The “Maid of Athens” discharged her cargo of cement at Vancouver, and
went over to the Puget Sound wharf at Victoria to load lumber for Chile.
She was there for nearly a month before she left her berth on a fine
October afternoon, and anchored in the Royal Roads, where the pilot
would board her next morning to take her down to Flattery.
Broughton went ashore in the evening for the last time, and walked up to
his agent’s offices in Wharf Street. He was burningly anxious to be at
sea again. The old restlessness was strong upon him that he had felt
before leaving London River, and a number of small vexatious delays had
whetted his impatience to the breaking point.
“Letter for you, Cap’n,” the clerk hailed him. “I thought maybe you’d be
around, or I’d have sent it over to you.”
Broughton turned the letter in his hands for a minute or two before
opening it. He recognized the prim, clerkly hand at once. It was from
Jenkinson. A cold wave of apprehension flooded over him. Some mysterious
kind of telepathy told him that it contained unwelcome tidings.
He slit the envelope at last, unfolded the sheet, and read it through.
Then he read it again, and still again--uncomprehendingly, as if it were
something in a foreign and unknown language:
“ ...Sorry to say the old ship has now been sold ... firm at Gibraltar
... understand she is to be converted into a coal hulk....”
Broughton crumpled the sheet in his hand with a fierce gesture, staring
out with unseeing eyes into a world aglow with the glory of sunset. It
was the worst--the very worst--he had ever dreamed of! Why hadn’t he let
her go, he wondered, that night in the North Atlantic? Why had he
dragged her back from a decent death for a fate like this? He could have
stuck it if she had gone to the shipbreakers. It would have hurt like
hell, but he could have stuck it. But this; it made him think, somehow,
of those old pitiful horses you saw being shipped across to Belgium with
their bones sticking through their skins. People used to have their old
horses shot when they were past work. They were different now. It was
all money--money--money! They thought nothing of fidelity, of loyalty,
of long service. They cared no more for their ships than for so many
slop pails....
Wasn’t it the old Vikings that used to take their old ships out to sea
and burn them? There was a fine end for a ship now--a fine, clean,
splendid death for a ship that had been a great ship in her day! He
remembered once, years ago, watching a ship burn to the water’s edge in
the Indian Ocean. He wasn’t much more than a nipper at the time, but he
had never forgotten it. The calm night, and the stars, and the ship
flaring up to heaven like a torch. He didn’t think he would have minded,
somehow, seeing his old ship go like that. But this--oh, he had got to
find a way out of it somehow....
“Bad news, Cap’n?” came the clerk’s inquiring voice.
Broughton pulled himself together with an effort.
“No, no, thanks!” Mechanically he made his adieux and passed out into
the street. He didn’t know where he was going. He never remembered how
he found his way to the Outer Wharf where his boat was waiting.
But he must have got there somehow, for now he was sitting in the
stern-sheets and looking out across the water to the ship lying at
anchor, with eyes to which sorrow and the shadow of parting seemed to
have given a strange new apprehension of beauty. How lovely she looked,
he thought, with the little pink clouds seeming to be caught in her
rigging, and the gulls flying and calling all about her! It was queer
that he should notice things like that so much, now that he was going to
lose her. He had known the time when he would have taken it all for
granted. Now, he kept seeing all kinds of little things in a kind of
new, clear light, as if he saw them for the first time----
* * * * *
Let young Kennedy tell the rest of the tale--in his cabin in a Blue
Funnel liner, years afterwards; the unforgettable, indefinable smell of
China drifting up from the Chinese emigrants’ quarters, the gabble of
the stokers at their interminable fan-tan on the forecastle mingling
with the piping of the gulls along the wharf sheds.
“I could see at once” (thus young Kennedy) “that something had gone
wrong with the Old Man. He looked ten years older since I had seen him
a couple of hours before. He came up the ladder very slowly and heavily,
passed me by without speaking--I might have been a stanchion standing
there for all the notice he took of me--and went down into the cabin
almost as if he were walking in his sleep.
“Something--I don’t exactly know what--intuition, perhaps, you’d call
it--made me trump up an excuse to follow him. I didn’t like the looks of
him, somehow.
“I found him sitting in his chair by the table, staring straight before
him with that same fixed look as if he didn’t really see anything.
“He didn’t so much as turn his head when I went in, and at first when I
spoke he didn’t seem to hear me. I spoke again, a little louder, and he
gave a sort of start, as if he had been suddenly roused out of a sleep.
“‘Yes--no!’ he said in a dazed kind of way. ‘Yes--no’ (like that); and
then suddenly, in a very loud, harsh voice, quite different from his
ordinary way of speaking: ‘A hulk! A hulk! They are going to make a coal
hulk of her!’
“The words seemed to be fairly ripped out of him. He didn’t seem to be
speaking to me. It was more as if he were trying to make himself believe
something that was too bad to realize.
“I managed to say something--I forget just what: that it was rotten
luck, perhaps. I doubt if he heard me, anyhow, for he went on in the
same strange voice, like someone talking to himself.
“‘She’s good for twenty years yet!’ And then, in a sort of choking
voice, ‘Mine--mine, by God, mine!’
“Well, I just turned at that and bolted. I felt I couldn’t stand any
more. It seemed like eavesdropping on a man’s soul.
“I didn’t see him again until the next morning, when the tug came
alongside as soon as it was light. He came on deck looking as if nothing
had happened. I never said anything, of course--no more did he; and from
that day to this I don’t really know--though I rather fancy he did--if
he remembered what had passed between us.
“We had a fine passage down to Iquique, where we discharged our lumber
and loaded nitrates for the U.K. The Old Man had got very fussy about
the ship. He had every inch of her teak scraped and oiled while we were
running down the Trades, and everything made as smart as could be aloft;
and while we were lying at Iquique he had her figurehead, which was a
very pretty one, all done over--pure white, of course. I did the best
part of it myself, for I used to be reckoned rather a swell in the
slap-dab business in those days, though I say it myself!
“Well, we finished our loading and left, and all the ships cheered us
down the tier; and I don’t wonder, for the old ship looked a picture.
“The Old Man and I had got to be quite friends. I suppose we were as
near being pals as a skipper and a second mate ever could be. He was
working on a new rail for the poop ladder--all fancy ropework and so
on--and he used to bring it up on deck and yarn away to me about old
times hour by the length. I fancy he rather liked me, but up till then
he had always had a kind of stand-offish, you-keep-your-place-young-man
way with him; and for my part I’d always looked on him with that sort
of mixture of holy awe when he was there and disrespect behind his back
a fellow has for the skipper he’s served his time under. I suppose our
both thinking such a lot of the old barky gave us an interest in common.
You see, I’d served my time in her right from the start, so that
naturally she was the ship of all ships for me--still is, for the matter
of that.... Say what you will, she was a great old ship, and he was a
great old skipper!”
(Kennedy paused. A quiver had crept somehow into his voice, and he had
to get it under control again.)
“The Old Man” (he went on) “had always been what I should call a careful
skipper. Not nervous--nothing of that sort--but cautious; I never knew
him lose a sail but once, and never a spar. In fact, I used to feel a
bit annoyed with him sometimes because he didn’t go out of his way to
take risks. He was a fine seaman; but there’s no denying the fact he
_was_ cautious. He made some fine passages in the ‘Maid of Athens,’ and
never a bad one. But he didn’t really drive her. I believe he was too
damned fond of her.
“So that you may imagine it was a bit of a surprise when we began to get
into the high south latitudes and he started to crack on in a way that
made even me open my eyes a little.
“I well remember the first day I noticed it. It was just on sunset--a
black and red sort of affair with lots of low-hanging clouds, and the
seas came rolling up with that ugly, sickly green on them when the light
caught them that always goes with bad weather.
“It had been blowing pretty hard all day, and the glass dropping fast.
The ship was labouring heavily and shipping quantities of water; she was
loaded nearly to her marks with nitrates. There stood the skipper--I can
just see him now--with his feet planted wide, holding on to the weather
rigging and looking up aloft, as his way always was when it was blowing
up.
“I expected him, of course, to order some of the canvas off her, for she
was carrying a fairish amount considering the weather. So I was fairly
taken aback, as you may imagine, when he turned round and said quite
quietly:
“‘I want the fore upper topsail reefed and set, Mr. Kennedy.’
“I was so surprised that I just stood and gaped for a minute or so. He
looked at me in a sort of a challenging way, and said:
“‘Didn’t you hear the order? What are you waiting for?’
“I pulled myself together, said ‘Fore upper topsail it is, sir!’ and off
I went. And I can tell you that for the next half hour or so I had
plenty to occupy me without worrying my head about what the Old Man was
thinking of.
“Well, we got the sail reefed and set. By this time the ship was ripping
along at a good sixteen knots or more. You could see her wake spread out
a mile behind her like a winding sheet. It was quite dark by this time.
Her lee rail was right under, and making our way aft was like going
through a swimming-bath.
“The Old Man was still standing just as I had left him, holding on with
both hands to the weather rigging, and bracing his feet against the
slant of the deck. I had hardly got my foot on the poop ladder when he
turned his head and called to me. I could see his lips move, but I could
hear nothing for the noise of the wind and sea.
“‘Beg pardon, sir,’ I yelled into the din.
“This time I managed to catch a word or two, but I could make nothing of
it. It sounded like topgallantsails, but in spite of what had just
happened I couldn’t believe my own ears.
“‘Are you deaf, or what’s the matter with you?’ yells the Old Man then.
‘That’s twice I’ve had occasion to repeat an order. Don’t let it occur
again!’
“Well, off I struggled again forrard! ‘What price Bully Forbes of the
“Marco Polo,”’ says I to myself; and I tried to fancy the old B.O.T.
examiner’s face that passed me for second, if I’d answered his pet
question, ‘Running before a gale, what would you do?’ with ‘Cram on more
sail and chance it!’
“It took us a good ten minutes to make our way through the broken water
on deck. We’d struggle forward a few yards, then--flop!--would come a
big green one over the rail and send us all jumping for our lives--on
again, and over would come another; still we got there at last, and
after a bit we managed to set the sail. Then came the big tussle, at the
braces up to our necks in water! More than once I thought we were all
gone; but at last everything was O.K., gear turned up and all, and we
hung on to windward as well as we could and put up a silent prayer--at
least I know I did--that the Old Man wouldn’t take it into his head to
fly any more kites just yet.
“I’d always rather envied the fellows who were at sea twenty years or so
before my time--the chaps who had such wonderful yarns to tell about the
dare-devil skippers and the incredible cracking on in the China tea
ships and the big American clippers. Well, I don’t mind owning I was
getting all of it I wanted for once!
“Mind you, it didn’t worry me any! On the whole, I liked it. I was a
youngster, with no best girl or anything of that sort to trouble about,
and I enjoyed it. There was something so wonderfully fine and exciting
in the feel of the thing, even when you knew at the back of your mind
that she might go to glory any minute and take the whole blessed
shooting-match along with her. But there wasn’t much time to worry about
details like that; and anyhow, after a certain point you just get beyond
thinking about them one way or the other. It’s all in the day’s work,
and there you are!
“But our precious mate, I must tell you, didn’t like it a bit--not a
little bit! He was a fellow called Arnot, rather a poisonous little
bounder; I guess he’d none too much nerve to start with, and he’d played
the dickens with what he had while we were in Iquique, running after
what he called “skirts” and soaking _aguardiente_. The skipper’s
carrying on got on his nerves frightfully. He was scared stiff. He went
about dropping dark hints about barratry, and chucking the ship away,
and _he_ wasn’t the man to hold his tongue if he ever got back to
England, and so on. He used to buttonhole me whenever we met and start
burbling away about the Old Man being out of his mind.
“I ran bung into him one day as I came out of my room. It was blowing
like the dickens and the ship tearing along hell-for-leather. I won’t
say what sail she was carrying, because I don’t want to get the name of
being a liar. She was a wonderful old ship to steer (I hardly ever knew
her need a lee wheel) or she could never have kept going as she did
under all that canvas. If she’d once got off her course it would have
been God help her!
“Mister Mate and I did one or two impromptu dance steps in each other’s
arms before we got straightened up again. I noticed two things about him
while we were thus engaged. One was that by the smell of him he’d been
imbibing a drop of Dutch courage from a private store I suspected he
kept in his room--the other that he was fairly shaking with fright.
“‘I s-s-say, you know, th-this is awful! He’s--he’s m-m-mad,’ he
stuttered. You really couldn’t help feeling sorry for the little beast
in a way. I believe he was nearly crying!
“‘Mad nothing!’ I said. ‘Anyway, mad or sane, he knows a damn sight more
about seamanship than either of us.’ I’d a good mind to add that so far
as he was concerned that wasn’t saying much.
“Arnot moaned, ‘He’ll drown us all, that’s what he’ll do!’ gave a
despairing little flop with his arms, and dived into his room, for all
the world like a startled penguin.
“I jolly well wasn’t going to take sides against the skipper with a
little squirt like Arnot, but in my own mind I was far from happy about
him.
“What _was_ he driving at? God knows!... Sometimes I think one thing,
sometimes another. Was he trying to throw his ship away after all those
years of command? I can’t say. I know I knocked a couple of Mister
Arnot’s teeth into the back of his head for saying so, after it was all
over; but that was more a matter of principle, and by way of relieving
my feelings, than anything else. It looked like it, I must own. And yet
I don’t think it was quite that. It was more, if you understand me, that
he just felt as if things had gone too far for him--so he threw his
cards on the table, and left it to--well, shall we say Providence to
shuffle them!
“Well, Mister Mate was going to have worse to put up with yet!
“The big blow lasted off and on for four days, and then it began to ease
off a bit. I went below for a sleep: I was fairly coopered out. I just
flopped down in my wet clothes and was off at once.
“When I came on deck again for the middle watch we were right in the
thick of a dense white fog. There was a cold wind blowing steadily out
of nowhere, and the ship was still going along, as near as I could
judge, at about thirteen or fourteen knots. The first person I saw was
the old bos’n--a Dutchman, and a real good sailorman, though a bit on
the slow side, like most Dutchmen--standing under the break of the poop
with his nose thrown up to windward, sniffing like an old dog.
“‘Ice!’ he said. ‘I schmell ice!’
“I should think he did ‘schmell’ it! Phoo! but it was cold! The sails
were like boards--as stiff and as hard. I doubt if we could have furled
them if we had wanted to. The helmsman, when the wheel was relieved,
left the skin of his fingers on the spokes. It was a queer, uncanny
experience ... the ship ripping along through that blanket of fog, as
tall and white as the ghost of a ship.... If there had been anyone else
to see her, they might have been excused for thinking they’d met the
‘Flying Dutchman’ a few thousand miles off his usual course.
“And ice--there was ice everywhere! It must have been all round us,
though we never saw it, only, as the bos’n said, ‘schmelt’ it and heard
it. Sometimes there would be the sound of the seas breaking along it for
miles; sometimes there would be the weird noises--shrieks and
groans--that the bergs make when they are ‘calving’; now and then cracks
like musketry fire--and in the midst of it all the penguins would make
you jump out of your skin with calling out exactly like human voices.
“There the Old Man stood on the poop, the whole time, more like a frozen
image than a man--his arms laid along the spanker boom, and his chin
resting on them--for hours, never speaking or moving.
“I went up to him at last and begged him to lie down, promising to call
him if anything happened. He seemed to wake out of a dream just as he
had done that day in the cabin at Victoria. His breath had congealed and
frozen his beard to his sleeve, and he had to give a regular tug to get
it loose. And he had to tear his hand away from the iron of the spar and
leave the skin behind.
“I got him a cup of coffee, and he drank it down, and then he lay down
on the settee in the chart-room. He called me back as I was leaving him,
as if he were going to say something. But he only said, ‘Never mind--it
is nothing,’ and lay down again.
“I looked in on him when the mate relieved me at eight bells. He was
still fast asleep, and it came over me all of a sudden how old and tired
he looked. I didn’t see any sense in waking him, so I tiptoed off and
left him.
“When I woke at seven bells I could tell at once by the movement of the
ship that she had much less way on her. I don’t mind owning I was more
than a little relieved. The Old Man’s cracking on had begun to get on my
nerves a bit since the fog had come on. It was so unusual there was
something uncanny about it. I don’t suppose I should have cared a cuss
if he’d been one of your dare-devil, Hell-or-Melbourne,
what-she-can’t-carry-she-must-drag sort of blighters. But, being the man
he was, that he should suddenly bust out like this--well, it staggered
me. It was like one’s favourite uncle going Fanti.
“What had really happened, as it turned out, was that Mister Mate had
taken the bull by the horns, and shortened sail while the Old Man was
safely out of the way. It was dead against his orders, and when the
skipper came on deck, which he did just as I turned up, there was a rare
to-do.
“I never saw a man in such a passion. He was white and shaking with
anger. He went for Arnot in a regular fury. Was he master of his own
ship, or was he not? and so on, and so on. And then Arnot, who had lost
his head altogether, started bawling back at him about barratry and
Board of Trade inquiries.
“‘You damned insubordinate hound!’ yells the Old Man. I could see the
big veins swell up on his forehead. I thought he would have struck the
mate.
“And then--something happened. There was a jar and a grinding crash
forward, and we were all thrown sprawling in a heap on the deck.
“The ship had driven bows on into a berg nearly as big as a continent,
and then slowly slid off again. Nobody was hurt. The men came tumbling
out of the deckhouse where they berthed before you could look round. I
don’t suppose any of them was asleep, for every one was getting a bit
jumpy since we had been among the ice.
“The first thing I saw when I picked myself up was Arnot crawling out of
the scuppers with such a comical look of surprise that I had to laugh.
Then I saw the Old Man--and the laugh died.
“I shall never forget his face--miserable and yet lifted up both at
once, if you understand me, like old what’s-his-name--you
know--sacrificing his daughter. There he stood, on the break of the
poop, quite calm and collected, seeing to the swinging out of the boats,
and making sure that they had food and water. Then at the last he went
back to the chart-room to fetch the ship’s papers.
“He sighed once, and looked round--a long look as if he were saying
good-bye to it all in his heart. He let his hand rest on her rail for a
minute, and I saw his lips move as if he were speaking to himself. Then
he sighed again, and went in.
“The ship settled down very fast. We waited five minutes--ten minutes. I
began to feel uneasy and went along to see what was detaining him. I
glanced into the chart-room. He was sitting by the table: I could see
his grey head--the hair getting a bit thin on top--just as I’d seen it
scores of times. Nothing wrong that I could see....
“Fifteen minutes--twenty--I shoved my head in to tell him the boat was
waiting....
“But I never got him told.... He must have had some sort of a
stroke--evidently when he was going to make a last entry in the log, for
the book lay open before him. I wonder what he was going to write in it.
I wonder! Ah, well, no one will ever know that but his Maker.
“He was still breathing when we got him into the boat, but it was plain
to see that no Board of Trade inquiry would ever trouble him.
“We only just pulled away from the ship in time. She went down quite
steadily, on a perfectly even keel. I suppose her cargo--she was loaded
right down to her marks--helped to keep her upright. She just settled
quietly down, with a little shiver now and then like a person stepping
into cold water. Her sails kept her up a little until they were soaked
through. She looked--oh, frightfully like a drowning woman! The fog shut
down like a curtain just at the finish, and the last I saw of her was
like a white drowning hand thrown up out of the water. I was glad from
my heart the Old Man couldn’t see her. It was bad enough for me--a young
fellow with all the world before me. I tell you, the salt on my cheeks
wasn’t all sea water! What it would have been like for him----
“He was dead by the time a steamer picked us up, twelve hours later, and
we buried him the same day, not many miles from the place where the old
‘Maid of Athens’ went down.
“Somehow, I think he would have been pleased if he knew.... You see, he
thought a lot of the old ship....”