THE CAPTAIN AND I TALK OF THE DEATH SHIP.
After three-quarters-of-an-hour, or thereabouts, Captain Skevington
returned. We then trimmed to our course again, and, ere long, the
Plymouth snow was astern of us, rolling her spread of canvas in a
saluting way that was like a flourish of farewell.
Whilst the jolly boat was being hoisted, the captain stood gazing at
the snow with a very thoughtful face, and then burying his hands in
his pockets, he took several turns up and down the deck with his head
bowed, and his whole manner not a little grave. He presently went to
the mate, and talked with him, but it looked as though Mr. Hall found
little to raise concern in what the captain said, as he often smiled,
and once or twice broke into a laugh that seemed to provoke a kind of
remonstrance from the master, who yet acted as though he were but half
in earnest too; but they stood too far away for me to catch a syllable
of their talk.
It was my watch below at eight o'clock that evening. I was sitting
alone in the cabin, sipping a glass of rum and water, ready to go to
bed when I had swallowed the dose. There was but one lamp, hanging from
a midship beam, and the cabin was somewhat darksome. The general gloom
was deepened by the bulkhead being of a sombre, walnut colour, without
any relief--such as probably would have been furnished had we carried
passengers--from table-glass or silver, or such furniture. I mention
these matters because they gave their complexion to the talk I am now
to repeat.
Presently, down into this interior through the companion hatch comes
Captain Skevington. I drained my glass and rose to withdraw.
"Stop a minute, Fenton," says he; "what have you been drinking there?"
I told him.
"Another drop can't hurt you," said he; "you have four hours to sleep
it off in." With which he called to the boy to bring him a bottle of
brandy from his cabin. He bid me help myself whilst he lighted a pipe
of tobacco, and then said: "The master of the snow we met to-day warns
us to keep a bright look-out for the Dutch. He told me that yesterday
he spoke an American ship that was short of flour, and learnt from the
Yankee--though how Jonathan got the news I don't know--that there's
a Dutch squadron making for the Cape, in charge of Admiral Lucas,
and that among the ships is the Dordrecht of sixty-six guns and two
forty-gun frigates."
"But should we fall in with them will they meddle with us, do you
think, sir?" said I.
"Beyond question," he answered.
"Then," said I, "there is nothing for it but to keep a sharp look-out.
We have heels, anyway."
He smoked his pipe with a serious face, as though not heeding me; then
looking at me steadfastly, he exclaimed, "Fenton, you've been a bit of
a reader in your time, I believe. Did your appetite that way ever bring
you to dip into magic, necromancy, the Black Art, and the like of such
stuff?"
He asked me this with a certain strangeness of expression in his eyes,
and I thought it proper to fall into his humour. So I replied that in
the course of my reading I might have come across hints of such things,
but that I had given them too little attention to qualify me to reason
about them or to form an opinion.
"I recollect when I was a lad," said he, passing my answer by, so to
speak, "hearing an old lady that was related to my mother, tell of a
trick that was formerly practised and credited, too; a person stood at
a grave and invoked the dead, who made answer."
I smiled, thinking that only an old woman would talk thus.
"Stop!" cried he, but without temper. "She said it was common for a
necromancer to invoke and obtain replies; but that though answers were
returned, they were not spoken by the dead, but by the Devil. The
proof being that death is a separation of the soul from the body, that
the immortal soul cannot inhabit the corpse that is mere dust, that
therefore the dead cannot speak, themselves, but that the voices which
seem to proceed from them are uttered by the Evil One."
"Why the Evil One?" said I.
"Because he delights in whatever is out of nature, and in doing
violence to the harmonious fabric of the universe."
"That sounds like a good argument, sir," said I, still smiling.
"But," continued he, "suppose the case of men now living, though by the
laws of Nature they should have died long since. Would you say that
they exist as a corpse does when invoked--that is, by the possession
and voice of the Devil, or that they are informed by the same souls
which were in them when they uttered their first cry in this life."
"Why, sir," I answered, "seeing that the soul is immortal, there is no
reason why it should not go on inhabiting the clay it belongs to, so
long as that clay continues to possess the physical power to be moved
and controlled by it."
"That's a shrewd view," said he, seemingly well-pleased. "But see here,
my lad! our bodies are built to last three score and ten years. Some
linger to an hundred; but so few beyond, that every month of continued
being renders them more and more a sort of prodigies. As the end of a
long life approaches--say a life of ninety years--there is such decay,
such dry-rot, that the whole frame is but one remove from ashes. Now,
suppose there should be men living who are known to be at least a
hundred and fifty years old--nay, add an average of forty to each man
and call them one hundred and ninety years old--but who yet exhibit no
signs of mortality; would not you say that the bounds of Nature having
been long since passed, their bodies are virtually corpses, imitating
life by a semblance of soul that is properly the voice and possession
of the Devil?"
"How about Methusaleh, and others of those ancient times?"
"I'm talking of to-day," he answered. "'Tis like turning up the soil to
work back into ancient history; you come across things which there's no
making anything of."
"But what man is there now living who has reached to a
hundred-and-ninety?" cried I, still struck by his look, yet, in spite
of that, wondering at his gravity, for there was a determination in his
manner of reasoning that made me see he was in earnest.
"Well," said he, smoking very slowly, "the master of that snow, one
Samuel Bullock, of Rotherhithe, whom I recollect as mate of a privateer
some time since, told me that when he was off the Agulhas Bank, he
made out a sail upon his starboard bow, braced up, and standing
west-sou'-west. There was something so unusual and surprising about her
rig that the probability of her being an enemy went clean out of his
mind, and he held on, influenced by the sort of curiosity a man might
feel who follows a sheeted figure at night, not liking the job, yet
constrained to it by sheer force of unnatural relish. 'Twas the first
dogwatch; the sun drawing down; but daylight was yet abroad, when the
stranger was within hail upon their starboard quarter, keeping a close
luff, yet points off, on account of the antique fit of her canvas.
Bullock, as he talked, fell a-trembling, though no stouter-hearted man
sails the ocean, and I could see the memory of the thing working in him
like a bloody conscience. He cried out, 'May the bountiful God grant
that my ship reaches home in safety!' I said, 'What vessel was she,
think you?' 'Why, captain,' says he, 'what but the vessel which 'tis
God's will should continue sailing about these seas?' I started to hear
this, and asked if he saw any of the crew. He replied that only two men
were to be seen--one steering at a long tiller on the poop deck, and
the other pacing near him on the weather side. 'I seized the glass,'
said he, 'and knelt down, that those I viewed should not observe me,
and plainly catched the face of him who walked.'"
"How did Bullock describe him, sir?" said I.
"He said he wore a great beard and was very tall, and that he was
like a man that had died and that when dug up preserved his death-bed
aspect; he was like such a corpse artificially animated, and most
terrible to behold from his suggestions of death-in-life. I pressed him
to tell me more, but he is a person scanty of words for the want of
learning. However, his fears were the clearest relation he could give
me of what he had seen."
"It was the Phantom Ship he saw, you think, sir?" said I.
"I am sure. He bid me dread the sight of it more than the combined
navies of the French and the Dutch. The apparition was encountered in
latitude twenty miles south of thirty-six degrees. 'Tis a spectre to
be shunned, Fenton, though it cost us every rag of sail we own to keep
clear."
"Then what you would say, captain," said I, "is, that the people who
work that ship have ceased to be living men by reason of their great
age, which exceeds by many years our bodies' capacity of wear and tear;
and that they are actually corpses influenced by the Devil--who is
warranted by the same Divine permission we find recorded in the Book of
Job, to pursue frightful and unholy ends?"
"It is the only rational view," he answered. "If the Phantom Ship be
still afloat, and navigated by a crew, they cannot be men in the sense
that this ship's company are men."
"Well, sir," said I, cheerfully, "I reckon it will be all one whether
they be fiends, or flesh and blood miraculously wrought to last unto
the world's end, for it is a million to nothing that we don't meet her.
The Southern Ocean is a mighty sea, a ship is but a little speck, and
once we get the Madagascar coast on our bow we shall be out of the
Death Ship's preserves."
However, to my surprise, I found that he maintained a very earnest
posture of mind in this matter. To begin with, he did not in the least
question the existence of the Dutch craft; he had never beheld her,
but he knew those who had, and related tales of dismal issues of such
encounters. The notion that the crew were corpses, animated into a
mocking similitude of life, was strongly infixed in his mind; and he
obliged me to tell him all that I could remember of magical, ghostly,
supernatural circumstances I had read about or heard of, until I
noticed it was half-an-hour after nine, and that, at this rate, my
watch on deck would come round before I had had a wink of sleep.
However, though I went to my cabin, it was not to rest. I lay for
nearly two hours wide awake. No doubt the depression I had marked in
myself had exactly fitted my mind for such fancies as the captain had
talked about. It was indeed impossible that I should soberly accept his
extraordinary view touching the endevilment of the crew of the Death
Ship. Moreover, I hope I am too good a Christian to believe in that
Satyr which was the coinage of crazy, fanatical heads in the Dark Ages,
that cheaply-imagined Foul Fiend created to terrify the weak-minded
with a vision of split-hoofs, legs like a beast's, a barbed tail,
flaming eyes, and nostrils discharging the sickening fumes of sulphur.
But concerning the Phantom Ship herself--the Flying Dutchman as she
has been styled--'tis a spectre that has too often crossed the path of
the mariner to admit of its existence being questioned. If there be
spirits on land, why not at sea, too? There are scores who believe in
apparitions, not on the evidence of their own eyes--they may never have
beheld such a sight--but on the testimony of witnesses sound in their
religion and of unassailable integrity; and why should we not accept
the assurance of plain, honest sailors, that there may be occasionally
encountered off the Agulhas Bank, and upon the southern and eastern
coast of the African extremity, a wild and ancient fabric, rigged
after a fashion long fallen into disuse, and manned by a crew figured
as presenting something of the aspect of death in their unholy and
monstrous vitality?
I turned this matter freely over in my mind as I lay in my little
cabin, my thoughts finding a melancholy musical setting in the
melodious sobbing of water washing past under the open port, and
snatching distressful impulses from the gloom about me, that was
rendered cloud-like by the moon who was climbing above our mastheads,
and clothing the vast placid scene outside with the beauty of her
icy light; and then at seven bells fell asleep, but was called
half-an-hour later, at midnight, to relieve Mr. Hall, whose four
hours' spell below had come round.