I CONVERSE WITH THE SHIP'S CARPENTER ABOUT THE DEATH SHIP.
And now for six days it veritably seemed as if we were to be
transformed into the marine phantom that, unsubstantial as she might
be, yet lay with the heaviness of lead upon Captain Skevington; for,
being on the parallel of Agulhas, a little to the south of that
latitude, and in about sixteen degrees west longitude, it came on to
blow fresh from the south-east, hardening after twenty-four hours
into a whole gale with frequent and violent guns, and a veering of
it easterly; and this continued, with a lull of an hour or two's
duration, for six days, as I have said. 'Twas a taste of Cape weather
strong enough to last a man a lifetime. The sea lay shrouded to
within a musket-shot by a vapour of slatish hue that looked to stand
motionless, and past the walls and along the roof of this wild, dismal,
cloud-formed chamber, with its floor of vaults and frothing brows, the
wind swept raving, raising a terrible lead-coloured sea, with heads
which seemed to rear to the height of our maintop, where they broke,
and boiled like a cauldron with foam, great masses of which the hands
of the gale caught up and hurled, so that the lashing of the spray was
often like a blinding snowstorm, but so smarting that the wind was as
if charged with javelins.
Look upon the chart and you will see that for measureless leagues there
is in these waters no land to hinder the run of the surges. Hence,
when a fierce gale comes on from the east, south or west, the seas
which rise are prodigious beyond such language as I have at command
to express. We lay-to under a storm staysail with topgallant-masts
struck, yards on deck and the lower yards stowed on the rail, the
hatches battened down and everything as snug as good seamanship
could provide. Our decks were constantly full of water; by one great
sea that fell over into the waist there were drowned no less than
six of the sheep we had taken in at the Cape, with a hog and many
fowls; the carpenter's leg was broken by a fall, and an able seaman
was deeply gashed in the face by being thrown against a scuttlebutt;
'twas impossible to get any food cooked, and throughout that week we
subsisted on biscuit, cheese and such dry and lean fare as did not need
dressing. In short, I could fill a chapter with our sufferings and
anxieties during that period.
I had supposed that when brought face to face with the stern harsh
prose of such weather as this, the mournful, romantic stuff that filled
the captain's head would have been clean blown out of it; but no! he
repeatedly said to me, and I believe on more than one occasion to Mr.
Hall, that he considered this weather as part of the ill-luck that
was bound to come to us from our having spoken a vessel that had been
passed within hailing distance by the Phantom Ship.
On the fifth morning of the gale, the pair of us being in the cabin,
he informed me that a man named Cobwebb, who was at the helm the night
before, had told him that some of the crew were for putting this foul
storm down to one Mulder, or some such name, who was a Russian Finn,
a sober, excellent seaman, and one of the only two foreigners in our
forecastle; that to neutralise any magical influence he might possess,
a horse shoe had been nailed to the foremast and the mainmast pierced
and scored with a black-handled knife. He smiled at these superstitions
but did not seem to suspect that his own, as being received by a man
of thought and tolerable education, might by many be deemed much more
worthy of ridicule.
But on the sixth day the gale broke, leaving our ship considerably
strained, by which time, in spite of the current and the send of the
sea, we had contrived to make forty miles of southing and easting,
owing to our pertinacity in making sail and stretching away on a board
at every lull.
It was shortly after this, on the Tuesday following the Friday on which
the gale ended, that, it being my watch on deck from eight o'clock
in the evening till midnight, I carried my pipe, an hour before my
turn arrived, into the carpenter's cabin, which he shared with the
boatswain, to give the poor fellow a bit of my company, for his broken
leg kept him motionless. It was the second dogwatch, as we term the
time, 'twixt six and eight o'clock, at sea, the evening indifferently
fine, the wind over the starboard quarter, a quiet breeze, the ocean
heaving in a lazy swell from the south, and the ship pushing forward
at five knots an hour under fore and main-royals. The carpenter lay in
a bunk, wearing a haggard face, and grizzly for lack of the razor. He
was a very sensible, sober man, a good artificer, and had served under
Lord Howe in the fleet equipped for the relief of Gibraltar, besides
having seen a deal of cruising work in earlier times.
He was much obliged by my looking in upon him, and we speedily fell to
yarning; he lighted a pipe, and I smoked likewise, whilst I sat upon
his chest, taking in with a half-look round, such details as a rude
sketch of the bo's'n's wife nailed to the bulkhead, the slush lamp
swinging its dingy smoking flame to a cracked piece of looking-glass
over against the carpenter's bed, an ancient horny copy of the Bible,
with type pretty nigh as big as the letters of our ship's name, a bit
of a shelf wherefrom there forked out the stems of some clay pipes,
with other humble furniture such as a sailor is used to carry to sea
with him.
After a little, the carpenter, whose name was Matthews, says to me,
"I beg pardon, sir, but there's some talk going about among the men
concerning the old Dutchman that was cursed last century. My mate, Joe
Marner, told me that Jimmy--meaning the cabin-boy--was telling some of
the crew this morning, that he heard the captain say the Dutchman's
been sighted."
"By anyone aboard us?" I asked.
"Mebbe, sir, but I didn't understand that."
Now, as every hour was carrying us further to the eastward of the
Cape, away from the Phantom's cruising-ground, and as, moreover, the
leaving gossip to make its own way would surely in the end prove more
terrifying to the nervous and superstitious on board than speaking the
truth, I resolved to tell Matthews how the matter stood, and with
that, acquainted him with what the master of the snow had told Captain
Skevington. He looked very grave, and withdrew his pipe from his lips,
and I noticed he did not offer to light the tobacco afresh.
"I'm sorry to hear this, sir," says he.
"But," said I, "what has the Lovely Nancy's meeting with the Dutchman
got to do with us?"
"Only this, sir," he exclaimed, with his face yet more clouded, and
speaking in a low voice, as one might in a sacred building, "I never
yet knew or heard of a ship reporting to another of having met the
Dutchman without that other a-meeting of the Ghost too afore she ended
her voyage."
"If that be so," I cried, not liking to hear this, for Matthews had
been to sea for thirty-five years, and he now spoke with too much
emotion not to affect me, "for God's sake don't make your thoughts
known to the crew, and least of all to the captain, who is already so
uneasy on this head that when he mentions it he talks as if his mind
were adrift."
"Mr. Fenton," said the carpenter, "I never yet knew or heard of a ship
reporting to another of having met the Dutchman, without that other
meeting the Ghost too afore she's ended her voyage," and thus speaking
he smote his bed heavily with his fist.
I was startled by the emphasis his repeating his former words gave to
the assurance, and smoked in silence. He put down his pipe and lay
awhile looking at me as though turning some matters over in his mind.
The swing of the flame, burning from the spout of the lamp put various
expressions, wrought by the fluctuating shadows, into his sick face,
and it was this perhaps that caused his words to possess a power I
could not feign to you by any art of my pen. He asked me if I had ever
seen the Dutchman, and on my answering "No," he said that the usual
notion among sailors was that there is but one vessel sailing the seas
with the curse of Heaven upon her, but that that was a mistake, as it
was an error in the same way to suppose that this ocean from Agulhas
round to the Mozambique was the only place in which the Phantom was to
be met.
"There's a ship," said he, "after the pattern of this here Dutchman, to
be found in the Baltic. She always brings heavy weather, and there's
small chance afterwards for any craft that sights her."
"I've been trading in the Baltic for five years without ever hearing
that," said I.
"But it's true all the same, Mr. Fenton; you ask about it, sir, when
you get back, and then you'll see. There's another vessel, of the same
pattern, that's to be met down in the mouth of the Channel, 'twixt
Ushant and the Scillies, and thereabouts. A man I know, called Jimmy
Robbins, saw her, and told me the yarn. He was in a ship bound home
from the Spice Islands; they were in soundings, and heading round
for the Channel; it was the morning watch, just about dawn, weather
slightly thickish; suddenly a vessel comes heaving out of the smother
from God knows where! Jim Robbins was coiling down a rope alongside
the mate, who, on seeing the vessel, screams out shrill, like a woman,
and falls flat in a swound; Jim, looking, saw it was the Channel Death
Ship, a large pink, manned by skeletons, with a skull for a figurehead,
and a skeleton captain leaning against the mast, watching the running
of the sand in an hour-glass he held. She was seen by twelve others,
besides Jim and the mate, who nearly died of the fright. And the
consequence of meeting her was, that the ship Jim Robbins was in was
cast away on the following night on the French coast, down Saint Brihos
way, and thirty-three souls perished."
The gravity with which he related this, and his evident keen belief
in these and the like superstitions, now rendered the conversation
somewhat diverting; for, as I have elsewhere said, though I never
questioned the existence of the one spectral ship, in a belief in
which all mariners are united, holding that the deep, which is full
of drowned men, hath its spirits and its apparitions equally with the
land, yet when it came to such crude mad fancies as a vessel manned
by skeletons, why, of course, there was nothing for it but to laugh,
which I did, heartily enough, though in my sleeve, for seamen are a
sensitive people, easily afronted, more especially in any article of
their faith. However, he succeeded, before I left him, in exciting a
fresh uneasiness in me by asseverating, in a most melancholy voice, and
with a very dismal face, that our having spoken with the snow that had
sighted the Dutchman was certain to be followed by misfortune; and
these being amongst the last words he exchanged with me before I left
his cabin, I naturally carried away with me on deck the damping and
desponding impression of his posture and appearance as he uttered them,
which were those of a man grieved, bewildered, and greatly alarmed.