A good solid point of difference is, on the whole, almost as
satisfactory as an interest in common--which, in the case of Kavanagh,
the mate, and Ferguson, the chief engineer, of the tramp steamer
“Gairloch,” was fortunate, since of the latter commodity they possessed
none at all.
Kavanagh was by way of being particular about his appearance, and shaved
before the six inches of mirror in his cramped little cabin as
religiously as any brassbound officer of a crack liner.
Ferguson was hairy and unbrushed both by inclination and principle.
Kavanagh was neat in his attire.
Ferguson was at his happiest in a filthy boiler suit, and he had a trick
of using a handful of engineroom waste where other men use a pocket
handkerchief, which annoyed Kavanagh almost to the point of tears.
Kavanagh’s whole soul revolted against the smelly, smutty little tub
which was for the time being his floating home. It was ungrateful of
him, certainly, for she had done him a good turn after a fashion. But he
couldn’t help it. He was a sail-trained man; and he had remained in
sail, out of a sheer sense of beauty which was no less real for being
entirely inarticulate, long after his own interests indicated that he
should leave it. Then the company with which he had grown up sold the
last of its fleet, and he had perforce to seek employment elsewhere. He
found it at last, though only after many long and weary weeks of hanging
about docks and shipping offices--found it as mate of the “Gairloch.”
He sang the praises of sail without ceasing. And even so did Ferguson
wax lyrical on the theme of the engines of the “Gairloch.”
She might not, he admitted, be beautiful externally; but, man, she’d
gran’ guts in her! He would then soar into ecstatic and highly technical
rhapsodies concerning those same internal essentials, the technicalities
being further complicated by a copious use of his native Doric, and
decorated freely with a certain adjective of a sanguinary nature of
which he was inordinately fond.
The argument began something after this fashion:
The “Gairloch” had not long cleared Victoria Harbour, and was belching
forth an Acheronian smudge from her shabby funnel, as she butted her
ugly hull into the south-westerly swell, when she met a big four-masted
barque coming in to Hastings Mill for a cargo of Pacific Coast lumber.
It was a glorious morning--one of those bright, calm, virginal mornings
that are an especial climatic product of that coast. Everything was
bathed in a flood of clear, pale sunlight. The opaque green waters of
the Strait gleamed and flashed in the sun, and, clear-cut as if they
were no more than a dozen miles away, the snowy summits of the Oregon
ranges stood out dazzling in their whiteness against the blue of the
early morning sky.
The barque was a tall ship for those days, with royals at fore, main,
and mizen, and her piled-up sails shone white as the distant ranges in
the sunlight that caressed their swelling surfaces. The hands were just
laying aloft to get the canvas off her, and as she surged by with a bone
in her mouth, her wet bows and white figurehead flashing as she lifted
on the swell, Kavanagh’s heart ached anew with an unquenchable longing
for sail. In his mind he followed the noble ship to her moorings, in
fancy heard the familiar nasal chant as sail after sail was furled:
“We’ll roll up the bunt with a fling--o--oh ...
An’ pa--ay Paddy Doyle for his bo--o--ots....”
“There’s a ship for you!” he exclaimed to the wide world.
“Ah see nae beauty in yon,” came a dour voice at his elbow--the voice of
Ferguson. “Ah see nae beauty in thae bluidy windbags, nae mair than in
ma wife’s cla’es hingin’ oot on the cla’es-line o’ a Monday morning.”
Kavanagh was annoyed. He had not meant his involuntary outburst of
feeling to be overheard--least of all to be overheard by Ferguson.
Sneaking about in carpet slippers....
“I dare say this floating abomination is more to your taste,” he
snapped.
“She’s guid guts in her,” said Ferguson.
The argument was still going on as merrily as ever while the “Gairloch”
rolled heavily up from the Line through days which grew ever colder and
winds which grew ever more stormy.
The little ship had struck the Western Ocean in one of the very worst of
his moods. She was making shocking weather of it. She rolled, she
pitched, she wallowed, she did every conceivable thing a deeply laden
and ill-designed ship could do in a seaway. Her iron decks were most of
the time under water, and the atmosphere of the stuffy little cabin,
with every scuttle shut and the lamp smoking villainously as it swung in
its gimbals, resembled that of the infernal regions.
But still, whenever Ferguson and Kavanagh met, the argument continued
without abatement. They went on with it grimly, with their legs hooked
on those of the cabin table, and their backs braced against the backs of
their chairs, while, in spite of the fiddles that had graced the board
for weeks, every roll of the ship added yet further contributions of
cold potato and congealed meat to the dreary confusion of the cabin
floor.
And so they might have gone on to the crack of doom had nothing happened
to interrupt them.
In this case what happened was the sighting of the derelict.
It was about the end of the morning watch, one dark, dreary morning,
when a late livid dawn was just creeping over the rim of the heaving
waste of waters. Kavanagh was cold, tired, and depressed, and his
reflections, as he stood on the bridge of the “Gairloch,” were in
harmony with the time and the weather. The future stretched before him
no more cheerfully than that expanse of grey Atlantic--dreary,
monotonous, and dismal to a degree. He didn’t expect he would ever get a
command. He ought to have gone into steam earlier. He might have got
into one of the big liner companies. Now----
Precisely at this point in his meditations he sighted the deserted
ship--now visible on the crest of a roller, now lost to sight as she
slid drunkenly down into the trough of the sea.
It was evident at a glance that she was not under control. She was
yawing helplessly hither and thither in the seas, her yards, with the
rags of their sails still fluttering in the wind, pointing as if in mute
appeal to the four quarters of the heavens.
“‘Maria’--Genoa,” said Kavanagh, with his glasses to his eyes, “and
built on the Clyde by the looks of her.... I think she’s been
abandoned--I don’t make out anyone moving, or any signal.”
He handed the glasses to Captain Harrison, who had just come on to the
bridge.
“Aye--she’s derelict right enough,” said the captain after a prolonged
scrutiny. “Well, I’ll have to report her--can’t do anything more. It’s
out of the question taking a ship in tow in a sea like this.”
He pulled at his sandy-grey beard in his worried way.
Kavanagh, in his gloomier moments, used to picture himself becoming like
Captain Harrison. He was a harassed-looking little man, who was haunted
by a nightmare-like dread of losing his ship and his ticket. He had a
sickly wife and a brood of young children at home, and his indecision
had prevented him from climbing any higher on the ladder of success than
the rung which was represented by the command of the “Gairloch.”
“Glass falling,” mumbled the captain into his sparse beard, “sea rising
... in for a night of it....”
Kavanagh hardly heard him. His eyes glued to his glasses, he gazed with
a passionate intensity at the abandoned vessel.
It was queer. He couldn’t explain it--couldn’t understand it! But there
was something about that ship that made him feel that, at all costs, he
_must_ save her! He could no more turn tail and leave her to perish than
if there had been human lives at stake. He could no more do it than a
knight of old could calmly ride away and leave a distressed damsel
making signals from a turret top. And, indeed, as her masts dipped and
rose again in the sea, she did somehow seem to be making
signals--personal signals--to him and to no one else: to be saying,
“Come! You’re surely not going to leave me to it, are you?”
“She’d be well worth salving,” he said, trying to keep some of the
eagerness out of his voice as he turned towards his captain. “Mean a lot
of money ... if you could spare the hands----”
Captain Harrison shook his head. He looked almost terrified. But
Kavanagh had seen the momentary gleam in his eyes at the mention of the
money, and his hopes rose.
“I don’t see how I’m going to spare the men,” said the captain, “and
besides what good would these chaps be for a job like that. I doubt if
there’s more than two or three of ’em have ever been in sail at all.”
“She isn’t a big ship, sir,” urged Kavanagh. “If you could let me have
half a dozen hands I could manage her all right.”
Captain Harrison pulled a minute longer at his ragged beard; then broke
out hurriedly, as if afraid that his own indecision might get the better
of him again: “Well, have it your own way--your own responsibility,
mind--and you’ll have to ask for volunteers. I’m not going to order men
away on a job like that. Madness, you know, really. I oughtn’t to do
it--oughtn’t to do it----”
There was, as it turned out, no need to order. Out of the twenty-six
hands comprising the deck department of the “Gairloch” a dozen
volunteered at once, and Kavanagh had a hard job to pick his salvage
crew.
Truth to tell, there wasn’t much to pick among them! Only two had had a
brief experience in sail. As for the rest, what they lacked in knowledge
they made up in enthusiasm. The donkeyman unexpectedly manifested a
romantic yearning to “’ave a trip in one o’ them there,” but him Captain
Harrison, resolute for once, flatly declined to spare.
Kavanagh was hard put to it to hide a rueful grin when he saw his crowd
ranged up before him. They were a scratch lot if ever there was one! He
foresaw that it would be up to him to combine as best he could the
duties of mate, second mate, bos’n, and general bottle-washer with those
of temporary skipper of “‘Maria’--Genoa.”
Scratch lot or not, however, the salvage crew were mightily pleased with
themselves as they pulled away for the barque, and they raised a highly
creditable cheer by way of farewell to their shipmates lined up along
the bulwarks of the “Gairloch.”
One of the last things Kavanagh saw was Ferguson’s hairy countenance
thrust over the rail.
“Every yin to his taste!” bawled the engineer. “Ah wouldna trust ma
precious life to thon bluidy auld windbag in the gale o’ wund that’s
gaun to blaw the nicht!”
His last words were caught up and whirled away on one of the short,
fierce gusts which blew out of the west at ever shorter intervals, and
Kavanagh heard no more.
A scene of chaos welcomed him as he climbed aboard the “Maria.” She had
a big deck-load of lumber, which had broken adrift, and lay piled up
against the temporary topgallant rail, together with an empty hencoop, a
stove-in barrel, and a number of other miscellaneous items. That in
itself was enough to account for the list of the vessel. Aloft she was
in better case than a casual glance suggested. Her spars were all
intact, in spite of the bad dusting she had evidently been through, but
every sail had been blown out of the bolt-ropes, with the exception of
the fore-lower topsail, and that was split from head to foot. The gale
had evidently struck her when she was carrying a fair amount of canvas,
and Kavanagh conjectured that the crew had turned panicky and made no
attempt to save the ship, but had jumped at the chance of being taken
off by some passing vessel.
He signalled to the “Gairloch,” which was still standing by, that he was
able to carry on, and with a farewell hoot of her siren she rolled off
again on her homeward road. Soon her smoke was lost to view in the
gathering dusk. The derelict was on her own now, for good or ill.
Kavanagh set his crew to work at once heaving the deck-load over the
side, and himself went below, accompanied by one of his few “sail” men,
a young seaman named Rawlings, to investigate matters below.
The sense of desolation which always pervades any place inhabited by man
when man’s presence is removed was strong upon him as soon as he began
to descend the companion which led to the saloon. That he had looked
for, however, and silence he had also looked for: so that it was with an
unpleasant sensation of shock that he became suddenly aware of a strange
voice speaking in rapid and monotonous tones, and in some language, too,
which he could not at all make out.
There was someone on board all the time, then! And yet--it was a
peculiar sort of voice--a voice with a strange, a hardly human ring in
it--unnatural, uncanny. Kavanagh stopped short half-way down the
companion. His scalp crept; indeed, he felt convinced that his cap must
be standing at least a quarter of an inch off his head. He restrained,
not without difficulty, a primitive impulse to bolt up on deck again--an
impulse which the consciousness of Rawlings’ round eyes and open mouth
just behind him helped him to check.
The voice ceased as suddenly as it had begun, and the silence which
followed it was worse than the sound.
“Wot the ’ell is it?” came the hoarse voice of Rawlings.
“Sounds like someone crazy,” pronounced Kavanagh; “sick, perhaps, and
they couldn’t get him away----”
He pulled himself together with an effort, and they completed the
descent into the saloon.
They stood together, Rawlings and he, in the little saloon, panelled
with bird’s-eye maple in the style once considered the last word in
elegant ship decoration, with its shabby padded settees, its mahogany
table marked with the rings of many glasses, its spotted and tarnished
mirrors, and its teak medicine chest in the corner.
It was a sorrowful, haunted little place. A smell of stale cigar-smoke
hung about it. The air was chilly, yet stuffy. The uncanny silence of
the deserted ship was all around--a silence only intensified by the
monotonous booming and crashing of the seas, and the occasionally
spasmodic thrashing of a loose block on the deck overhead.
The mysterious voice broke forth anew in a torrent of unintelligible
speech. The sound came this time almost as a relief to the tension. It
was so unmistakably real, now that it was at closer quarters, that half
its terrors fled.
“Whatever it is,” exclaimed Kavanagh, “it’s in here!”
Flinging open a door on his right hand, he stepped boldly in.
The next moment he burst into a shout of laughter. It was a large and
imposing stateroom with a big teak bed--evidently the captain’s, a relic
of the days when the captain of a crack sailing ship was decidedly a
somebody, and when, moreover, he frequently took his wife to sea with
him. And in the middle of the bed was a brass cage containing the owner
of the voice--a fine sulphur-crested cockatoo, which was even now
pouring forth a flood of the choicest polyglot oaths Kavanagh had ever
heard.
It was astonishing what a reaction that bird brought about. All the
haunted air of the ship seemed to have been effectually dispelled.
Kavanagh’s spirits began to rise unreasonably as he continued his tour
of his new command.
The sail locker yielded up only the remains of a fine-weather suit,
mostly patches. Kavanagh whistled softly to himself as he fingered the
thin canvas, and thought about the swiftly falling glass and the fierce
gusts which blew ever more frequently out of the angry winter sunset.
Still, there was nothing for it but to make the best of a bad job, so,
leaving one of his best men at the wheel, he set about the task of
getting off the rags of the fore-lower topsail and bending the new (or
rather the whole) sail in its place.
And what a job that was! Never to the day of his death will Kavanagh
forget it. He had worked with scratch crews in his time, but never
before with a crowd like those well-meaning steamer deck-hands who had
never seen a sail in their lives at such close quarters.
Swearing, struggling, hanging on with teeth and nails, they sweated and
toiled on their unaccustomed perch, until at last--it seemed like a
miracle--all was as snug aloft as was possible in the circumstances. The
chaos on deck was reduced to something approaching order, though the
ship still lay over to it rather more than Kavanagh liked. And now, the
watch being set and look-outs posted, he had time to do what he had been
longing to do--find out, if he could, what the old ship’s past had been.
He felt convinced that she was the product of some crack Aberdeen or
Clydeside builder, for, in spite of her dirty and neglected condition,
there was about her the unmistakable air of decayed gentility. The brass
on capstan and wheel was so caked with rust and paint that the letters
of the builder’s name could not be discerned, and it was only by chance,
while making an inspection of the miscellaneous junk in the lazarette,
that he made the great discovery.
This was, in the first place, nothing more important than an old ship’s
bell with a crescent-shaped fragment broken out. It had evidently been
thrown down there when it was replaced by a new one. It was thick with
dirt and verdigris; but, pressed for time as he was, an instinct of
curiosity made him linger while he scraped off some of the deposit with
his knife to see if anything lay beneath.
His first find was a date--1869.
“Hallo! This gets interesting!” he exclaimed. “Here’s a letter--‘D’--no,
‘P,’ ‘L’ something, an ‘M,’ another ‘M’----”
His breath began to come fast with excitement. He scraped away harder
than ever.
“It _can’t_ be,” he gasped, sitting back on his heels, “but, by George,
it _is_!... The ‘Plinlimmon’!”
Possibly few people outside that comparatively restricted circle which
is closely interested in sailing ships and their records could
understand the feeling of almost reverential awe with which the mate of
the “Gairloch” gazed at the dim lettering on that old broken bell. To
most laymen--indeed, to many seamen of the more modern school--it would
have stood for nothing but an old outworn ship--a good ship, no doubt,
in her day, a day long since over and done.
But to Kavanagh and to his like the name “Plinlimmon” had a very
different significance.
Some ships there are whose names remain as names to conjure with long
after they themselves are gone--names about which yarns will be spun and
songs sung while still any live who have felt their spell. Such a ship
was the “James Baines” of mighty memory; such also were the glorious
“Thermopylæ,” the lovely “Mermerus”; such the evergreen “Cutty Sark” and
her forerunner “The Tweed.” And--though perhaps in a lesser degree--such
was also the “Plinlimmon.”
And to Kavanagh she was even more.
She was like something belonging peculiarly to his own youth. She was
inextricably interwoven with the memories of his boyhood, of his first
voyage--those memories which for him now held the wistful golden glamour
of youth departed.
For, though he had never before this moment beheld her with his bodily
eyes, he had been brought up, as it were, in the “Plinlimmon” tradition.
There had been an old fellow in his first ship--they called him Old
Paul. He had served in the “Plinlimmon” in the days when she was
commanded by the famous “Bully” Rogers: had, indeed, enjoyed the signal
honour of being kicked off the poop by that nautical demigod. He was a
hoary old ruffian, was Old Paul, but a seaman of the old stamp; and he
had that curious, almost poetic, delight in the beauty of a ship which
belonged to so many unlettered old seadogs in the days of sail.
Kavanagh had sat and listened to that old man’s yarns for many and many
an hour. The name “Plinlimmon” recalled to him a hundred memories he had
thought forgotten. He almost seemed to hear the ghostly echo of the
gruff old voice: “Ah, them was ships, them was, sonny.... When Bully
Rogers set a sail, w’y, ’e _set_ it.... Number One canvas, ’is royals
was, an’ they ’ad to stop there till it blew outer the bolt-ropes....
‘Hell or Melbourne’ ... that was the game in them days in the ol’
‘Plinlimmon.’...”
Why, he had all but forgotten Old Paul.... Where was the old chap now,
he wondered.... Dead, no doubt, long ago.... He must have been seventy
and more then, though he never owned to more than fifty-two....
But in the meantime there were other things to think of. The ship to
bring into port ... the glass falling ... the wind and sea rising.... He
turned away from the old bell and its memories and went back on deck.
The light was all but gone, and before the strength of the westerly wind
the old ship was foaming gallantly along under her scanty sail, leaving
a seething white wake faintly luminous in the dusk--the wind all the
while in her rigging humming the song of the storm.
Just for a moment Kavanagh’s heart sank at the thought of that fine
weather lower topsail. Oh, for a bolt or two of Bully Rogers’ Number One
canvas, he thought; but it was only for a moment.
A curious exaltation gripped him.... “By God, she _shall_ do it!” he
said to the sea and the darkness.
* * * * *
Looking back in after years upon the events of the next few days,
Kavanagh could never feel quite certain how long they really occupied.
Time--there _was_ no time! There was just a never-ending succession of
low, hurrying, ragged-edged clouds chasing over a confusion of
white-crested waves that came charging perpetually out of the dim
vapour that shrouded the meeting of sea and sky. There must have been
days--there must have been nights. But he hardly noticed either their
coming or their going. He was intent, his whole being was intent, on one
thing, and one thing only--saving that old ship from her old rival the
sea.
How they worked, those amazing, those indomitable steamboat-men! It was
as if the spirits of all the “Plinlimmon’s” old sailors had come back to
join in the struggle. They fought with strange monsters in the shape of
sails and ropes, they groped in tangles and labyrinths of unaccustomed
rigging; and their great hearts kept them going. While there was breath
in their bodies to work they pumped, and when they could do no more they
dropped in their tracks and slept the sleep of sheer exhaustion.
Once the whole crew was washed overboard clinging to the lee forebrace,
only to be sucked back again with the next roll of the ship. Once
Kavanagh heard a man pouring out a flood of the vilest oaths in a tone
of mild expostulation, as he nursed a hand streaming with blood which
had been jammed between a block and the pin-rail. And once he remembered
seeing that lower topsail, bent with such pains and peril, simply fade
out of the bolt-ropes and be seen no more. It didn’t split or tear. It
just vanished....
But there always seemed to him to be a sort of dream-like atmosphere
about the whole thing. He was never quite sure what did happen and what
didn’t happen. It was impossible on the face of it, for instance, that
Old Paul should have been there hauling with the rest--yet at the time
Kavanagh was quite sure that he saw him. It was also impossible that
there should have been a dozen men on the yard when there were only half
a dozen in the whole blessed ship--yet Kavanagh was equally sure at the
time that he saw and counted them. He even remembered some of their
faces--a huge fellow with a bare, tattooed chest, in particular, that he
hadn’t seen about the ship before.... Not that he ever mentioned it to
anyone else. He might have been asleep and dreamed it, for all he knew.
Still, it served a useful purpose at the time. It put heart into him.
And he needed it before the end!...
At last--at long last--came a grey dawn that broke through ragged clouds
upon a sea heaving as with spent passion, upon a handful of weary,
indomitable men, upon an old ship that still lived!
Kavanagh was suddenly aware that he was tired--dog-tired; that his
wrists were red-raw with the chafing of his oilskins; that the weight of
uncounted days and nights without sleep was weighing down his eyelids
like lead.
But he had won--he had won! And he had commanded the “Plinlimmon”!
Whatever the years to come might bring or take away, they could never
rob him of that glory. They could bring him no greater prize.
There was a yell from the look-out, and a faint answering shout came
back out of the grey dawn.
“The ba-arque, aho-oy!”
A boat scraped against the ship’s side. One by one, a succession of
familiar faces topped the “Plinlimmon’s” rail. The “Gairloch’s”
donkeyman, the “Gairloch’s” cook, the “Gairloch’s” boy clutching and
being desperately clutched by the “Gairloch’s” cat!
Last of all, Ferguson climbed heavily over the rail and sat down on a
spare spar, wiping his face with a lump of waste.
“A steamer--a Dago--rin the auld girl doon,” he said, “an’ the swine
sheered off an’ left us to droon, for all he knew.”
He paused a moment, then went on, his voice rising suddenly to a lament:
“She wasna muckle to look at ... but, man, she’d gran’ guts in her!”
Kavanagh let him have the last word. In the circumstances, he felt he
could afford it.