I SEND MY LETTER.
At sunrise nothing was to be seen of the schooner, though a seaman was
sent on to the main royal yard with a telescope, where he swept the sea
in all directions.
We crossed the equator before noon and drove into the South Atlantic,
with a pleasant breeze of wind out of the east. A day or two of such
sailing would send us clear of the zone of calms and catspaws, and then,
with the southeast trade wind strong on the larboard bow, the yards
braced forward, the blue seas breaking in foam from the sides, we might
hope for a smart run southwest, with weather enough to follow to bring
that wonderful island of Greaves within reach of a few days of us;
instead of a few months of us, as it had been and still was.
I considered very seriously whether I should repeat to the captain my
brief conversation with Yan Bol--that chat, I mean, which I have related
at the end of the last chapter. For my own part I could not comfortably
settle my views of Yan Bol, yet I saw nothing to object to in the man.
Nothing could I recollect him saying of a kind to excite misgiving.
Though he was acting as second mate, he associated with the seamen as
one of them, slept and ate with them in their forecastle, and yet had
their respect. This I observed and thought well of. He was a bold and
hearty seaman--a practical sailor. Of navigation he knew nothing;
indeed, he once owned that he could never understand how it happened
that the progress of a ship altered time; the reason, he said, had been
explained to him on several occasions, but it was all the same--it was a
mystery “und it vhas vonderful dot any man vhas born mit brains to
understand him.”
And yet I could not arrive at any conclusion to satisfy me. “Am I
influenced almost unconsciously against him,” thought I, “by his Dutch
airs and graces? Am I moved to an inward, secret dislike by a certain
freedom of speech and accost, by a sort of familiarity I have noticed
among Germans, and thought particularly detestable in Germans?” though I
had heretofore found such Dutchmen as I had encountered too stodgy and
stolid, too insipid and inexpressive, too torpid in mind and laborious
in perception to be readily capable of vexing one by that kind of
freedom and easiness of address and bearing which makes you thirsty to
kick the beast whose burden it is. No, I could not trace my doubts of
Yan Bol to my dislike of his behavior to me. Indeed, I could not trace
any doubts at all. And yet I never thought of him quite comfortably. If
Greaves’ dollar-ship was no vision of his slumbers, if Greaves’ chests
of milled silver were veritably aboard _La Perfecta Casada_ in the cave
he had described, then we should be a rich brig when we set sail from
the island; we should need an honest crew to carry us safely home. Was
Yan Bol honest? If a doubt of him arose he was the one man of the whole
ship’s company whom it would be Greaves’ policy to get rid of as soon as
possible, because he was the one man of all our little ship’s company
the most capable, should he take the trouble to exert himself, of
obtaining an ascendancy over his mates, and of directing them for good
or ill as he decided.
These being my thoughts I resolved to repeat to Greaves the questions
which Bol had put to me touching the money in the island ship. He
listened to me anxiously and attentively.
“I hope that man will not go wrong,” said he, when I had concluded; “I
like him.”
“He is a good man in the forecastle-sense of the word,” I answered.
“I like him,” he repeated. “He controls his mates; he is the sort of man
to keep them straight if he chooses, and I am almost resolved to make
him choose, by promising him a handsomer share than his bond states--not
at the expense of the crew, no; but by drawing on my own and the ship’s
share. Tulp must do what I want when I plan for the interests of all.”
“That is a hammer to drive the nail home,” said I, “for this has to be
considered, captain; your cases of dollars will be handed over the side.
The men are not fools; they will count them and roughly calculate the
value of every case. As we sail home there will be much talk forward.
The amount of money on board will, of course, be exaggerated. Bol will
say, ‘I am second mate and boatswain, and my share is to come out of
sixty-one thousand dollars, eleven sharing. How much does the Englishman
get, the stranger that did not sail with us from Amsterdam, who is
merely a shipwrecked man, and not one of us?’ He will wish to know how
much, and he may breed trouble if he does not learn how much. On the
other hand, if he gets the truth and compares it with _his_ share----”
“All this has been in my head. I will confirm him in such honesty as he
has by a written undertaking to pay him more dollars.” He added, after
thinking a little while, “I wish he had not asked you those questions.
But the fellow may doubt my story. All hands may doubt it.” He gazed at
me significantly for a moment, and continued: “He might have hoped to
get you to tell him something that he could repeat to the others, and
that would hearten ’em. Should he question you again, encourage him to
talk.”
“Very good, sir.”
“You are not to know the value of the freight of dollars.”
“I will know nothing when I converse with him.”
“But I shall want you to persuade him that my yarn is true,” said he
with a faint smile, but with a gleam in his eyes which neutralized that
weak expression of good humor.
The relations between the master and the mate--between the captain and
the lieutenant--instantly made themselves felt by me. I looked him in
the face awaiting instruction.
“You will be able to convince him that my yarn is true,” said he.
“He has all the reasons which I have for believing it.”
“Do you believe it?”
“Why, yes! Mynheer Tulp’s promotion of this voyage is all the proof that
one wants.”
He cast his eyes upon the deck, and a light smile twitched his lips.
When he next spoke it was to ask me some question that had no relation
to the subject we had been conversing upon.
After this I created opportunities for Yan Bol to question me. I
lingered when he came on deck to relieve me. I sought to coax him into
asking about the ship in the cavern, by loitering in his company instead
of at once going below, and by speaking of the voyage, of the Galapagos
Islands, of the uncharted island to which we were bound; but his mind
appeared to have suddenly and completely turned round; what was before
an eager, was now a blank countenance; indeed, he would look at me
suspiciously when I talked of the voyage and the dollar-ship as though I
had a stratagem in my head which must oblige him to mind his eye.
Thereupon I ceased to trouble myself to attempt to convince Yan Bol that
the captain’s story was true, and that our errand was as real as a
silver dollar itself is; and it was as well, perhaps, that this Dutchman
found me no occasion to tax my wits by the invention of proofs for what
I could by no means prove to myself. I did not like Greaves’ looks when
he talked of his dollar-ship; I did not understand his half-smiles at
such times; I was puzzled by the dreamy expression of his eye, and by
the light that had kindled in his gaze when he asked me, with an
unspoken doubt behind his words, to convince Yan Bol that his story was
true, in order that the crew might be satisfied.
It was a few days after my chat with him about the Dutch boatswain’s
questions that he asked me if I had succeeded in satisfying the fellow
that there was a vessel, with a lazarette full of dollars, locked up in
an island off the Western American coast? I told him that the man had
bouted ship and was on the other tack now; that he shifted his helm when
I approached him, exhibited no further curiosity, but, on the contrary,
shrunk from the subject as though it vexed him. He made, or seemed to
make, little of this. But that same evening, when I was sitting at
supper with him, he said:
“Yan Bol will go to the devil for me now. I walked with him for an hour
this afternoon, while you were below. He was frank. I like him none the
less for being frank. He is a bit jealous of you. Mind ye, he said not
one word against you, Fielding, not a syllable--though at the first
syllable I should have brought him up, all standing. But the spirit of
jealousy was strong in his remarks; it smelt in his words like a dram in
a man’s breath. ’Tis natural. You are an Englishman--he is a darned
Dutchman. You came aboard through the cabin window, and his countryman,
Van Laar, goes out as you walk in. But a plague upon forecastle
passions! He was frank, as I have said, and told me that he had some
doubts of the truth of my story, and that the rest of the men had not
yet made up their minds about it. ‘And what the deuce,’ said I, ‘is it
to you or to the men whether my story be true or false? You were engaged
for the voyage. It was a question of wages with you, and your wages will
be paid.’ ‘Dot vhas right,’ said this Dutchman. But I talked of the
_Casada_, nevertheless, described her in the cave, gave him, in short,
the story of my discovery that it might go the rounds forward; and then
I told him that I had made up my mind to increase his share of the
booty; his share of the sixty-one thousand dollars, I said, was to be
according to his rating, which was the highest next yours; but I added
that if he chose to work with a will and aid me and you to the utmost to
carry this brig in safety to the Downs, I would give him a written
undertaking to pay him a percentage on the whole value of the property,
which sum would be over and above what he would receive in money as
wages and as his share in the sixty-one thousand dollars.”
“What did he say to that, sir?”
“He smiled, he thanked me, he let fall several Dutch words, swore that I
was the finest captain that he had ever sailed under, and that his
earnings out of this voyage would set him up for life in his native
town. He was a fairly trustworthy fellow before. He is as honest now as
is to be reasonably expected of human flesh. I am satisfied; and you
need give yourself no further trouble, Fielding, to convince him that my
story is true.”
Well, thought I, this, no doubt, is as it should be, though it seemed to
me that Greaves was making too much of Yan Bol, too much of his own
anxieties, indeed, sinking the skipper in the adventurer, and a little
heedless of Nelson’s axiom that at sea much must be left to chance. If,
thought I, he is cocksure that his ship and her dollars are where he
says he beheld them, then how can it matter to him one jot whether his
crew believe in his story or not? But conjecture and speculations of
this sort were to no purpose. In a few weeks the problem would be
solved; either the money would be aboard, or we should have found the
ship broken up and everything gone out of her to the bottom--to such
bottom as she rested upon, twenty or thirty feet, maybe, but as
unsearchable to us, without diving equipment, as the floor of the
mid-Atlantic; or we should have discovered that there was no ship and no
island, and that ours had been the expedition of a dream. And still no
matter, I would think. There are wages to be pocketed in the end, and I
can only be worse off _then_ by being so many months older than I was
when I was fished up out of the Channel by the people of the brig.
The letter I had written to my uncle Captain Round, when I agreed to
sail in the _Black Watch_ in the room of Van Laar, I had not yet been
able to send. I forgot all about that letter when I went aboard
Tarbrick’s ship to arrange for the reception of the Dutch mate, and I
had not witnessed in the little _Rebecca_, with her two of a crew, a
very likely opportunity for communicating with Uncle Joe. But when we
were somewhere about six degrees south we fell in with a large snow
homeward bound. She was from round the Horn and proceeding direct to the
Thames. I had several selfish as well as respectable and honorable
motives for desiring to send the news of my being alive to my uncle, not
to mention the pleasure it would give him and my aunt and cousin to
learn that I was alive; I was down in his will for what you might call a
trifle, but such a trifle as would prove very acceptable to me should it
come to my having to continue the sea life for a living. There were
other reasons why I desired that my uncle should know that I was alive,
and let the one I have given suffice.
Our meeting with that snow was rendered memorable by a phenomenal
caprice of wind. It was blowing a light breeze off our starboard bow;
the hour was about two, the sky was like a sheet of pale blue silver,
here and there shaded with curls and plumes and streamers of
high-floating yellow-colored cloud. There was wind enough to keep the
ocean trembling, but at intervals, and at fairly regular intervals,
there ran north and south a number of glassy swathes, oil-calm paths
from the remotest of the northern airy reaches to the most distant of
the recesses of the south. It was my watch below when we sighted the
sail; I had dined. It was soul-consumingly hot in the cabin, and I came
on deck to smoke a pipe and lounge amid the brine-sweet draughts of air,
and in the pleasant shadows cast upon the white and glaring planks by
the quietly breathing sails. Greaves was below. Presently Yan Bol, who
was in charge of the brig, approached me. I had watched him staring at
the approaching vessel through the ship’s telescope, his vast chest
rising and falling under his extended arms, which, clothed as he
went--in pilot cloth, though the sun made him no shadow--looked as big
as the thighs of an ordinary man. He approached me and said:
“Mr. Fielding, didt you belief in impossibilities?”
“No, Bol, I don’t; do you?”
“By de tunder of Cott, den, I shall for effermore after dis, onless,
indeedt, I hov lost der eyes I schipped mit at Amsterdam.”
“What’s the matter?” said I.
“Coom dis vay, Mr. Fielding, und you see for yourself.”
He crossed the deck. I followed him. He put the telescope into my hands
and leveled a square fat forefinger at the sail that was now at no great
distance. I viewed the vessel through the glass, but saw nothing
remarkable. She was a motherly tub of a ship, with big topsails and
short topgallant masts, and a cask-like roll in the sway of her whole
fabric as the silver blue undulations took her.
“Well, what is there to see?”
“Tunder of God?” cried he in Dutch. “Lok, Mr. Fielding, how her yards
vhas braced.”
And now, indeed, I beheld what Jack might fairly call a miraculous
sight. The wind, as I have said, was off our starboard bow, and we were,
therefore, braced up on what is termed the starboard tack; but the
stranger that was coming along was also braced up on the starboard tack,
showing that she, like ourselves, had the wind on her starboard bow. For
what did our two postures signify? This--that the wind with us was
directly west-southwest, while the wind with the stranger was directly
east-northeast. Here, then, were two vessels within a couple of miles of
each other, so heading that one would pass the other within a
biscuit-toss; here, I say, were two vessels steering in exactly opposite
directions, but each braced up on the same tack, and each with the wind
off the same bow!
“May der toyfell seize me if I like him!” exclaimed Bol, looking aloft
at our canvas and then around the sea.
The sailors at work about the deck stared aloft and then at the
approaching ship. They bit hard upon the tobacco in their cheeks. One of
the Dutchmen called to an English seaman in the fore rigging:
“Dis vhas der ocean of Kingdom Coom. Der anchells vhas not far off vhen
efery schip hov a vindt for himself.”
The English sailor, with an uneasy motion of his body, swang off the
rigging to spit clear into the sea.
“Arter this, mate,” he called down to the Dutchman, “I shall give up
drinking water when I gets ashore.”
I looked into the cabin skylight, and, seeing Greaves at the table,
begged him to step on deck and behold a strange sight. By this time both
vessels had hoisted their ensigns, and each flag blew in an opposite
direction.
“I have heard of this sort of thing,” said Greaves, “but never before
saw it. Lord, now, if every ship could have a wind of her own, as we and
yonder craft have! There would be no weather gauge then--no complicated
dodging for advantageous positions. Ha! Look at that now. She has taken
our wind!”
The sails of the approaching vessel fell and trembled. A minute later,
the yards were slowly swung, and the canvas shone like white satin as it
swelled to the same breeze that was breathing off our bow.
“I should be glad to send my letter home by that ship,” said I.
“It may be managed,” he exclaimed, “and without bothering to back yards
or lower a boat. Get your letter.”
I ran to my berth and returned with the letter, which Greaves posted for
me on the passing ship in the following manner:
He sent me to procure a piece of canvas, a small number of musket balls,
some twine, and an end of ratlin stuff. He put the balls and my letter
into the canvas, and, with the twine, bound the cloth into a small,
heavy parcel, to which he secured the end of the piece of ratlin stuff;
then, giving directions to the man at the helm to starboard, so as to
close the stranger, he sprung upon the rail and waited for the two
vessels to draw together.
“Oh, the snow ahoy!” he shouted.
“Hallo!” responded a man who stood on the quarter of the vessel.
“Where are you bound to?”
“London.”
“Will you take a letter for me?”
The man motioned assent and looked aloft, as though about to order his
topsail to be backed. “I will chuck the letter aboard,” said Greaves,
swinging the parcel by its line, that the man might guess what he
intended to do. “Stand by to receive it!”
Again the fellow, who was, probably the captain, motioned; and then,
waiting until the two craft were abreast, Greaves, with a dexterous
swing of his arm, sent the parcel flying through the air. It fell on the
deck of the passing vessel just abaft her mainmast. The fellow who had
answered Greaves’ hail, running forward, picked it up, and held it high
in his hand that we might see he had it. After this there was no
opportunity for further communication; for scarce were the two vessels
abreast when they were on each other’s quarter, rapidly sliding a
widening interval betwixt their sterns.
The snow was the _Lady Godiva_. I read her name under her counter. But
her being bound to London, now that my letter was aboard, was
information enough about her to answer my turn.
From this date down to the period of our arrival off the west coast of
South America my clear recollection of every particular of this voyage
yields me little that is good enough to record. Incidents so far had not
been lacking, but south of the equator our sea life grew as dull as ever
the vocation can be at its dullest. Heavens! how incommunicably tedious
is the mechanic round of shipboard days! Wonderful to me is it that
sailors in those times, when a single passage kept them afloat for
months, remained human. And less than human some of them were, I am
bound to say. Think of their lodging--a small, black hole in the bows of
the ship, dimly lighted by a lamp fed with slush skimmed from the
coppers in the galley, no fire in bitter weather, no air in hot; every
straining timber sweating brine into the dark interior, till the floor
in a headsea was a-wash; till every blanket was like a newly wrung out
swab; till there was not a dry rag in the hole of a living room to
enable the poor devils to shift themselves withal. Think of their
food--salted meat, out of which they could have sawn and chiseled blocks
for reeving gear to hoist their sails with; biscuit that crawled on the
innumerable legs of vermin, alive but unintelligent, for it came not to
your whistle nor did it elude your grasp; tea from which the thirstiest
of the fiery-eyed rats in the fore peak are known to have recoiled with
lamentable squeaks and dying shrieks of disappointment. Think of their
labor--the scrubbing, the tarring, the greasing, the furling and reefing
and stitching, the kicks, the blows, the curses which accompanied the
toil. Think of their pleasures--an inch of sooty pipe to suck, an
ancient story to nod over, a song at long intervals.
Alas, poor Jack! What is it that carries thee to sea in the first
instance? The love of freedom? Hie thee to the nearest jail; there is
more freedom in it; better food, kinder words. The desire to see the
world? What dost see unless thou runnest from thy ship? for in harbor
all day long thou art sweating in the hold and stamping round and round
to the music of the pawls; and when the night comes and thou goest
ashore, if thou hast a shot in thy locker thou gettest drunk, and with
whirling brains and blistered lips art thrust rather than conveyed to
thy toil in the morning by the constable whom thy skipper hath sent in
search of thee. And so much, therefore, Jack, dost thou see of foreign
parts. But whatever may have been the cause that sent thee to sea, my
lad, this will I affirm; that when once thou art afloat, there is
nothing clothed in flesh, with an immortal spirit to be saved or damned,
more deserving of pity.
But though we were a dull, we were a comfortable little ship. I never
heard of any falling out among the crew. They worked well together. The
common hope of the dollar that lay on t’other side the Horn was strong
in them. It kept them well meaning. It was clear they all had full
confidence in the captain’s yarn, and their spirits danced with
anticipation of the money they would jingle when they got home--the
money in wages and share per man. This I used to think.
They made much of their dog watches when the weather was fine. One of
the Dutchmen played on the flute; one of the Englishmen had a fiddle.
The fellows would save their noon-tide grog for a dog watch, and make
merry. Yan Bol sang as a bull roars, but his singing was vastly enjoyed.
Never did any mariner better dance the sailor’s hornpipe than the
English sailor, Thomas Teach. He went through it grim and unsmiling, but
his postures were full of that sort of elegance which is the gift of old
ocean to such men as Teach. It is old ocean alone that can animate the
limbs with the careless beauty of motion that Teach’s arms and legs
displayed when he danced the hornpipe.
And there was a sailor named Harry Call. He had served in American
ships, and knew the negro character, and when he blacked his face he was
good entertainment. Greaves liked his fooling so well that he would call
him aft, send for the men, order Jimmy to mix a can of grog, and Call
with his spare voice and negro pleasantries would agreeably kill an
hour.
My own life was as pleasant as a seafaring life can very well be.
Greaves had much to talk about. He had looked into books. He had
traveled widely and observed closely. He was a person of much good
nature. In truth, a more genial, informing man I could not have prayed
for as a shipmate. Yet I would take notice of a certain haziness on one
side of his mind. He loved metaphysical speculations, and would wriggle
out of a homely topic to start a religious discussion. I humored him for
some time, but religion being one of those subjects that I did not much
care to talk about, I soon ceased to argue, and then all the talking was
his. He entertained some odd notions for a sailor, believed that every
man had a good and bad angel, that when a man died his spirit slept with
his dust. “Otherwise,” he asked, “what is to bring the parts together
again, inform them with mind, and render the whole sensible of what is
happening?” I found that he had a leaning toward the Roman Catholic
faith. I asked him if he was married. He answered “No.” I then inquired
why Van Laar had threatened to take the bed from under him and his wife.
“To vex me,” said he.
He would be talking of religion and metaphysics, of dreams and a future
life, of the state of his soul a million years ago, and of the
inhabitants of certain of the stars, when I would be thinking of his
ship in the cave and the dollars aboard of her. But as our voyage
progressed, as we drove southward toward the Horn, he found little or
nothing to say about his ship in the cave. You would have said he was
done with the subject. He had so little to say, indeed, that I would
wonder at times whether the purpose of this expedition was not slipping
out of his memory as a dream, that is vital and brilliant on one’s
awaking from it, fades ere nightfall, and is effaced by the vision of
another slumber. “It will be a confounded disappointment should it prove
false after all,” I would think; for, spite of my misgivings which
sometimes I would nourish and sometimes spurn, I, during those tedious
days and weeks running into months, I, in many a lonely watch on deck,
in many a waking hour in my hammock, had built my little castles in the
air, had furnished them handsomely for one of my degree, had gazed at
them with fondness as they glittered in the light of my hope. Six
thousand pounds! The money was a bigger pile in those days than it is
now; to be so easily earned too! Why, in imagination I had bought me a
little house, I had married a wife, I was gardening often in mine own
little estate, and every quarter I was receiving dividend warrants; and
there was good ale in my cellar, and no stint at meal times; and I was a
happy young man, in imagination sitting, as I did, on the apex of that
pyramid of promised dollars, whence I commanded a boundless prospect for
a mariner’s eye. And now if it was all to end in a hoaxing dream! Bless
me! While I was on this side of the Horn how I pined for t’other side,
how I thrashed the old brig through it in my watch on deck! With what
ardor of expectancy did I every day sit down to work out the sights!