show that he had been taught to feign to handle a razor;
whereupon the carpenter shaped a piece of wood to resemble a razor, with
which the monkey, whenever he was asked, would shave himself, pretending
to lather his beard, after, with his own hands, putting a little bit of
canvas under his chin. The sailors also discovered that the creature
could play the fiddle—that is to say, if you put two sticks in his hand
and told him to fiddle, he would adjust one of them to his shoulder, and
saw away with the other, making the most horrible faces the while, as
though ravished by the exquisite sounds he was producing.
Again and again would I stand watching him till the tears flowed from my
eyes. The sailors called him Old Jacob, dimly conceiving that was a good
name for anything with a white beard. But alas! the ocean had marked him
for her own, and poor Old Jacob did not live to see land again. His death
was very tragical, and the manner in which I was startled by it leaves
the incident, to this moment, very clear in my memory.
We had run out of the north-east trades, and were sweeping along over a
high sea before a strong breeze of wind. We had met with a bothersome
spell of baffling weather north of the equator, and the captain was now
“cracking on,” as the term goes, to make up for lost time, carrying a
main-royal, when, at an earlier season, he would have been satisfied with
a furled topgallant sail, and through it the _Lady Violet_ was thundering
with foam to the hawse-pipe, the weather-clew of her mainsail up, and the
foretop-mast staysail and jibs flapping and banging in the air over the
forecastle, where they were becalmed by the forecourse and topsail.
[Illustration: “WOULD SHAVE HIMSELF.”]
There was a sailor at work on the rigging low down on the fore-shrouds.
I had been watching him for some minutes, observing the carelessness of
his pose as he stood poised on a ratline, whilst I thought how utterly
hopeless would be the look-out of a man who should fall overboard into
the white smother roaring alongside; and I turned my back to walk aft,
when I heard a loud cry of “Man overboard!”
I looked; the fellow I had been watching had disappeared! I rushed to the
side and saw poor Old Jacob skimming along astern! He had his spectacles
and his cap on, and he was swimming like a man, striking out with vigour.
He swept to the height of a sea, and his poor white-whiskered face most
tragically comical with its spectacles stood out clear as a cameo for a
breath, ere it vanished in the hollow. It then disappeared for good.
I glanced forward again and perceived the man whom I thought had fallen
into the sea climbing out of the forechains to the part of the rigging
where he had been at work.
The mate, coming forward, cried, “Who was it that sang out _man
overboard_?”
“I did, sir,” answered the sailor.
“Step aft!” said the mate.
The fellow dropped on to the deck and approached the officer.
“What do you mean,” cried the mate in a passion, “by raising over a
monkey such an alarm as _man overboard_?”
“I thought it was a man, sir,” answered the sailor. “I had caught sight
of him on the jibboom, and believed it was Bill Heenan.”
“What!” shouted the mate, “with those spectacles on?”
“I didn’t notice the spectacles, sir,” said the man; “I see a figure
out on the jibboom, and whilst I was looking the jib-sheet chucked him
overboard, and that’s why I sung out.”
The mate stared hard at the man, but seemed to think he was telling the
truth, on which he told him to go forward and get on with his work,
biting his underlip to conceal an expression of laughter, as he walked
towards the wheel.
That evening, in the second dog-watch, there was a fight between the
sailor, whose name was Jim Honeyball, and Bill Heenan. Bill had heard
that Jim had mistaken him for Old Jacob, and had told the mate so; and
thereupon challenged him to stand up like a man. There was a deal of
pummeling, much rolling about, encouraging cheers from the sailors, and
“language,” as it is called, on the part of the combatants; but neither
was much hurt.
Such was the end of the poor monkey; yet he seemed to have found a
successor in Bill Heenan, for, to the end of the voyage, the Irishman was
always called Old Jacob.
We were talking in the midshipmen’s berth over the loss of the monkey,
when Poole, the long midshipman, who was in my watch, spun us the
following yarn:—“I made my first voyage,” said he, “in a ship called
the _Sweepstakes_, to Madras, Calcutta, and Hong Kong. On our way home
we brought up off Singapore for a day on some business of cargo, of
which I forget the nature. I was standing at the gangway, my duty as
midshipman being to keep the ship’s side clear of loafers, when I saw a
large boat heading for us. She was like one of those surf-boats you see
at Madras. There were five fellows rowing her, and one chap steered with
a long oar. They were all darkies, naked to the waist. I was struck by
the manner in which one of them, as the boat approached, looked over the
shoulder at our ship. The others kept their eyes on their oars or gazed
over the stern; but this chap stared continuously behind him as the boat
advanced; by which I mean that he looked ahead, for of course a fellow
rows with his back upon the bow of a boat. They came alongside, and I
found that the men had a great number of monkeys to sell. I looked hard
at the fellow whose chin had been upon his shoulder as he rowed, and
was wondering what on earth sort of native he was, when, on a sudden, I
caught sight of his tail! He was a huge ape, of the size of a man—at all
events, of the size of his shipmates. He so much resembled the others
at a little distance that there was nothing wonderful in my not having
distinguished him quickly. He had pulled his oar with fine precision,
keeping time like one of the University Eight, and there had been nothing
odd about him at all, saving his manner of looking over his shoulder. The
others held up monkeys to show us, and, I tell you, I burst into a roar
of laughter when I saw this great ape pick up a bit of a marmozette and
flourish it up at me as if he would have me buy. In a very little while
the ship was full of monkeys. Almost every man amongst us bought one. I
chose a pretty little creature that slept in the clews of my hammock all
the way home; but he grew so tall and quarrelsome that my mother, when
I was absent last year, gave him away to an old gentleman, who shortly
afterwards, in the most mysterious manner, disappeared, together with the
monkey.”
“Where wath the mythtery?” asked Kennet.
“Well,” said Poole, “the notion was that the monkey had eaten up the
old gentleman, dressed himself up in his clothes, and gone to London to
consult a solicitor, with a view of contesting the old man’s will, as
being next of kin.”
We were gradually now drawing near home. The English Channel was no
longer so far off but that we could think of it as something within
reach of us. All my clothes had shrunk upon me, whence I might know that
I had grown much taller and broader than I was when I left England.
My face was dark with weather, the palms of my hands hard as horn with
pulling and hauling. I had the deep-sea rolling gait that is peculiar
to sailors, and, indeed, I had been transformed during the months I had
been away into as thorough a little “shellback” as was ever made of a
boy by old ocean. I was wonderfully hearty besides—had the appetite of a
wolf and the spirits of a young spaniel. I was equal to doing “my bit”
on board ship, whatever might be the job I was set to. I could put as
neat a bunt to the furl of the mizzen-royal as any lad aboard, knew how
to send the yard down, how to pass an earing—though I was too small, and
without sufficient strength, to jockey the yard-arm in reefing—was well
acquainted with all the parts of the rigging, and the various uses of the
complicated gear; could steer, make knots of twenty different kinds—in
short, I had picked up a great deal of sea knowledge of a working sort;
but I knew nothing of navigation beyond the art of bringing the sun down
to the horizon through a sextant, and working out a simple proposition of
latitude, for which I had to thank Mr. Cock; Captain Tempest taught me
nothing.
I was very eager to get home; I had never before been so long absent from
my parents. I was pining, too, for comforts which when at home I had made
nothing of, but which I would now think upon as the highest luxuries.
How often when hacking with a black-handled knife at a piece of iron-hard
salt junk and rapping the table with a biscuit to free the mouthful of
any stray weevil which might be lurking in the honeycombed fragment—how
often, I say, has the vision of my father’s table arisen before my eyes:
the basin of soup at which I have known myself to sometimes impatiently
turn up my nose; the fried sole or delicious morsel of salmon; the roast
leg of mutton or sirloin of beef, with its attendant vegetables—things
not to be dreamt of at sea—the jam tarts, the apple pies, the custards,
not to mention the dessert! Oh, how often has the lump of cold salt fat
pork or the mouthful of nauseous soup and bouilli come near to choking
me with those thoughts of breakfast, dinner, and supper at home, which
the odious nature of the food on our cabin table has excited in my hungry
imagination!
After we had crossed the parallels of the Horse Latitudes, as they are
called, we met with some strange weather: thick skies with a look of
smoke hanging about the horizon, sometimes the sun showing as a shapeless
oozing, like a rotten orange, a dusky green swell rolling up out of two
or three quarters at once, as it seemed, and shouldering one another into
a jumble of liquid hills which strained the ship severely with rolling,
making every tree-nail, bolt, and strong fastening cry aloud with a
voice of its own, whilst the masts were so wrung that you would have
expected them any minute to snap and fall away overboard.
Some of our passengers whom the mountainous seas of the Horn had not in
the least degree affected were now sea-sick; in fact, I heard of one lady
as lying below dangerously ill with nausea. The men declared it made them
feel squeamish to go aloft. I should have laughed at this in such salt
toughened Jacks as they but for an experience of my own; for being sent
to loose the mizzen topgallant sail, I was so oppressed with nausea on my
arrival at the cross-trees, that it was as much as I could do to get upon
the yard and cast the gaskets adrift. This was owing to the monstrous
inequalities of the ship’s movements, to the swift jerks and staggering
recoveries which seemed to displace one’s very stomach in one; added to
which was the close oppressive temperature, a thickness of atmosphere
that corresponded well with the pease-soup-like appearance of the ocean,
and that seemed to be explained by the sulphur-coloured, smoky sort of
sky that ringed the horizon.
It was on this same day, or rather in the night of it, during the first
watch, from eight o’clock to midnight, that a strange thing happened. It
was very dark, so black indeed that though you stood shoulder to shoulder
with a man you could see nothing of him. There was no wind, but a heavy
swell was running on whose murky, invisible coils the ship was violently
rolling. There was not a break of faintness, not the minutest spot of
light in the sky, whose countenance, with a scowl of thunder upon it,
seemed to press close to our wildly sheering mast-heads.
There was something so subduing in the impenetrable gloom, something that
lay with so heavy a weight upon the spirits, that the noisiest amongst us
insensibly softened his voice to a whisper when he had occasion to speak.
I particularly noticed this when some of the watch came aft to clew up
the main topgallant sail and snug the main sail with its gear; there was
no singing out at the ropes; instead of the hoarse peculiar songs sailors
are wont to deliver when they drag, the men pulled silently as ghosts,
and not a syllable fell from them that was audible to us when they were
upon the yard rolling the sail up.
[Illustration: “SUDDENLY SHONE OUT A LIGHT.”]
I was holding on to a belaying pin to steady myself when there suddenly
shone out a light upon the boom iron at the extremity of the main-yard.
It was of a greenish hue, sickly somewhat, so as to make one think of
a corpse-candle or a graveyard Jack-o’-lantern. It swayed as a bladder
would or as a soap-bubble might ere it soars from the pipe out of which
it is blown. It had some power of illuminating in spite of its wan
complexion, for I observed that it threw a very feeble light upon the
clew of the sail, and that, as the ship rolled the yard-arm on which it
shone towards the sea, the huge, round, ebony black swell mirrored it in
the shape of a dull star like a phosphoric jelly-fish.
I had never seen such a sight before, nor indeed had I ever heard of the
like of such a thing. I was standing close to Poole at the time, and he
said to me—
“What do you think it?”
“Why, but what _is_ it?” I responded.
“A spirit of the sea!” he exclaimed in a sepulchral voice; “the ghost of
a dead sailor who has grown tired with flying and is resting himself on
the yard-arm. The souls of dead seamen always carry lanterns with them to
show them the road on dark nights after this pattern.”
As he spoke the fiery exhalation disappeared.
“Ha! he’s started again!” cried Poole. “He’ll meet with another ship
presently and take another spell of rest.”
“A very good explanation, Mr. Poole,” exclaimed the voice of the mate,
“but not strictly scientific, sir.”
He had been standing within earshot of us, yet was utterly
indistinguishable in the blackness.
“The light, Rockafellar,” continued the officer, “is what is called by
sailors a corposant. It is supposed that the points of iron on board
a ship kindle into a flame some quality of electricity in the air. I
daresay it will show again in a minute. Yes, as I thought.... It is on
the topsail yard-arm now.”