MR. MOORE SAILS
I think, I will not be sure, that the date on which I returned to
London from this visit to Sir Mortimer was October 26. In the year 1860
sailing ships bound to the Australias and the East Indies frequently,
many of them regularly, touched at the Cape; small vessels, such
as brigs and barques, also traded to that colony. There was steam
communication, however, then. I believe the first of the steamers of
the Union Steamship Company was despatched three years earlier, namely,
in 1857.
Be this as it may, since steam was to be got I was resolved to have
nothing to do with what the sailor calls tacks and sheets. A sailing
ship might keep me four months upon the ocean in her struggles with
head winds and failing catspaws. On the other hand, the Cape, by steam,
was to be reached certainly within forty days. But having made up my
mind, I found there was no time to lose, that is, if I resolved on
steam; for, on reaching London, I learnt that the next Union steamer
was the 'Cambrian,' sailing from Southampton on November 6.
It was this obligation of despatch, perhaps, which hardened me in
my resolution. I meant to sail by the 'Cambrian' and there was no
leisure for hesitation, no time for second thought. Not, indeed,
that I was not passionately resolved; I had been so from the hour of
clearly understanding that I must proceed to the Cape and procure the
exhumation of the body if my mind was to be set at rest one way or
the other. I mean, if I had been obliged to wait a month, say, for a
sailing ship, I might have found myself troubled, my resolution a
little unsettled, by the counsels of friends.
My father, for example, fully sanctioned my going, but advised me to
consider how it would be with my memory if, when the coffin was opened,
I recognised the body as Marie's.
I answered I had thought over that, and knew it would prove a terrible
ordeal. But it must be worse with me if I stayed at home, never
stirring to find out if the body that lay in Cape Town cemetery was
indeed that of the girl I loved.
'Suppose she is drowned,' I reasoned, 'I should not believe it for
months, perhaps years. No man could persuade me she was dead. Time
alone must convince me. But how long should I allow myself? Meanwhile I
must live in expectation. My life would be a torment of suspense. But
by going to the Cape I shall satisfy myself at once.'
'Yes,' said my father, 'but you will only be able to satisfy yourself
that Marie does not lie buried in Cape Town if, when the grave is
opened, the remains should prove another's.'
'It will satisfy me to know _that_, at all events,' I exclaimed.
'Will they let you exhume the body?'
This staggered me somewhat; but I replied I would take my chance of it.
The corpse had been brought to Cape Town, and there buried with a view
to identification. The case was extraordinary; and when the Colonial
authorities heard my story they would not refuse to let me disinter the
remains.
Several friends offered like objections. One suggested I should ask
that the clothes should be sent home, and submitted to the inspection
of those from whom Marie bought her outfit; the shopmen would know
their own wares. If they asserted the clothes had been sold by
them--had at any time passed through their hands--there would be
something solid to go upon; I could then sail for the Cape and confirm
by inspection what to most would pass as a foregone conclusion.
But my answer was, it was not very conceivable that those who held the
clothes would part with them; it was no case of suspected murder, so
as to admit of the introduction of the machinery of the law; moreover,
if I waited, the remains would become unrecognisable. It was already a
question how far the climate would admit of an identification of them.
The body arrived at the Cape August 10; this was the close of October.
December would have come before I landed; and December is the burning
midsummer of South Africa.
But herein, as in all the rest, I was prepared to take my chance. I
felt a secret reluctance in one direction only. It shocked me even in
imagination to think, if the remains _should_ prove Marie's, of the
memory I must return home with and be haunted by to my death-bed.
On November 5 I travelled to Southampton, and on the following day
embarked in the steamship 'Cambrian' for Cape Town. I had said good-bye
to my friends in London and went on board alone. Never did passenger
tread a ship's deck with heavier heart than I. The vessel was full of
bustle and confusion; she was taking out a large number of passengers
who, with their friends, filled her fore and aft, overflowing the
saloon, and crowding the raised deck or poop.
It is at such a time as this, and amid such a crowd as littered the
'Cambrian's' decks, that you learn what real loneliness is. I looked
around me and saw not one face I had ever met before. There was much
surging and elbowing of figures in the gangway, a constant dragging
here and there of baggage, shouts from the ship to the shore, from
the shore to the ship, with stewards dodging and shoving in and out,
officers of the steamer twinkling and flitting in the finery of the
merchant service.
I contrasted all this noise--threaded by strange groaning rumblings
down in the bowels of the metal keel, as though the giant, steam, lying
imprisoned, was beginning to mutter in his impatience and shake his
chains--with the peace on board the 'Lady Emma' when I mounted her side
with Marie and her father and Mrs. Burke. All was quiet there, the
masts pointed their crossed and knitted heights silent in the breeze
as a tree that sleeps in the dead calm of a summer's night; about
was spread a shining scene of river abounding in life and colour, in
gliding and in stately motion; but the ear was not vexed.
However, it would not be long before the 'Cambrian' was under way, and,
indeed, whilst I was seeing to my baggage in my berth, and taking a
view of the bedroom I was to sleep in for thirty-five or forty days, I
heard noises and felt a vibration which satisfied me we were about to
start.
The vessel was something less than nine hundred tons; she was fitted
with a saloon, on either hand of which went a range of sleeping berths,
and the amidships was filled with a long table. She was rigged as a
schooner, with a couple of yards on each mast, and sat with a promise
of swiftness in her posture, her bow being yacht-like and sharp,
dominant, that is, with a good spring, whilst the run of her vanished
in a very pretty mould of stern.
She would be laughed at now; side by side with the Cape white giantess
of to-day, thrashing from the top of the North Atlantic to the other
bottom of the South Atlantic in a trifle more than a fortnight, how
meanly would she show! even as a pinnace or steam launch in the shadow
of the man-of-war that owns her. No splendour of internal fittings;
nothing rememberable in the form of smoke-room or bath-room. And still
my heart swells with the memory of that little iron steamer, which long
since ceased, save as one of the countless spectres of the deep, the
true and only phantom ships of the sea.
It was a bleak, dark November day when we started; a strong wind blew,
and the sky was thick and near with rolling snow-clouds. We passed
along Southampton Water in a squall of sleet, and though imagination
was never an inactive quality in me, yet then, more keenly than at any
previous time, was I able to realise the significance of Wall's story
of the dismasted hull, the high foaming seas of the great ocean past
the Horn, the mountains of ice rocking their lofty summits in the smoke
of flying flakes.
It was blowing fresh in the open, clear of the Isle of Wight; the
little steamer pitched and sprang and made vile weather of the spiteful
snap of that November Channel surge. She drove the most of us to our
berths, and for four days I was a prisoner, stupidly sick and helpless.
Then I stepped forth feeling well again, and making my way on to the
poop found a fine day, a swelling sea, a rattling breeze astern, before
which the vessel, with bladder-like canvas swelling hard from her yards
and black funnel pouring smoke over the bows to the horizon ahead, was
bowling and rolling, with an occasional kick up astern which drove a
shock and vibration of exposed screw through the length of her.
Abreast on the right was a little ship under full sail braced sharp
up, tearing through the seas; the red flag of England stood like a
board at her mizzen peaks. She was apparently bound home. The water
swept in sheets from her steering stem, and every flash of the white
brine was magically spanned by a rainbow. She was painted black, and
to my land-going eye exactly resembled the 'Lady Emma,' though the
practised nautical glance would doubtless have witnessed plenty that
distinguished her from the other. I watched her with fascinated gaze,
and in deep melancholy, as she swept through the brilliant curls of
sea, clouding her path as she dived and scoring the rolling blue astern
of her with an arrow-like line of light.
Just such sailing as that had Marie described in the fragment of
journal we had received. She had named the sails, flung with dexterous
pen the very sheen of the lustrous rounds of canvas upon the vision of
the mind, painted the picture of the deck, the dark wet length of plank
gleaming along the sobbing scuppers at every roll, sailors hanging in
the rigging with marling-spikes and coils of small stuff, or stitching
on spaces of canvas in the sun, the mate walking the weather side of
the deck, her own dear self seated under a short awning talking with
her old nurse about the home she was leaving, about the countries
she was to visit. I caught my breath with a spasm and turned from the
beautiful picture.
We were a great number of passengers for so small a vessel. When
the fine weather came and the people got their stomachs, no more
hospitable scene at meal-time was ever afloat than that saloon of
over thirty years ago. There is plenty of finery at sea in this age;
but the picturesque is almost dead; it flourished then. Much of the
old Indiaman, the old Caper and South Spanier survived in the early
steamer. You found this in colours and fittings, and in rig; for, none
of us yet making cocksure of the cub of the engine-room, a fabric nigh
as spacious and wide as that of the sailing ship was reared to draw
from the wind the help the propeller might refuse.
This little steamer, too, would go along in an ambling way when it was
fine, like any large ship with the wind on the quarter, taking the wide
heaves of the deep in a procession of curtseys whilst she fanned the
sky with her squares of canvas. I see again the dinner-picture of a
fine afternoon: a row of well-dressed people filling the long table;
the captain bland and watchful at one end; someone trembling in brass
buttons at the other; the claret-coloured light of the setting sun
ripples in polished bulkhead and makes rubies of diamonds on moving
hands; every shadow sways with slow grace, and the large round cabin
windows deepen into dark blue, or glance out in crimson light as the
vessel softly rolls them from sea to sky.
My place at table was at top, on the captain's right: a seat of
distinction, but a matter of accident so far as I was concerned. The
commander of this steamer, to give the worthy skipper a sounding name,
was a kindly hearted seaman named Strutt, who had used the sea for many
years in sailing ships, and had much to tell about the ocean life. One
of the passengers was a retired shipmaster who, I understood, was
making the voyage to the Cape to seek some waterside berth in South
Africa; he was a Newcastle man and had been bred to the sea in the coal
trade; such was his contempt of steam he could find nothing in his rude
and quaint dialect vigorous enough to dress it in. He sat within three
or four of the captain on the left and they often argued, and their
speech was my diversion.
I remember one day, shortly before we made the island of Madeira, that
these two men got upon the subject of Polar expeditions. The captain
said that the discovery of the North Pole would be as important to
navigation and science as the discovery of America was to civilisation.
The other replied that the North Pole was of no use to any mortal man.
What was it? An imagination. Nothing you could see, or sit upon, or
lean against. At this a great many people laughed.
A middle-aged lady sitting at a little distance on my right begged that
the North Pole would not be mentioned; she had lost a promising nephew
in consequence of it. He had sailed in one of the expeditions and had
fallen into a deep hole beside the ship when she lay upon the ice, and,
marvellous to relate, though the body of the poor young man was not
discovered until six weeks afterwards, it was so perfectly fresh, the
face so lifelike, the colour on the cheeks so exactly as in health,
that all wondered he did not speak and smile.
'There's no perishing in ice,' said the retired shipmaster in a deep
voice, 'once dead, ye keep arle on. Sir John Franklin was to be found.
Nought was wanting but the right sort of men to look for him. He's
somewhere up there still, just as he died, poor chap, hard as a statue,
him and the rest of them, saving those they fed on.'
'What's the action of salt water on a body?' said an old gentleman
sitting five or six down on the opposite side.
'It drowns,' replied the retired shipmaster.
'I don't mean that,' said the other, 'does it preserve as ice does?'
'No, sir,' answered the shipmaster. 'The sea sarves a drowned sailor as
the crimps sarve the live ones. It strips him, and when he's naked it
tarns to and kicks and beats him till his mother wouldn't know whose
child it was.'
'Not always,' exclaimed the old gentleman with emphasis.
The retired shipmaster leaned forward to see him, but made no reply.
Then the captain, at the head of the table, exclaimed: 'I knew a man
years ago who had penetrated far north in a whaler. They were frozen
up for a spell, hard bound in white ice, with hills to the horizon,
till the season came and they broke adrift, the piece they were on
floated round a point and gave them the sight of a little barque
stranded on a slope, her topmast was standing, sails furled, everything
in its place--she looked as if she had gone ashore the day before.
They boarded her and found by her log and papers she had been in that
situation eight years. But that wasn't it,' said he with a glance down
the double line of listening faces turned his way, one of the most
eagerly attentive of which I observed was the old gentleman's. 'In the
cabin they found five frozen men, they looked to have died without a
groan one after the other, every man in the act of doing something,
none guessing that the forefinger of the grinning king was on his
heart. One sat with a pipe in his hand, another leaned on the table as
though he was meditating, a third lay back in his chair, his eyes on
the skylight as if he heard a noise on deck. That's what cold will do,'
said he.
Something at this point diverted the conversation, and the subject was
dropped.
When I left the table I went on deck; the west was still full of
warm splendour, the sea ran heaving in deep blue folds to an horizon
crystalline in the delicate sweep of it against the east, on whose
violet slope--that looked to thrill with the depth of its own hue as
the blue of the calm trembles under the eye--a large star was flashing.
I lighted a cigar, sunk in thought over the talk about the ice. If the
body should not prove Marie's, then, supposing the hull had got locked,
how long would she be able to support life in the bleak dark cabin? I
had often asked that of myself and of others. I asked it again now, and
whilst my mind ran upon the dinner talk Captain Robson, the old retired
Newcastle shipmaster, stepped up to me.
They did not allow you to smoke on the poop; I stood in what would
be called the gangway, and Captain Robson came along with a great
meerschaum pipe in his hand, stuffing the bowl with a queer kind of
granulated tobacco which he pulled out of a little sack.
'This is Zooloo mundungus,' said he with a hoarse, shouting laugh;
'I am learning to like it. They say it is arle a man can get on the
coast yon,' and he hove up three stout chins in a measured nod in the
direction of the sea over the bows.
'Are you going to take charge of a ship?' said I.
'I'm going to seek a job,' he answered.
'Were you long at sea, captain?'
'Ay, was I? Since I was twelve. D'ee ken,' said he, broadening his
accent for my entertainment, 'that I'm the original laddie of this
yarn: A boy was holding a candle in the North Sea for the skipper
whilst he overhauled his chart. "Eh, sir," says the boy, "if they did
but ken war we was at home!" "If we kenned oursells," says the skipper,
"I'd ne'er heed a dam!"'
'You seem to know a good deal about the ice,' said I.
'I knew too much about most things,' he answered, puffing. 'If you was
to turn to and pump out my mind, more'd come up than what the poets
call sparkling brine.'
He looked to right and left to observe if he was overheard, and I
guessed he was a wag who liked the laughter of many.
Just then four Italian emigrants began to sing together on the
forecastle; their voices swelled in a pleasing concert; the rude
harmonies of the engine-room, dim and deep, as interpretable as human
voices, so articulate was the metallic clangour, mingled with the music
the singers made without vexing the ear.
I listened, then looked at Captain Robson, whose round face was staring
deafly seawards.
'Captain,' said I, 'figure a dismasted hull in sixty degrees of south
latitude and nothing of land nearer than the South Shetlands. When she
was abandoned there was plenty of tall ice on the horizon in points,
on both bows and astern. What's to become of that wreck?'
'Are ye speaking of the "Lady Emma"?' said he.
I started and exclaimed, 'Oh, you've heard of her loss?'
'I've known Jim Hobbs, one of her owners, ever since he was a boy,' he
answered. 'A little while afore I left London I met him at a luncheon
party and we talked that loss o'er. Loss! Well, ye've not to call it
_that_ yet, neither. The skipper and two females remained aboard, Hobbs
told me. The crew was quick in desarting. There was twelve foot of
stump forrard, Hobbs said; they should have given the capt'n a chance.
With less than twelve foot of stump when I was a boy, good prizes have
been blowed under jury canvas into safety. But when steam came in,'
said he, turning to send a gaze of contempt at the funnel, 'the sailor
went out. Let the master of the "Lady Emma" have had a collier crew of
my time aboard, and they'd ha' made no more of the loss of all three
masts--twelve foot of stump and the bowsprit remaining, according to
Hobbs--than a dog of his tail.'
'What chance do you give the hull?' said I.
He viewed me with an arch lift of his eyebrows, as though his smile at
the instant were in _them_ only.
'I'll answer you as I answered Hobbs that same question,' said he,
after discharging a number of puffs; 'she'll be heard of again. I don't
care about the ice. Dismast your ship and she'll wash round an object.
I'm not speaking of a dead-be shore leagues long. Plant an iceberg
close aboard a hulk and she'll wallow clear. It's the height of spar,
the weight of rigging, plenty of surface of stowed sail for the wind
to shoulder, that keeps a vessel helpless in her drift when she's not
under command.'
'But if she strikes she's gone, masts or no masts.'
'She'll swim for her life. It's like striking out clear of your
clothes.'
'You give that hull a chance then, captain?'
'I give her this chance: first, as to the ice; she's a naked swimmer,
light as a cask, with the wind for a buffer 'twixt her and the ice,
and a backwash of sea which she'll make the most of. And then this: if
a whaler falls in with her and she's sound they'll tow her clear. She
was worth thirty-two thousand pounds, ship and cargo, when she left the
Thames. There's sights of grease, mon, in that money.'
He ended this talk by giving a loud laugh and walking a little way
forward, where he stood, pipe in hand, listening to a German Jew and
his wife who were singing a duet.