AT SEA AGAIN
I had arrived at Cape Town on December 13, and on the 26th of the same
month the colonial brig 'Albatross' lay in Table Bay, waiting for me to
go aboard in order to sail. This was surely what the shipowners would
call 'prompt despatch'!
On the morning of the 26th I said good-bye to my friends in the
boarding-house and drove to one of the jetties where Captain Cliffe
awaited me. I was accompanied by the colonel and Mr. Pollak. A
considerable crowd had assembled to see me embark; the story had leaked
out; it was in the papers that I had come to the Cape to identify the
body brought from sea by the 'Emerald,' and that, being satisfied it
was not that of the girl I was in search of, I was going to the New
Orkneys in the hope of finding her locked up in a wreck described as
corresponding in every material detail with the hull of the 'Lady Emma.'
It was an extraordinary romance; Mr. Pollak had assured me that
all Cape Town was talking about it. For the first time in my life
I was made to understand the inconvenience and discomfort of
publicity. A number of ladies were in the crowd, and they thrust most
unceremoniously forward to catch sight of me. When I got into the boat
the crowd good-naturedly cheered; I did not feel easy till the oars
were dipping and the boat under way, for the crowd was bringing others,
and as we rowed from the jetty I saw some men and women running towards
the water.
Mr. Pollak and the colonel went on board with me. It was a rich glowing
day, a number of white steam-like clouds were circling above Cape
Town, but low over the water, brushing it into a wide sheet of rippling
blue splendour, a hot fresh breeze was blowing; it swept straight down
the Bay, with a brassy light in the air that made you think of the wind
as coloured by the yellow glares of the sandy land it had travelled
across.
Mr. Pollak had on several occasions visited the brig; the colonel
had not before viewed her close; he was greatly pleased and hummed a
tune approvingly as he accompanied me about the decks. One detail of
furniture, his own suggestion, he lingered over; it was a bright brass
cannon mounted on the quarter-deck.
'He'll do for you!' he exclaimed, slapping the breech of the piece.
'That should fetch an echo loud enough to awaken the dead.'
A little further aft stood a mortar, with its round mouth gaping at the
sky.
'What's that for?' asked the colonel. 'Isn't the gun noisy enough to
alarm 'em if they're aboard?'
'It is my idea,' said Mr. Pollak. 'Suppose it should be impossible to
scale the slope and reach the ship; _here_ is an engine that will throw
you a ball and line which anyone on board may catch and pull ladders up
by.'
'Good!' exclaimed the colonel.
We then examined the two fresh boats which Captain Cliffe had
purchased on my behalf; they were large, strong, handsome whale-boats,
strengthened by iron beams or girders under the thwarts; and made
lifeboats of by a quantity of cork fenders carefully laced or otherwise
seamed along the sides.
'These,' said I, 'together with rope ladders hooked for scaling, and
grappling irons, form my machinery.'
'It is all you will need,' said Mr. Pollak, 'and I am sure everyone
must pray that God will bless and prosper your noble voyage.'
I took the worthy Dutchman's hand and thanked him with a silent grip.
At that moment the windlass began to clank; immediately a hoarse voice
bawled out a song whose burthen was caught and flung in thunder into
the air by the seven or eight hearts who bowed and rose at the windlass
handles.
'Come, Mr. Pollak; come, colonel,' I exclaimed; 'there's time for a
bumper.'
I called to the captain to send aft the lad who was to wait upon us in
the cabin, and descended with my friends. A magnum of champagne was
opened, and we filled and drank to the voyage. I obliged Captain Cliffe
to come down and drink. He cried through the skylight that he durst not
leave the deck for above three minutes; I told him to come, and the two
gentlemen toasted the little man, who delivered, with several grimaces,
a brief sailorly speech, full of hope, then rushed on deck.
I bade Mr. Pollak good-bye with a full heart. The colonel followed him
into the boat, which put off, and then hung by on her oars to watch us.
At this time the anchor was off the ground, and the crew were making
sail on the brig, whose bowsprit, with a white pinion of jib swelling
from it, was rounding, finger-like, in a slow, pointing way for the
open; the sheep-faced mate stood on the forecastle shouting orders;
a sailor was at the wheel; Captain Cliffe crossed the deck from left
to right, looking up and around, moving swiftly, a doll of a man,
grimacing and blinking at every pause in his nimble trot.
Some of the ships round about had got our tale, I fancy, or at least
the scent of our errand; since from most of them we were watched by
many heads above the rail. Presently the brig's stern was to the wind,
her topsails filled, the lighter sails glanced wing-shaped to the
yard-arms to the drag of the gear; I waved my hat from the quarter
to my two friends, and they flourished a last farewell. My voyage,
strange as any that had ever been undertaken in this world, was begun!
We were the only ship at that time leaving the Bay, and I think our
lonely going must have given a certain majesty and nobleness to the
figure of the vessel in the eyes of those who watched us, with the
significance of her dangerous, surprising, romantic mission going along
with her. I don't know what my own sensations were: I was sensible
perhaps of a little triumph of spirits at this getting away so quickly,
and then there was the feeling that I was in action, that no time was
being lost; and yet there was a heaviness at my heart too, the chill of
doubt, a frosty dread that the errand would prove profitless, and that
if God suffered me to return home it must be as a mourner for Marie.
But we were sailing through a wide, shining scene of commanding beauty,
lofty and gloriously coloured, and the influence of it, I don't doubt,
rescued me from the dark mood imagination might have raised. The breeze
blew hot, but the sweetness of flowers and fruit was in it, and the
scent of the land was brisk with the salt of the sea. In a very little
while the seamen had clothed the brig from the main-royal yard to the
waterways, and as she floated onwards, _now_ slightly curtseying to a
small breathing of swell, the mountains went with her, and the ships
astern closed into clusters past the tail of our mirror-bright line of
wake. The mountains towered on our left; Cape Town vanished, and we
softly drove with a noise of fountains on either hand past rich curves
of shore on whose margin the huge Atlantic comber formed and fell in
snowstorms with white houses beyond the foam like models in ivory
shining amid the greenery.
And all the time we were alone! _This_ was the wonderful feature of our
departure. I could not see the smallest boat in motion. The water was
like a great lonely lake, and the silence on the face of the mountains
was in the wind, in a presence that seemed to _compel_ isolation for
us, hushing all life off the face of the bay down to where the ships
were lying too far off to trouble the sense of solitude.
The crew were now occupied in coiling away the rigging and clearing up
the decks, and I had an opportunity of viewing them. All were white
men; there were eight, together with a cook and a boy to wait upon
us aft, making with captain and mate twelve of a company, which was
plenty. Cliffe had told me he would not ship a certificated second
mate; the man who went as boatswain would relieve the mate and stand
a watch. That man was a wiry, middle-aged seaman; he wore a spread of
grey whisker scissors-trimmed, close to his face, and dark eager eyes
which he rolled quickly as a monkey; he sang out briskly, and sprang
about the decks. Little Captain Cliffe, observing that I watched the
man, came and stood beside me and spoke up softly to my ear:
'I engaged that chap because of his knowledge of the ice. He told me he
was seven years whaling in the Pacific and Southern oceans. He is the
most wonderful jumper I ever heard of.'
'So old as he is?'
'Forty-five or thereabouts. Men of that sort soon lose the reckoning of
their birth. I don't allow their mothers ever enter 'em. They're always
the age that suits 'em to be. But look what a life it is, sir! the iron
it will put into a young 'un's hair! the kinks it'll run into a young
'un's back! All the hard life and the bad food works out through a
man's pores after a few years, bows him down, and hardens in his face
with a crust of years. He's a marvellous jumper that, sir. Tell ye what
he did--and it astonished me--there was a horse and trap standing
close beside where we were talking. He turns on a sudden and sings out,
"Captain, did yer ever see this done?" and putting his feet together
and clenching his fists he bent his knees, let go of the ground like
and shot as a bolt, clearing the horse till you could see half the
length of his own legs of blue sky 'twixt his feet and the animal's
back.'
He gazed up at me, blinking and grinning, and added, 'I allow, should
it come to any awkward climbing jobs, we'll find that covey handy.'
I lingered a little to watch the brig and the coast. The swell was
coming straight out of the wide sea, but the breeze still followed
fiery and splendid with the light of that land; the little ship bowed
softly; the long heave under the bows did not stop her; she floated
with erect spars, her yards square, the canvas breathing like human
breasts as her bowsprit rose and fell; yet a glance astern showed me
she was already whitening the water.
At every look, the high land, purple and hard in that noontide
brilliance, yielded new features. It was towering now on to Hont Bay,
with a trend which made a mighty shoulder of it as it sounded towards
Simon's Town and the Cape of Good Hope: the towering terraces were on
our port quarter with Robben Island to starboard, and ahead was the
glittering breast of the Atlantic with the sea-line hard-carved against
the faint silvery blue. I looked for a sail, but nothing broke that
measureless run of horizon; the junction of air and water had a wild
loveliness, indescribable, thanks perhaps to the violet of the brine
that washed the light azure; though the fear and mystery of beauty I
found in it then doubtless came of the thought of what lay hidden from
me hundreds of leagues deep beyond that slope of airy silver. Had we
been a ship of ancient explorers the field of ocean could not have
shown more barren than my eyes, exploring its recesses under the sharp
of my hand, found it.
Some seamen came aft to spread an awning. They eyed me askew; of course
they knew the brig's mission, and perhaps thought me a little mad;
but it would be all one to them; there is worse to be suffered at sea
than a cruise off the Horn in the midsummer of this side on such wages
as they had signed for, in a tight well-built brig. In fact, they
rolled about their work with a sort of rollicking carriage that made
one reckon they had entered upon the voyage with jolly hearts as on a
yachting jaunt, secure from all danger and dirt of cargo; only it was
as likely they'd come on board a little merry with Jack's custom of
farewell.
I now went below to see to my berth and arrange my traps; but came to a
halt at the cabin table, to lean upon it and think. This interior was
wholly unlike the 'Lady Emma's'; yet the skylight, the lockers, and
several trifling details of cabin furniture brought to my recollection
that day in the Thames when I had said good-bye to Marie in her cabin,
alone. What had been her sufferings since? If she was in the hull she
had been imprisoned at this date for five months, and by the time we
got to her six! For six months she would have been locked up in a
motionless hulk, high perched upon a savage island, heavily faced with
ice, with a thunder of surf far down for ever in her ear, and always
the same white, desolate, fierce prospect of frozen cliffs and rolling
ocean. Would it not have killed her? I clasped my hands in the torment
of the thought. Should I be making this voyage to a remote ice-girt
island merely to enter the wreck and behold the remains of my Marie as
I had looked into that coffin in Cape Town beholding another?
I passed into my own berth, a small but comfortable box, and after
busying myself for half an hour, during which I had recalled my mind
to something of its former composure, I re-entered the cabin and found
the table laid for dinner. The little sea parlour looked cheerful with
this hospitable setting. The heel of a windsail buzzed in the skylight.
There had happened a little shift of wind whilst I was below, for the
brig leaned over and I heard a smart hissing--the seething of foam
sliding past; it was as cooling a noise as the sound of a hard shower
of rain on a dusty August day at home.
I stepped on deck to take a look; the land was melting into a vast roll
of shadow astern and on the port quarter, filming down to the Cape end;
the breeze hung steady, only it came fresher, more fiery and sparkling
out here in the wide ocean, we had changed our course by two or three
points, bringing it somewhat abaft the beam; I saw no cloud, nothing
but a glad race of flashing bright blue seas ridging from an horizon
that rose into a dome of untarnished blue in the midst of which was
the sun, making a dazzling plain of a great surface of water in the
north.
Captain Cliffe came to the compass-stand whilst I stood looking at the
card; I felt his little blinking eyes were upon me when my sight went
to the hollow canvas, and to the sea-smoke that from time to time blew
away in little puffs from off the lee bow when the brig stooped with a
sheering plunge shouldering a knoll of the blue brine into a long roar
of foam.
'This is good sailing,' said I.
'It beats steam anyhow,' said he, turning to look at the race of wake
astern.
'What's the speed?'
'Nine,' he answered with a convulsive grimace of triumph, 'and I
understand they never could get more than seven out of the steamer you
came out in.'
The mate walked in the gangway; I saw but one man forward. The captain
told me the crew were at dinner. But whilst I stood first one man and
then another came up through a little hole in the fore part of the
brig, and in a few minutes half a dozen of them were sprawling and
lounging in the shadows the canvas made upon the forecastle, smoking,
but scarcely speaking for heat and loathing of movement.
I could not forbear a smile when I reflected that to all intents
and purposes I was veritably the owner of this white brig sweeping
south-west, and the master of those people yonder. What would my
prosaic friends of the City think of such an adventure as this I was
upon? But put Marie by my side, or bid me know for a God's-truth that
she was safe, and I'd have sworn there was nothing in this wide world
of delights comparable with such sailing as this. Sickness had been
cured by the 'Cambrian.' The heave of the deck, the slant of the hull,
the feel of the speeding of the fabric of white cloud through the
sun-bright gushing of wind were as a buoyancy of spirits; you did not
heed them, yet they worked like wine in the blood. I wanted but peace
at my heart, the tranquility of conviction, to have tasted a perfect
happiness in this glorious Cape noon of flashing ocean, of rushing brig
and wind filled with the music of the strands.
My reverie was disturbed--for Cliffe stood silent by my side--by the
sight of the boy coming along with the cabin dinner, and presently the
captain and I were seated at table.
This was my first meal aboard, and I often laugh silently when memory
returns me the image of my little skipper sitting behind a roast fowl,
blinking and stretching his lips at it, then rising and lurching over
it, being too short to carve it sitting. He saw amusement in my face,
for on beginning to eat he said he often lamented that he had come
in at the tail end of his family when nearly all the height had been
served out. He was the last born, and arrived when not very many
inches were left. He had a brother six foot high, and his mother was
a big woman. He told me that he once dined with a company of people
when the Queen's health was proposed and everyone stood. His neighbour
requested him to stand up as the Queen's health was being drunk. He
answered he _was_ up. These were the sort of mortifications, he said,
to which little men were subjected.
After a bit, talking always as I now did on the subject of the 'Lady
Emma' and our chances of finding Miss Otway alive in the wreck, I asked
if the boatswain of the brig--that jumping seaman who had been whaling
seven years--had ever sighted the New Orkneys?
'I didn't think of asking,' he answered, 'but I'll soon find out, sir.'
'Would you object to his coming here?'
'This is your ship, Mr. Moore.'
'I'd like to ask him some questions.'
He at once told the boy who waited on us to send Bodkin aft. In a
few minutes the man came; by this time we had dined, but the captain
lingered to hear what this boatswain had to say before he went on deck
to send the mate to his dinner.
'I've been telling this gentleman,' said the captain, leaning his
little figure against a stanchion and discharging a whole broadside of
grimaces at Bodkin, who stood staring at us and around him, astonished
at the summons, 'that you've been a-whaling seven years in the Pacific
and Southern Ocean.'
Here Bodkin lifted his hand to his forehead in the seaman's salute to
me.
'Know anything of the New Orkneys?' said the captain with nervous
abruptness like the briskness of a bird.
'Well, sir, bin off 'em again and again.'
'Sit down,' said I. 'Boy, give Mr. Bodkin a glass of sherry.'
Bodkin put down his cap and sat; he had evidently been called from
some heavy work, and his face and hairy arms bare to the elbows, and
his well-baked throat naked to the iron-grey hairs upon his chest,
shone with sweat. He took the glass and tipped down the wine.
I then said, 'Do you know that we're sailing to the New Orkneys?'
'Oh, yes. I signed for that run.'
'Is our errand known to you?'
'It's to search for a wreck, ain't it, sir?'
'A wreck with live people in it,' said Captain Cliffe. 'I made that
clear, didn't I?'
'Then I hope we shan't find 'em,' said Bodkin.
'What!' shouted Cliffe with a hideous face.
'For their own sakes. Who'd lock a dog up there?' said the man, running
the length of his wet bare arm along his streaming forehead ''Tain't
imagined here, with the pitch 'twixt the seams like suet, and the
paint-work blistering into scabs. I've been off the larger of them
islands five times. Yer wouldn't know 'em from icebergs, 'cept for here
and there a piece of naked black rock showing where ice hadn't formed
or snow couldn't keep a hold of.'
'Could a boat land?' I exclaimed, scarcely bearing to hear him when he
talked like that.
'Why yes, sir. This time of the year--watching a smooth--'tain't always
what they calls weather down there; but it's b---- cold.'
'Were ye ever ashore on them islands?' inquired the captain.
'No, sir.'
'Did your ship send a boat ashore?' I asked.
'The last time I was off them rocks a boat was sent and she came back
again; they was nearly capsized, and that was all they did.'
'Describe the land,' said I.
His recollection, however, was not very clear. He talked of tall
ice cliffs and of a huge dim mountain far inland; and of peaks and
projections showing and disappearing amidst storms of snow.
'Is there much ice about the island?' said I.
'Plenty,' he answered. 'The biggest berg I ever see in all my life was
close in with that land, third time I wur off it.'
'Suppose the hull of a ship was on a ledge of ice, thirty or forty
feet above the wash of the sea; she was lying plain in sight of the
ocean'--I named the date on which the skipper of the whaler 'Sea Queen'
had passed her--'would you expect to find her still exposed, lying in
full view?'
He looked at me with a working mind, his words being too few to help
him quickly; then said, turning his eyes upon the captain:
'All things considered, I allow it's more'n likely she'd be smothered
up.'
'What's to smother her?' cried Captain Cliffe.
'The congregating of bergs,' answered the other.
'Is that all ye know of ice?' exclaimed the little man. 'Haven't you
heard that ice fetches away from the main and works north this time o'
year?'
'I'm asked a question,' said the man with a note of sullenness in his
voice, 'and I'm expected, I suppose, for to speak the truth, being sent
for. All I know is there's nothen so shifting as ice, and therefore
nothen so smothering.'
'But the hull's ashore on an island,' I exclaimed.
'That's not going to stop the ice from a-blocking of her out,' he
answered.
'I'm afraid you won't get much encouragement out of this man,' said
Captain Cliffe, turning and grimacing at me.
'Yer see, sir,' said Bodkin, directing a languishing look at the
decanter of sherry in the hands of the boy as he went to the pantry,
''tain't only the chance of that there hull being hobscurified by the
congregating of ice right in front of her; she lies under slifts which
are constantly a-going to pieces and tumbling down in thundering lumps.'
'Then,' said I, 'I take it, Mr. Bodkin, that you, who have had plenty
of experience of the ice down south, give me little reason to hope that
we shall find the wreck whole or the people abandoned in her alive?'
He rolled his monkey eyes briskly at this, fretting first one cropped
grey whisker and then the other with the palm of his hand.
'I allow,' he answered after a silence, during which little Captain
Cliffe viewed him as sternly as his nervous distorting affection
permitted, 'that your chance is as good as any chance at sea hever can
be. But I don't mind saying,' he added, standing up, catching hold of
his cap and revolving it, 'that our number is agin your luck.'
'What's that?' exclaimed the captain.
'Let the gent count us. There's thirteen souls.'
'Go forward,' said the captain, 'and get on with your work.'
The man, with a civil flourish of his hand to his brow, left the cabin.
'There's no fool like Jack fool,' said Captain Cliffe.
I confess, however, that when I reckoned up to myself the number
of people on board and made No. 13, I felt a little uneasy. I said
nothing to the captain, but the thing weighed upon me. It was perfectly
natural that at such a time I should be superstitious; certainly a
good omen would have heartened me: why, then, should not so unlucky a
circumstance as that of thirteen forming the number of us in the brig
prove depressing? I was so weak in this way that I had serious thoughts
of ordering Cliffe to tranship one of the men at the first chance that
offered. Also, the boatswain Bodkin's description of the island, his
talk of the cliffs, of ice-splitting and thundering down in blocks,
worried me by exciting new apprehensions. I was sorry I had sent for
the man. I had come from the deck to my dinner in tolerably good
spirits, and when I returned on deck I felt as melancholy as ever I had
been in my gloomiest hour aboard the 'Cambrian.'
The mood lasted for the remainder of the day, so that, spite of
the noble sailing breeze, this, my first start in search of Marie,
seemed as inauspicious as though the scheme had failed in the first
breath of it. But after a long chat with Cliffe in the evening I grew
cheerfuller. The sun was sinking in splendour: the dark blue sea ran in
frothing lines; the brig was sailing swiftly, heeling down and smoking
onwards as though, like something living, she blew the breath of life
in steam from the nostrils of her hawsepipes as she fled. Every hour of
such progress shortened the term of expectation; all might yet be well;
I could not but reflect that, until the worst was known, the best might
most rationally be hoped for. I had come to Cape Town thinking to find
my sweetheart dead; it was not she that lay there. Though we should
board the wreck and find nobody in her, still I should have a right to
believe that the three had been rescued, and perhaps at that very time
were at home in safety.
Thus I reasoned with myself after my talk with Cliffe in the evening
and was somewhat easier at heart, which indeed in this whistling
evening, merry with progress, spacious with the splendour of the
setting sun, and the distance of the eastern seaboard faintly flushed,
might have been at rest but for the gloom of the silly superstition of
thirteen!
About this time, a little before it fell dark, whilst looking towards
the forecastle where most of the crew were smoking and talking, I saw a
man come out of the hatch, hugging something to his breast. The sailors
jumped up and pressed around him. Hands were outstretched to what the
fellow held, and I heard some laughter. Cliffe was below. The mate
Bland was walking near me abreast of the skylight. He bawled out:
'What have you there, my lads?'
On which the boatswain Bodkin, snatching the object from the hold of
the man, held it high, shouting:
'Here's good luck to the brig "Albatross;" and now there's fourteen all
told.'
I started, and saw it was a cat he held. It was black as coal.
'Bring it here,' I cried.
He came, the others grinning as they stood in a huddle looking aft. It
was a young cat, and it mewed as the man approached with it. Cliffe
came on deck at that moment.
'Where was it found?' I asked, stroking the thing as it lay mewing in
Bodkin's hands.
'In one of the men's hammocks, sir.'
'It's a cat!' exclaimed Cliffe with a grimace. 'Who brought it aboard?'
'No man owns to it,' responded Bodkin.
'But who would bring it aboard if it wasn't its own legs, Mr. Moore?'
said Cliffe, turning to me. 'D'ye know I'd ask for no better stroke of
luck in all my seafaring days than this same beast's presence,' and he
advanced his little hand and tickled the cat's head.
'There's fourteen of us now, sir,' said Bodkin, with a darting roll of
his eyes.
'Fourteen and a stroke of luck besides, eh?' said I with a foolish
laugh of good spirits spite of myself.
'Go and give it something to eat and see that it don't jump
overboard,' said Captain Cliffe; and whilst the boatswain walked
forward handling the cat tenderly enough and talking to it, the little
skipper with a snap of his eyes and a voice of conviction exclaimed:
'That cat's squared the yards, Mr. Moore. We shall find the wreck, sir,
and do your business.'