reports. They had nothing to tell. The steward and the stewardess had
searched with the two mates in the saloon or cuddy. Every cabin had
been ransacked, with the willing consent of its occupants. The
forecastle, and 'tween-decks, and steerage, and lazarette had been
minutely overhauled. Every accessible part of the bowels of the ship
had been visited; to no purpose. No stowaway of any sort, no rag of
evidence, or weapon to supply a clue was discovered.
That afternoon we buried the body and I took command of the ship.
I saw nothing of Miss Le Grand for two days. She kept her cabin, and
was seen only by the stewardess, who waited upon her. At the
expiration of that time I received a message, and went at once to her
berth. I never could have figured so striking a change in a fine woman
full of beauty in so short a time, as I now beheld. The fire had died
out of her eyes, and still there lurked something weird in the very
spiritlessness, and dull and vacant sadness of her gaze. Her cheeks
were hollow. Under each eye rested a shadow as though it was cast by a
green leaf.
Her first words were: "Cannot you find out who did it?"
"No, madam. We have tried hard; harder for the captain's sake than had
he been another, for the responsibility that rests upon the master of
an ocean-going vessel makes him an object of mighty significance,
believe me, to us sailors."
"But the person who killed him must be in the ship," she cried, in a
voice that wanted much of its old clear music.
"One should suppose so; and he is undoubtedly on board the ship; but
we can't find him."
"Did he commit suicide?"
"No. Everybody is accounted for."
"What motive," she exclaimed, with a sudden burst of desperate
passionate grief, that wrung her like a fit from head to foot, "could
any one have for killing Captain Griffiths! He was the gentlest, the
kindest--oh, my heart! my heart!" and, hiding her face, she rocked
herself in her misery.
I tried my rough, seafaring best to soothe her. Certainly, until this
moment I never could have supposed her love for the poor man was so
great.
The fear bred of this mysterious assassination lay in a dark and heavy
shadow upon the ship. None of us, passengers or sailors, turned in of
a night but with a fear of the secret bloody hand that had slain the
captain making its presence tragically known once more before the
morning.
It happened one midnight, when we were something north of the equator,
in the calms and stinging heat of the inter-tropic latitudes, that,
having come on deck to relieve the second mate, and take charge of the
ship till four o'clock, I felt thirsty, and returned to the cuddy for
a drink of water. Of the three lamps only one was alight, and burnt
very dimly. There was no moonlight, but a plenty of starshine, which
showered in a very rippling of spangled silver through the yawning
casements of the skylights.
Just as I returned the tumbler to the rack whence I had removed it,
the door of Miss Le Grand's cabin was opened, and the girl stepped
forth. She was arrayed in white; probably she was attired in her
bed-clothes. She seemed to see me at once, for she emerged directly
opposite; and I thought she would speak, or hastily retire. But, after
appearing to stare for a little while, she came to the table and
leaned upon it with her left hand, sighing several times in the most
heart-broken manner; and now I saw by the help of the dim lamplight
that her right hand grasped a knife--the gleam of the blade caught my
eye in a breath!
"Good gracious!" I cried to myself, instantly, "the woman's asleep!
This, then, is the ghost that frightened the Dane. And this, too, was
the hand that murdered the captain!"
I stood motionless watching her. Presently, taking her hand off the
table, she turned her face aft, and with a wonderfully subtle,
stealthy, sneaking gait, reminding one strangely of the folding motion
of the snake, she made for the captain's cabin.
Now, that cabin, ever since Griffith's death, I had occupied, and you
may guess the sensations with which I followed the armed and murderous
sleep-walker as she glided to what I must call my berth, and
noiselessly opened the door of it. The moment she was in the cabin her
motions grew amazingly swift. She stepped to the side of the bunk I
was in the habit of using, and lifting the knife plunged it once, deep
and hard--then came away, so nimbly that it was with difficulty I made
room for her in the doorway to pass. I heard her breathe hard and fast
as she swept by, and I stood in the doorway of my cabin watching her
till her figure disappeared in her own berth.
So, then, the mystery was at an end. Poor Captain Griffith's murderess
was his adored sweetheart! She had killed him in her sleep, and knew
it not. In the blindness of slumber she had repeated the enormous
tragedy, as sinless nevertheless as the angel who looked down and
beheld her and pitied her!
I went on deck and sent for the doctor, to whom I communicated what I
had seen, and he at once repaired to Miss Le Grand's berth accompanied
by the stewardess, and found her peacefully resting in her bunk. No
knife was to be seen. However, next morning, the young lady being then
on deck, veiled as she always now went, and sitting in a retired part
of the poop, the second mate, the doctor, and the stewardess again
thoroughly searched Miss Le Grand's berth, and they found in a hollow
in the ship's side, a sort of scupper in fact for the porthole, a
carving knife, rusted with old stains of blood. It had belonged to the
ship, and it was a knife the steward had missed on the day the captain
was killed.
Since the whole ghastly tragedy was a matter of somnambulism, all
points of it were easily fitted by the doctor, who quickly understood
that the knife had been taken by the poor girl in her sleep just as it
had been murderously used. What horrible demon governed her in her
slumber, who shall tell? For my part I put it down to Mrs. Burney and
a secret feeling of jealousy which had operated in the poor soul when
sense was suspended in her by slumber.
We tried to keep the thing secret, taking care to lock Miss Le Grand
up every night without explaining our motive; but the passengers got
wind of the truth and shrunk from her with horror. It came, in fact,
to their waiting upon me in a body and insisting upon my immuring her
in the steerage in company with one of the 'tween-deck's passengers, a
female who had offered her services as a nurse for hire. This action
led to the poor girl herself finding out what had happened. God knows
who told her or how she managed to discover it; but 't is certain she
got to learn it was her hand that in sleep had killed her lover, and
she went mad the selfsame day of her understanding what she had done.
Nor did she ever recover her mind. She was landed mad, and sent at
once to an asylum, where she died, God rest her poor soul! exactly a
year after the murder, passing away, in fact, at the very hour the
deed was done, as I afterwards heard.
_The Ship Seen on the Ice_.
In the middle of April, in the year 1855, the three-masted schooner
_Lightning_ sailed from the Mersey for Boston with a small general
cargo of English manufactured goods. She was commanded by a man named
Thomas Funnel. The mate, Salamon Sweers, was of Dutch extraction, and
his broad-beamed face was as Dutch to the eye as was the sound of his
name to the ear. Yet he spoke English with as good an accent as ever
one could hear in the mouth of an Englishman; and, indeed, I pay
Salamon Sweers no compliment by saying this, for he employed his _h's_
correctly, and the grammar of his sentences was fairly good, albeit
salt: and how many Englishmen are there who correctly employ the
letter _h_, and whose grammar is fairly good, salt or no salt?
We carried four forecastle hands and three apprentices. There was
Charles Petersen, a Swede, who had once been "fancy man" in a toy
shop; there was David Burton, who had been a hairdresser and proved
unfortunate as a gold-digger in Australia; there was James Lussoni, an
Italian, who claimed to be a descendant of the old Genoese merchants;
and there was John Jones, a runaway man-of-warsman, pretty nearly worn
out, and subject to apoplexy.
Four sailors and three apprentices make seven men, a cook and a boy
are nine, and a mate and a captain make eleven; and eleven of a crew
were we, all told, men and boy, aboard the three-masted schooner
_Lightning_ when we sailed away one April morning out of the river
Mersey, bound to Boston, North America.
My name was then as it still is--for during the many years I have used
the sea, never had I occasion to ship with a "purser's name"--my name,
I say, is David Kerry, and in that year of God 1855 I was a strapping
young fellow, seventeen years old, making a second voyage with Captain
Funnel, having been bound apprentice to that most excellent but
long-departed mariner by my parents, who, finding me resolved to go to
sea had determined that my probation should be thorough: no half-laughs
and pursers' grins would satisfy them; my arm was to plunge deep into
the tar bucket straight away; and certainly there was no man then
hailing from the port of Liverpool better able to qualify a young chap
for the profession of the sea--but a young chap, mind you, who liked
his calling, who _meant_ to be a man and not a "sojer" in it--than
Captain Funnel of the schooner _Lightning_.
The four sailors slept in a bit of a forecastle forward; we three
apprentices slung our hammocks in a bulkheaded part of the run or
steerage, a gloomy hole, the obscurity of which was defined rather
than illuminated by the dim twilight sifting down aslant from the
hatch. Here we stowed our chests, and here we took our meals, and here
we slept and smoked and yarned in our watch below. I very well
remember my two fellow apprentices. One was named Corbin, and the
other Halsted. They were both of them smart, honest, bright lads,
coming well equipped and well educated from respectable homes, in love
with the calling of the sea, and resolved in time not only to command
ships, but to own them.
Well, nothing in any way noteworthy happened for many days. Though the
schooner was called the _Lightning_, she was by no means a clipper.
She was built on lines which were fashionable forty years before, when
the shipwright held that a ship's stability must be risked if she was
one inch longer than five times her beam. She was an old vessel, but
dry as a stale cheese; wallowed rather than rolled, yet was stiff;
would sit upright with erect spars, like the cocked ears of a horse,
in breezes which bowed passing vessels down to their wash-streaks. Her
round bows bruised the sea, and when it entered her head to take to
her heels, she would wash through it like a "gallied whale," all
smothered to the hawse-pipes, and a big round polished hump of brine
on either quarter.
We ambled, and wallowed, and blew, and in divers fashions drove along
till we were deep in the heart of the North Atlantic. It was then a
morning that brought the first of May within a biscuit-toss of our
reckoning of time: a very cold morning, the sea flat, green, and
greasy, with a streaking of white about it, as though it were a
flooring of marble; there was wind but no lift in the water; and
Salamon Sweers, in whose watch I was, said to me, when the day broke
and showed us the look of the ocean:
"Blowed," said he, "if a man mightn't swear that we were under the lee
of a range of high land."
It was very cold, the wind about north-west, the sky a pale grey, with
patches of weak hazy blue in it here and there; and here and there
again lay some darker shadow of cloud curled clean as though painted.
There was nothing in sight saving the topmost cloths of a little
barque heading eastwards away down to leeward. Quiet as the morning
was, not once during the passage had I found the temperature so cold.
I was glad when the job of washing down was over, and not a little
grateful for the hook-pot of steam tea which I took from the galley to
my quarters in the steerage.
I breakfasted in true ocean fashion, off ship's biscuit, a piece of
pork, the remains of yesterday's dinner, and a potful of black liquor
called tea, sweetened by molasses and thickened with sodden leaves and
fragments of twigs; and then, cutting a pipeful of tobacco from a
stick of cavendish, I climbed into my hammock, and lay there smoking
and trying to read in Norie's _Epitome_ until my pipe went out, on
which I fell asleep.
I was awakened by young Halsted, whose hand was upon the edge of my
hammock.
"Not time to turn out yet, I hope?" I exclaimed. "I don't feel to have
been below ten minutes."
"There's the finest sight to see on deck," said he, "that you're
likely to turn up this side of Boston. Tumble up and have a look if
only for five minutes"; and without another word he hastened up the
ladder.
I dropped out of my hammock, pulled on my boots and monkey-jacket, and
went on deck, noting the hour by the cabin clock to be twenty minutes
before eleven. The captain stood at the mizzen-rigging with a
telescope at his eye, and beside him stood Mr. Sweers, likewise
holding a glass, and both men pointed their telescopes towards the sea
on the lee bow, where--never having before beheld an iceberg--I
perceived what I imagined to be an island covered with snow.
An iceberg it was--not a very large one. It was about five miles
distant; it had a ragged sky line which made it resemble a piece of
cliff gone adrift--such a fragment of cliff as, let me say, a quarter
of a mile of the chalk of the South Foreland would make, if you can
imagine a mass of the stuff detaching itself from under the verdure at
the top and floating off jagged and precipitous. There was nothing to
be seen but that iceberg. No others. The sea ran smooth as oil, and of
a hard green, piebald foam lines as in the earlier morning, with but a
light swell out of the west, which came lifting stealthily to the side
of the schooner. There was a small breeze; the sky had a somewhat
gloomy look; the schooner was at this hour crawling along at the rate
of about four and a half knots.
I said to Halsted: "There was nothing in sight when I went below at
eight bells. Where's that berg come from?"
"From behind the horizon," he answered. "The breeze freshened soon
after you left the deck, and only slackened a little while since."
"What can they see to keep them staring so hard?" said I, referring to
the captain and Mr. Sweers, who kept their glasses steadily levelled
at the iceberg.
"They've made out a ship upon the ice," he answered; "a ship high and
dry upon a slope of foreshore. I believe I can see her now--the gleam
of the snow is confusing; there's a black spot at the base almost
amidships of the berg."
I had a good sight in those days. I peered awhile and made out the
object, but with the naked eye I could never have distinguished it as
a ship at that distance.
"She's a barque," I heard Mr. Sweers say.
"I see that," said the captain.
"She's got a pretty strong list," continued the mate, talking with the
glass at his eye; "her topgallantmasts are struck, but her topmasts
are standing."
"I tell you what it is," said the captain, after a pause, likewise
speaking whilst he gazed through his telescope, "that ship's come down
somewhere from out of the North Pole. She never could have struck the
ice and gone ashore as we see her there. She's been locked up; then
the piece she's on broke away and made sail to the south. I've fallen
in with bergs with live polar bears on them in my time."
"What is she--a whaler?" said Mr. Sweers. "She's got a lumbersome look
about the bulwarks, as though she wasn't short of cranes; but I can't
make out any boats, and there's no appearance of life aboard her."
"Let her go off a point," said the captain to the fellow at the wheel.
"Mr. Sweers, she'll be worth looking at," he continued, slowly
directing his gaze round the sea-line, as though considering the
weather. 'You've heard of Sir John Franklin?'
"Have I heard?" said the mate, with a Dutch shrug.
"It's the duty of every English sailor," said the captain, "to keep
his weather eye lifting whenever he smells ice north of the equator;
for who's to tell what relics of the Franklin expedition he may not
light on? And how are we to know," continued he, again directing his
glass at the berg, "that yonder vessel may not have taken part in that
expedition?"
"There's a reward going," said Mr. Sweers, "for the man who can
discover anything about Sir John Franklin and his party."
The captain grinned and quickly grew grave.
We drew slowly towards the iceberg, at which I gazed with some degree
of disappointment; for, never before having beheld ice in a great mass
like the heap that was yonder, I had expected to see something
admirable and magnificent, an island of glass, full of fiery
sparklings and ruby and emerald beams, a shape of crystal cut by the
hand of King Frost into a hundred inimitable devices. Instead of
which, the island of ice, on which lay the hull of the ship, was of a
dead, unpolished whiteness, abrupt at the extremities, about a hundred
and twenty feet tall at its loftiest point, not more picturesque than
a rock covered with snow, and interesting only to my mind because of
the distance it had measured, and because of the fancies it raised in
one of the white, silent, and stirless principalities from which it
had floated into these parts.
"Get the jolly-boat over, Mr. Sweers," said the captain, "and take a
hand with you, and go and have a look at that craft there; and if you
can board her, do so, and bring away her log-book, if you come across
it. The newspapers sha'n't say that I fell in with such an object as
that and passed on without taking any notice."
I caught Mr. Sweers' eye. "You'll do," said he, and in a few minutes
he and I were pulling away in the direction of the ice, I in the bow
and he aft, rowing fisherman fashion, face forward. The schooner had
backed her yards on the fore when she was within a mile of the berg,
and we had not far to row. Our four arms made the fat little
jolly-boat buzz over the wrinkled surface of the green, cold water.
The wreck--if a wreck she could be called--lay with her decks sloping
seawards upon an inclined shelf or beach of ice, with a mass of
rugged, abrupt stuff behind her, and vast coagulated lumps heaped like
a Stonehenge at her bows and at her stern. When we approached the
beach, as I may term it, Salamon Sweers said:
"I'll tell you what: I am not going to board that craft alone, Kerry.
Who's to tell what's inside of her? She may have been lying twenty
years, for all we know, frozen up where it's always day or always
night--where everything's out of the order of nature, in fact; and rat
me if I'm going to be the first man to enter her cabin."
"I'm along with you," said I.
"So you are, David," said he, "and we'll overhaul her together, and
the best way to secure the boat'll be to drag her high and dry"; and
as he said this, the stem of the boat touched the ice, and we both of
us jumped out, and, catching hold of her by the gunwale, walked her up
the slope by some five times her own length, where she lay as snug as
though chocked aboard her own mother, the schooner.
Sweers and I stood, first of all, to take a view of the barque--for a
barque she was: her topgallantmasts down, but her topsail and lower
yards across, sails bent, all gear rove, and everything right so far
as we could see, saving that her flying jib-boom was gone. There was
no need to look long at her to know that she hadn't been one of
Franklin's ships. Her name and the place she hailed from were on her
stern: the _President_, New Bedford. And now it was easy to see that
she was a Yankee whaler. Her sides bristled with cranes or davits for
boats, but every boat was gone. The tackles were overhauled, and the
blocks of two of them lay upon the ice. She was a stout, massive,
round-bowed structure, to all appearances as sound as on the day when
she was launched. She was coppered; not a sheet of metal was off, not
a rent anywhere visible through the length and breadth of the dingy
green surface of it.
We first of all walked round her, not knowing but that on the other
side, concealed from the landing-place by the interposition of the
hull, some remains of her people might be lying; but there was nothing
in that way to see. We united our voices in a loud "Hallo!" and the
rocks re-echoed us; but all was still, frozen, lifeless.
"Let's get aboard," said Mr. Sweers, gazing, nevertheless, up at the
ship's side with a flat face of reluctance and doubt.
I grasped a boat's fall and went up hand over hand, and Sweers
followed me. The angle of the deck was considerable, but owing to the
flat bilge of the whaler's bottom, not greater than the inclination of
the deck of a ship under a heavy press of canvas. It was possible to
walk. We put our legs over the rail and came to a stand, and took a
view of the decks of the ship. Nothing, saving the boats, seemed to be
missing. Every detail of deck furniture was as complete as though the
ship were ready for getting under way, with a full hold, for a final
start home. Caboose, scuttle-butts, harness-cask, wheel, binnacle,
companion-cover, skylight, winch, pumps, capstan--nothing was wanting;
nothing but boats and men.
"Is it possible that all hands can be below?" said Sweers, straining
his ear.
I looked aloft and about me, wondering that the body of the vessel and
her masts and rigging should not be sheathed with ice; but if ever the
structure had been glazed in her time, when she lay hard and fast far
to the north of Spitzbergen, for all one could tell, nothing was now
frozen; there was not so much as an icicle anywhere visible about her.
The decks were dry, and on my kicking a coil of rope that was near my
feet the stuff did not crackle, as one could have expected, as though
frosted to the core.
"The vessel seems to have been thawed through," said I, "and I expect
that this berg is only a fragment of the mass that broke adrift with
her."
"Likely enough," said Sweers. "Hark! what is that?"
"What do you hear?" I exclaimed.
"Why, _that_!" cried he, pointing to a shallow fissure in the icy
rocks which towered above the ship: and down the fissure I spied a
cascade of water falling like smoke, with a harsh, hissing noise,
which I had mistaken for the seething of the sea. I ran my eye over
the face of the heights and witnessed many similar falls of water.
"There'll not be much of this iceberg left soon," said I, "if the
drift is to the southward."
"What d'ye think,--that the drift's northerly?" exclaimed Sweers.
"I'll tell you what it is; it's these icebergs drifting in masses down
south into the Atlantic which cause the sudden spells of cold weather
you get in England during seasons when it ought to be hot."
As he said this he walked to the companion-hatch, the cover of which
was closed, and the door shut. The cover yielded to a thrust of his
hand. He then pulled open the doors and put his head in, and I heard
him spit.
"There's foul air here," said he; "but where a match will burn a man
can breathe, I've learnt."
He struck a match, and descended two or three steps of the ladder, and
then called out to me to follow. The air was not foul, but it was
close, and there was a dampish smell upon it, and it was charged with
a fishy odour like that of decaying spawn and dead marine vegetation.
Light fell through the companion-way, and a sort of blurred dimness
drained through the grimy skylight.
We thoroughly overhauled this interior, spending some time in looking
about us, for Sweers' fear of beholding something affrighting vanished
when he found himself in a plain ship's cabin, with nothing more
terrible to behold than the ship's furniture of a whaleman's
living-room of near half a century old. There were three
sleeping-berths, and these we explored, but met with nothing that in
any way hinted at the story of the ship. It was impossible to tell,
indeed, which had been the captain's cabin. All three berths were
filled alike with lockers, hammocks, wash-stands, and so forth; and
two of them were lighted by dirty little scuttles in the ship's side;
but the third lay athwartships, and all the light that it received
came from the cabin through its open door.