THE SHIP SEEN ON THE ICE
I was advised against the two or three bad hotels in Cape Town, and
whilst in the ship had obtained the address of a boarding-house. It was
a comfortable big Dutch-built house, low, without chimneys; it stood
in a garden full of moon-lilies, and many lovely flowers, the fairest
of them scentless. Here I found a colonel from India for his health, a
Dutch couple, and one or two others. From the stoep of this house you
saw the grand mass of Table Mountain, seemingly close to; the shadow
of its noble bulk seemed to fill the heavens and swell with sensible,
usurping presence into the far reaches of the country. I had travelled
in mountainous parts in Europe, but never before witnessed such a
tyrannous domination as this. The colossal ramparts caught up the whole
prospect whilst you looked in a swinging sweep of their length, till
'twas all mountain with the steam-like vapour shredding away from the
boiling whiteness atop, and the houses clustering into the base like
things of life shuddering back into the giant refuge.
Such were the fantastic notions I got of the thing as I sat, cigar in
mouth, on the stoep of the boarding-house on the first night of my
arrival. The full moon was shining over the bay. I saw through the
trees a space of the silvered waters, with the black figures and lines
of ships anchored in the trembling glow, spotting it with their riding
lights. The breeze was falling in sighs down the steep and troubling
the vegetation into the shedding of some perfume upon the night air;
the tinkling of the crickets spread low, like a noise of fairy bells,
over the land, surging up in the warm, damp breeze and dying. I heard
a band of music in the distance, but the mountain shone upon by the
moon and now radiant at the summit with snow-white mist, looked the
tranquility of its great face into the night, and the peace of its
sublime silence dwelt like a spirit everywhere, to the very height of
the stars, down to the waters trembling under the moon.
This rest was grateful and exquisitely refreshing after the ceaseless
motions of the ship and the senseless chatter of the engine-room. And
yet, though I was but just arrived, I now, after my first meal ashore
for many days, sat alone, considering what I should do.
I had learnt at table there were ships in the bay homeward bound,
also I was aware and had been long aware that I must wait a month
for the next Union steamer to England. I could not, however, bring
myself to endure the prospect of _sailing_ home. The voyage by steam
had already proved unendurably long; and now I might take shipping
under a topsail, make a passage of two months to the line, lie in a
month-long trance upon the burnished swathes of the molten silver swell
of the Doldrums, then wish myself dead in six weeks of tempest to the
Scillies, with a long flounder up Channel to round off all.
Therefore, on this the first night of my arrival at Cape Town, I
resolved to return by steam, taking anything in that way which might
come from the Indies, or, failing that, then the monthly Union steamer.
The colonel came out of the house with a long cheroot in his mouth, and
sat down by my side. He was a man with bland manners, and a sarcastic
voice. He talked contemptuously of Cape Town and its people, and cursed
the indisposition that had driven him into such a barbarous hole,
where you were distempered by bad cooks, poisoned by dreadful smells,
maddened by the horns of the coloured costermongers. I was in no temper
to hear him and was glad when he got up and strolled off.
Here was I, thousands of miles from home--for what purpose? I was no
nearer to Marie! Would she ever be heard of? Was she alive? I looked up
at the full moon and asked of God if its splendour rested anywhere upon
her.
But then--but then--and my heart ached again as I reflected; it was
in July that her ship was dismasted and last heard of, and this was
December, almost the middle of it--five whole months! And the hard part
was that I should have to live through another interminable period of
expectation before reaching home, where alone I must hope to get news.
Why, even whilst I sat there, with the two Atlantics between England
and me, she might have arrived, or they might have got news that she
was coming, and thus was I sure to go on thinking and hoping until I
returned--when they would tell me they had heard nothing!
My thoughts went but seldom and lightly to the body of the girl who
was resting in her grave somewhere past those trees yonder. _She_ was
not Marie. I'd look upon her if the coffin was lifted and Hoskins
invited me; but _she_ was not Marie! The wonder and pity of her to my
mind now that I had seen the photographs lay in the coincidence of her
discovery, and in the ghastly vision of her floating figure--so young
and fair as she had been--a fancy of ocean loneliness I could somehow
realise better _here_ than at sea, maybe because of the height the
lofty shadow of the mountain sent the stars to, its blotting presence
widening the scene of heaven by exciting imagination of the magnitude
of the hidden slope going over and past it to Agulhas and to where the
ice was.
After this, for two or three days, I went about alone, struggling with
a mood of depression that discoloured everything I beheld. It robbed
all grace of freshness from the beauty and the splendour of the sights
which lay about me. My favourite haunt was the waterside, where I'd
stand watching the Atlantic comber form, huge and polished, out of the
silken swell, arching and rushing onwards in a sparkling bravery of
foam and sunlight; but my thoughts were always with Marie, and again
and again I'd catch myself sighing as I brought my eyes away from the
remote blue distance pass Robben Island.
It was on the fourth day of my arrival, in the afternoon, that
strolling slowly under the shade of an umbrella from that part of the
waterside close to where the docks now are, I met the colonel who
lodged with me in the boarding-house. He turned from gazing at the bay
under the sharp of his hand, and approached me.
'Were you ever aboard a whaler?' he asked.
'Never,' I answered.
'That ship yonder's a whaler,' said he pointing.
'Yes, I know,' I replied. 'I had a good look at her from the side of
the steamer--we lay within a biscuit-toss.'
'I went aboard of her this morning,' said he, causing me to stop by
halting and looking towards the vessel as though he would have me
observe her whilst he talked. 'She is well worth a visit. Half of
her crew are Kanakas, and the remainder Yankees, and a wild, queer,
hairy lot they are. The captain's a Quaker, a strange, tall, formal
fellow, buttoned up, lean and yellow, and thee's and thou's you; most
unlike a seaman of any I ever saw. He was very civil though, mighty
communicative. I sat an hour in his little cabin and 'twas as good as
going awhaling to hear him. Such an array of harpoons and lances, decks
dark with the mess of blubber boiling--'trying out' the captain called
it. If you want to agreeably pass an hour and forget that you're in a
land of smells and noise, visit her.'
I answered it was probable I would do so.
'Not that she's a nosegay,' said he, with a short, sarcastic laugh,
'but there's nothing Malay in the odour, nothing Dutch. The captain
related an odd incident that happened whilst he was off the Horn, a bit
south of it I think.'
Here he stepped out and I strolled by his side, pricking my ears, for
there was a magic in the name of Cape Horn that never failed to arrest
my attention.
'She'd been fishing in the South Seas and finding no quarry was coming
into this ocean. She was running before a strong gale of wind off--I
forget the name of the island; it lies south of the Horn. The land,
coated with ice, stretched along their starboard beam; the captain had
no notion he was so close in. He was looking at the land through his
telescope when, in a sudden flaw that thinned the weather out into
a momentary brilliance, he caught sight of a large dismasted ship
upright on her keel upon a huge projection of ice that fell sheer to
the wash of the surf. He reckons the height of cliff on which that hull
was poised about thirty feet. How devilish odd! You can figure ships in
many situations, but how in ghosts are they going to cradle themselves
on an elevation of thirty or forty feet?'
When he said this I stopped dead; a fancy then, at that instant,
flashed into me in pang after pang as though every drop of blood in my
veins was living fire. It brought me to a stand just as if I had been
paralysed, or struck by lightning.
Presently looking at him and rather gasping than speaking, I said:
'A dismasted ship, was it? On an island south of the Horn, did he say?
Why, my God, I wonder--I wonder----'
'What's the matter? What's there in this to---- I hope I---- Catch hold
of my arm!' exclaimed the colonel, staring at me with astonishment.
'What's it--sunstroke? Not under your umbrella?'
And he directed his aquiline nose and keen blue eyes right up into the
sky; then put his arm through mine, and we walked slowly, he meanwhile
surveying me askant with every mark of amazement.
After going a little way, during which I thought I should be unable to
command my tongue or collect my wits, so heart-staggering had been that
leap of fancy in me, I said:
'You have given me an extraordinary piece of news. I am deeply
interested in a ship that was abandoned in a dismasted state in the
neighbourhood of the Horn.'
'By gad! then,' said he, halting me with a violent, nervous pull at my
arm, 'you had better go aboard and get a description at first hand, for
the whaler's here to refresh only; she's been in the bay a fortnight
and sails to-morrow.'
Without exchanging a word I walked, almost ran, to the waterside.
A number of boats lay rippling close in to the beach. A couple of Malay
or Africander boatmen seeing me coming jumped into one of the little
craft, and in a few minutes I was being rowed in the direction of the
whaler.
It was about half-past four o'clock in the afternoon; the light of
the high South African midsummer sun fell on the water in a blaze
that made one think of a sky-wide bolt of flame; the scorching heat
steamed to the face off the surface in tingling red-hot needles; there
was not a breath of air; along the polished surface, breathing with
the swell of the sea, slipped the small thunder of the distant surf.
We drew close to the whaler and I read her name upon her counter 'Sea
Queen, Nantucket.' Her sides were blistered and honeycombed with heat
and conflict; her cabin scuttles or windows, in a row of three above
her green sheathing, stared in their dirt blearedly across the water,
like the eyes of a blind man; a number of seamen of several dyes of
complexion and queerly attired overhung the bulwark rails.
She was a little ship of about four hundred tons and looked to be
dropping to pieces with use, so deeply was she seamed, so ill were her
masts stayed, so rusty and pale was her rigging, so worn and ragged the
complexion and suggestion of the canvas heaped clumsily and negligently
bound. When the boat was alongside I looked up at a copper-coloured
face covered with black prickles of hair, and asked if the captain was
aboard.
'Ay,' was the answer.
'I wish to see him on very particular business,' said I.
The man stared stupidly and lounged off.
'You gittee on board, boss,' said one of the boatmen. 'You hab welcome
allee same as other gents,'
I took the man's advice, and putting my foot on to the shelf or
projection of main channels, sprang and gained the deck in a jump from
the bulwark rail.
There were probably twenty men lounging forward in every imaginable
posture, smoking and talking; they were black and yellow and some were
of the white man's bronze, long-haired, beards goat-shaped, the figure
of them striking, with grass hats, dungaree trousers, brown shanks,
and shirts of several dyes exposing their furry breasts. They took no
notice of me whatever. The decks were dark with dirt: insufferably
heaped up with caboose, boats, casks, pumps, and some midship
arrangement for boiling blubber. A smell of greese hung cold and nasty
in the atmosphere.
I faced aft, and was moving that way when a tall figure rose through
the deck from under a sort of wooden hood which yawned at the wheel. I
instantly guessed him the captain by the colonel's description; he was
lean and hollow, with high cheek bones and a clean shaven face, yellow
as any of his men forward, buttoned up in an old frock coat, and he
wore a grey wideawake, the brim turned down. His eye came to me without
any expression of interest; I judged by his manner his ship had been
much visited.
I went straight up to him, and lifting my cap asked him if he was the
master of this barque.
'I am,' he replied, with the usual American drawl.
'I have come off,' said I, 'to speak with you on a matter of the
deepest interest to myself. I just now met a gentleman who told me that
south of the Horn you sighted a large hull, high and dry upon the ice.
Last July a ship named the "Lady Emma" was dismasted and abandoned by
her crew who left three people aboard: the men quitted her much about
the spot where you sighted the wreck. One of the people remaining in
her was Captain Burke, her commander; the others were his wife and
a young lady named Miss Otway. I was engaged to be married to that
young lady, sir, and came here, having arrived from England on the
thirteenth, believing that a body which had been found at sea and
brought to Cape Town was Miss Otway's. It is not so. The remains are
not hers. God knows but that, if the hull you sighted be the "Lady
Emma," the three may be living--aboard--in a hopeless state! Will you
tell me all you can recollect of her appearance and situation?'
In speaking I had insensibly worked myself up, and ended with my voice
broken by agitation. He looked me steadily in the face, and when I had
ended, after a minute's silence, said:
'Friend, follow me into the cabin, and I'll tell thee all I know.'
He led me down a narrow staircase with a little brown, gloomy interior,
whose equipment, glorious as was the day outside, was barely revealed
by the light that struggled through the frame of dirty glass overhead.
The shaft of mizzenmast pierced the deck and was ringed by a number of
polished harpoons which glanced in the gloom with the blue gleam of the
razor. A squab square table was set in the midst of this cabin, and on
either hand it was a locker, rugged and jagged, as though generations
of whalemen had cut up plug tobacco upon the lid.
The captain told me to sit down, and with a stride or two of his long
legs vanished inside a small berth abaft the mizzenmast. He reappeared,
holding a volume which proved to be his log-book: this he placed upon
the table and sat down in front of it.
'What might thy name be?' he asked whilst he turned the leaves of the
book.
'Mr. Moore,' I answered.
He fastened his eyes on the page, and after reading awhile, said:
'We sighted the ship on the ice on the morning of October 13. It had
been blowing a hard gale all through the night, but it slackened down
airly in the morning and we put her before it; but so high a sea was
running that had I seen that thar hull full of men I could have done
nothing for them.' He ran his finger along the page and continued: 'The
latitude in which that wreck lies is 60° and the longitude--I'm giving
it thee by thy Greenwich time--will be 45° 28´ W.'
I pulled out my note-book and entered these figures.
'Though,' he went on, 'she looks to be lying on ice, it's land that
cradles her. It's what's marked down as Coronation Island, and's the
westermost of the South Orkneys. She lies plain in sight of the sea,
onless the ice since then has come together and blocked her out.'
'Did you get a good view of her?'
'Ho, yes; I had her clear for ten minutes, watching for smoke for a
signal; and I then gave the glass to the mate, who likewise looked till
the run of the land hid her.'
'Will you describe her as you remember her?'
'Ho, yes. She was black, a lump of a ship she looked; wal, I daresay
all seven hundred tons. What was the burthen of thy vessel, Mr. Moore?'
'Six hundred,' I answered.
'Ho, wal, we was a good ways off, and that thar hull might as wal be
six as seven hundred tons.'
'Was she clean dismasted?'
'Clean?--wal, my mate arterwards said there was a stump of foremast
standing. I didn't observe it.'
'But it must be the ship--the "Lady Emma" herself!' I cried, almost
shouting in my excitement. 'When her masts went over the side, twelve
feet of the foremast remained.'
He nodded gravely; but his long, hollow, yellow face reflected nothing
of my emotion, no more than had he been a sheep.
'Did you see nothing whatever to hint at there being life on board?' I
exclaimed.
'Nothin',' he answered; 'she hung betwixt thirty and forty foot high
above the wash of the sea, on a big ledge of ice, with the white cliffs
going up behind her. Haow she so perched herself beats all my going
a-fishing; onless the ice jerked her up into it, for when them bergs
are took with convulsions their tricks are queerer than their shapes by
su'thin', and that's a fact.'
'You saw nothing to hint at life on board?' I repeated.
He shook his head with solemn emphasis.
'Your mate saw nothing?'
Again he wagged his head.
'Captain, tell me--you are an old hand--could people support life in
that craft as she lies there, supposing her to have been stranded
since July last?'
'No, I reckon.'
'But would not the people on seeing your ship pass have made a smoke,
have shown some signal, that you could report life as helpless there
since you could not rescue it?'
'Wal,' he answered, 'supposing folks aboard, thee's not to reckon
they'd be always keeping a look-out. It's mighty cold down thar, an'
they'll be mostly sitting under hatches, an' if they've been thar since
July, as thee says, they'll have growed a little tired, I guess, by
this here time of watching for su'thin' to happen.'
'Is she accessible?'
'Haow?'
'Is she to be got at by the people of a ship sighting her, or sent to
her?'
'There was a mighty biling of water all along under where she was,' he
answered. 'Thee'd need a quiet day; but quiet days are to be had, bar
the swell. Folks have landed afore and they'll land again. Ho, yes! If
thy friends are locked up in that thar hull, they're to be got out of
her.'
'Suppose her there since July; will you believe she has been boarded
and the people released?'
'Why,' he answered, 'if she's been lying fair and square, clear in
sight as she now is, since that month thee names, it's more'n likely
the folks are out of her. But no vessel was ever put by herself in the
situation of that craft. I reckon she's been worked up into it arter
having lain ice-locked, which may sinnify that for months she's been
hid, so that for all we're to know that thar hull may have been the
first that passed close in with the island since the ice broke away and
exposed her.'
I listened with a feverish passion of attention, devouring every
syllable his drawling tongue dropped.
'Have you a chart of that island?' I asked.
He nodded gravely and stood up.
'I'm temperance aft, here,' said he. 'I can offer thee nothing stronger
than lemonade.'
I was too violently agitated to thank him decently, and stuttering out
an awkward acknowledgment, begged him again to let me see the chart of
the island. He took the log-book with him to his berth, and returning,
spread before me a chart representing a considerable expanse of the
seas off the Horn. My sight was now used to the gloom; when he put his
finger upon the place where he had seen the wreck I bent close, and
observed that he indicated an indent in the tracing marked Palmer's Bay.
I entered this in my note-book and asked if he would sell the chart.
He couldn't spare it, he said, but added I might easily furnish myself
with what I wanted in that way at Cape Town.
My spirits were in such a tumult, my heart beat so wildly, the pulses
of my head throbbed so, there was so much feverish confusion of mind
and brain, I could scarcely rally my wits to the task of further
questioning him; I seemed, indeed, scarcely able to understand him. I
cannot express my amazement, the emotions that swelled my heart. 'Twas
as sure as that I lived that the hull seen by this man was the 'Lady
Emma,' and even whilst I bent over the chart, whilst I lifted up my
eyes to look at him, the thought of the measureless distance at which
the wreck lay, of Marie perhaps being at this very time alive in her;
then the imagination of her having been rescued long since, then the
fancy of the hull as a huge coffin in which my dear one lay frozen
and dead; all this, I say, worked in me like a madness; I was beside
myself, and I pored upon the chart panting, the sweat streaming from my
brows, my hands cold as stone.