THE CRY.
The wind and sea went down together as day brightened on the
cheerless scene. After the night we had passed, how grimly pale and
wan our faces seemed in the cold grey dawn of morning!
This catastrophe occurred in the middle of May, when we were about
three hundred miles from St. John, our destination. Our compass was
broken, but we continued to steer south-west and by west, as well as
we could determine.
The gale having abated, we hoisted the sail to the masthead, shipped
our oars, and after receiving about a tablespoonful of rum per man,
endeavoured to make the best of our way towards Newfoundland, in the
hope of being picked up, ere long, by one of the many outward or
homeward bound traders.
When day was fully in, we swept the sea with anxious eyes, but not a
sail was visible!
Cast thus helplessly on the wide ocean, with a few biscuits, a small
beaker of fresh water, and a gallon keg of rum, at a distance of
three hundred miles from land, our prospects were gloomy in the
extreme; and amid them all, the horrible story of the _De Ruyter_,
and similar miseries endured by those of whom I had heard and read in
such situations, haunted me.
Exertion warmed us: we now got our clothing wrung out and dried, the
boat thoroughly baled, and by midday we were as comfortable as men so
circumstanced might be. Cuffy, who had saved his violin, the only
article of property he ever possessed, now proceeded to enliven us,
as he had often done before, by singing a negro melody, to his own
accompaniment; yet this was but ghastly mirth at best.
Our biscuits being soaked by the brine, excited a thirst which we
were without the means of allaying. Moreover, the _idea_ of being
upon allowance in itself excites a thirsty craving; thus by the noon
of the second day, the water in the beaker was nearly consumed, and
we had no hope now but for rain.
I believe some hours elapsed before we were fully aware, or had
realized a true sense of our dreadful situation.
How shall I describe the days that passed--and how the nights?
Morning after morning only dawned to raise our hopes of success; and
these faded as the day wore on; and then the nights were dark
monotonous hours of bitterness and despair.
Yet they were the short nights of May; and it must be borne in mind
that however warm they are upon the land, and in more temperate
latitudes, they were cold and chilly when passed in an open boat,
upon the mighty Atlantic. The evening of the fourth day deepened,
and still not a sail was in sight. About nine o'clock, one of our
forlorn party, whose clothing was thinner than the rest, and who had
suffered much from hunger and exposure, died in the bottom of the
boat, and we silently committed his body to the deep.
There were neither prayer nor funeral service, but we all stood up,
and uncovered our heads, while Hans and a seaman launched the poor
fellow into the sea.
Our last drop of water was now expended, for it had been poured
between the parched lips of this sufferer, in vain.
Our bread we dared scarcely eat, even in the morsels in which it was
doled out, lest it might excite that awful thirst which we had no
liquid to assuage, and which the summer sun, when blazing over our
heads at noon, rendered worse by a thousand degrees, making us long
for night, when the moist dew would fall on our parched lips and arid
visages; then night made us long for day, in the hope of seeing a
sail, as we were in terror lest one should pass us unseen; and I am
assured that more than one must have done so.
Amid his own bodily misery, poor Hartly frequently reproached himself
for having, as he said, "lured me from a quiet occupation into a
career so fatal and disastrous."
The older seamen sought to encourage us by relating how often they
had been wrecked, and yet had escaped death.
"I remember," said Hans Peterkin, "when the _Brenda_, a bark of
Kirkwall, was wrecked on her voyage from Jamaica. The night was
rough, and we were under close-reefed topsails, when a sea struck
her, and unshipped her rudder, just as she sprang a leak. All hands
were ordered to the pumps, and to the thrumming of a sail; but the
loss of the rudder hove her dead in the wind's eye, so her mainmast
went by the board, bringing with it the fore and mizen topmasts,
making her a useless wreck in a moment. I was washed overboard; but
there was no time to look after me, so I rode on the mainmast all
night. When day broke there was no ship to be seen--she must have
foundered in the dark. Three days and two nights I rode upon that
shattered mast, till a Spanish schooner, bound for Rio, picked me up;
yet I never lost heart, shipmates, for I knew I should be saved."
"How?" said Reeves.
"Because we have a saying among us in Orkney, that he who eats of the
dulse of Guiodin,* and drinks of the well of Kildingie, will escape
everything but the _Black Death_; and many a time I have eaten of one
and drunk of the other."
* The creek of Odin, in Stronza.
On the fifth day another man died, and was committed to the deep. No
one stood up this time, we were becoming either too weak or too
callous.
"Water--water," sighed Paul Reeves; "when ashore, I will never drink
aught but pure spring water again."
"Bide ye, messmate, and dinna gut a swimming fish; or, as we say in
Orkney, cut up nae herrings till ye have them in your net. When you
are ashore!--ashore indeed--when shall we ever see the shore?"
Even the strong mind of the hardy Hans was wandering now. The wind
kept tolerably fair, and though by alternate spells at the oars we
toiled day and night to add to the speed of our sail, we had no means
of ascertaining the distance we ran; and now the pangs of hunger were
alternately maddening or paralyzing, but they were trivial when
compared with those of thirst. By skilfully striking with his oar,
Hans contrived to kill four petrels when they came tripping by close
to our boat. Since the days of Clusius and Pliny, tradition has
foolishly made these poor birds the precursors of a storm; but the
elements had done their worst upon us, so we cared not. They were
soon plucked and demolished.
We found them very fat and nutritious, as the whole genus of petrels
have a singular facility for creating and for spouting pure oil from
their bills in defence of themselves and their eggs if molested; and
of this oil they can produce plenty, as they feed on blubber and
fish. The quantity in them astonished all but Hans Peterkin, who had
been wont to harry the nests of the skua, as the petrel is named in
his native isles, and who told me that whales were often discovered
in the Firth of Westra and the Sound of Yell by the flocks that
followed in the hope of a gorge of blubber.
"My father was drowned by a _skua_," said he.
"Drowned--how, by a skua?"
"Ay, for so they called the petrels in Orkney once, and so they call
them in Faroe now."
"But how was he drowned?" asked Hartly.
"He was a bold fellow who could climb the steep rocks that overhung
the most furious sea, to get eggs and catch the petrels _asleep_ if
possible; for the skua or fulmar supply us with feathers for our
beds, medicine in illness, and oil for our lamps. My mother used to
make the whole bird a candle by passing through its mouth a wick,
which the fat of the body fed. My father, Magnus Peterkin, was, I
have said, a bold fellow, though he wore a _glain neidr_, or
adder-gem, an old amulet of the Druid days, and believed that while
it hung at his neck he was safe. On a stormy night he swung himself
over a rock in Pomona to pull some petrels out of their holes, but
one squirted a billful of salt oil right into his eyes---just as I
might a quid--which so confused him, that he quitted hold of the
rope, fell upon the rocks three hundred feet below, and perished
miserably--poor man!"
The fifth night was calm and beautiful--too calm for us, as the wind
had almost died away, and a clear moonlight was shining on the silent
sea, when a singular and startling event occurred--one that filled us
with vague terror and awe.
Six of us, faint, worn, and half-asleep, were tugging monotonously at
our oars; four slept in the bottom of the boat, and Reeves was
steering by a star, while honest Cuffy Snowball, whose native
good-humour and cheerfulness even the horrors of our situation could
not repress, was playing sweetly on his violin, and, to keep our
spirits from sinking, sang a negro song which he had picked up during
the years of his slavery in South Carolina--and sung it while his
tongue clove to the roof of his mouth with thirst. I leave the
reader to judge how in such a time and place the soft melody and
grotesque pathos of a hackneyed popular air sounded in the ears of
the starving and the dying!
"All round de leetle farm I wandered,
When I was young;
Den my 'appy days I squandered,
Many de songs I sung.
"When I was playing wid my brudder,
'Appy was I;
Oh take me to my kind old mudder,
Dere let me lib and die.
"All the world am sad and dreary,
Ebberywhere I roam;
Oh darkies, how my 'art grows weary,
Far from de old folks at home!"
Alas, it was grotesquely horrible!
The calmness of the night, the sickness of my heart, the weakness of
my limbs, and the sweetness of the violin as its notes floated far
over the moonlit sea, together with the monotonous sound of the oars,
made me fall into a waking doze--yet I still tugged mechanically on,
though dreaming.
At times I imagined that I was in a dense fog off the harbour mouth
of St. John. I heard the booming of the fog-guns from the battery on
the mountains, though they sounded faint and far off. Then followed
the welcome voice of the gunner on the low rocky point of Fort
Amherst, challenging as usual--
"What ship is that?"
I strove to answer as we ran in through the Narrows, but my tongue
refused its office.
Again, I was at my desk, engrossing in giant ledgers, with the
snorting voice of old Uriah Skrew grating on my ear. Anon I was in
my father's rose-covered villa at Peckham--in London, amid the roar
and gaiety of its streets--its evening bustle and lights--in the
theatre--at the opera--galloping out of town on the Derby-day. Then
I was in a silent forest--but lo!
My dreams were broken by a shriek which made us all start as if
electrified--the oarsmen at the oars, the sleepers at the bottom of
the boat. Cuffy dropped his violin, and Reeves his tiller, as we all
sprang up, looked in each other's sunken eyes, and on the glassy sea,
that rippled in flat immensity far away in the moonlight.
"What is it--where did it come from?" we all gasped.
But none could answer correctly.
"It seemed to rise from the sea, far away on the starboard bow," said
Reeves.
"_The starboard bow!_" repeated Hartly, shuddering.
We gazed intently around us, and though one of our men insisted that
he could see a large figure like that of a man swimming towards us in
the moonlit water, the rest could discern nothing.
This supernatural cry or sound seemed to belong neither to earth nor
heaven; it rent the air and penetrated to our inner hearts; its
cadence, too, was horrible, and unlike anything we had ever heard
before. Its source occasioned us endless surmise, and we never
discovered it; but the circumstance affected us all variously, and
for a time we forgot our thirst, our hunger, and our danger, in the
mystery and vague fear it occasioned.
That it could be given, as one surmised, by a drowning seaman who had
escaped from some wreck, was impossible, for under the brilliant moon
of the early May night, the whole sea was visible to us as at
noonday. Hans of Orkney declared it to be a spirit of the sea, a
water-bull, or the ghost of a man, whom we had unwittingly deserted
in the foundering wreck. Cuffy moaned out that it was a warning from
the Obi man. An Irish batman muttered something about a Banshee, but
poor Hartly was too careless now, or too desponding, to suggest
anything, and remained silent.
I can scarcely conceive that this cry, so strange, so wild and
thrilling--so appalling to those who were in such a solemn and
terrible situation--and which was heard by us all at the same moment,
was the combined effect of imagination; but whether it was some
phenomenon--a sound brought through the air from a vast distance, by
some unknown cause--the echo of a crime committed elsewhere, or a
jarring of the elements that affected our over-strained organs of
hearing, I know not.
I merely relate the event as it occurred; but never, while life
remains, shall I forget the bewildering and terrifying effect of that
appalling shriek, when it rang in our ears, across the otherwise
silent sea on that most mournful night.