MY FIRST NIGHT IN THE DEATH SHIP.
I had been in too great a confusion of mind to heed the movements of
the ship whilst I was under cover, but on emerging I now noticed that
it had come on to blow very fresh. The vessel under larboard tacks--I
could not see what canvas she carried--lay along very much, being
light and tall, and rolled with peculiar clumsiness in the hollows. I
caught sight of the water over the weather-rail, and judged with the
eye of a seaman that what progress she was making was wholly leeway;
so that we were being blown dead to the eastward, without probably
"reaching," as it is termed, by so much as half-a-knot an hour. The
moon was now deep in the west and showing a very wan and stormy disk.
North-west, where the land lay, the sea looked to rise into a fluid
blackness of thunder-clouds, wherefrom even as I glanced that way there
fell a red gash of lightning. There was a heavy sound of seething and
bombarding billows all about us, and the whole picture had a wildness
past language, what with the scarlet glare of the northern levin-brands
and the ghastly tempestuous paleness of the westering moon and a dingy
faintness owing its existence to I know not what, if it were not the
light of the foaming multitudinous surge reflected upon the sooty
bosoms of the lowering clouds over our stern.
Captain Vanderdecken stood for a moment looking round upon this warring
scene, and flung up his arms towards the moon with a passionate savage
gesture, and then strode to a narrow hatch betwixt the limits of the
quarter-deck and the mainmast, down which he went, first turning to
see if I followed. I now found myself in a kind of 'tween-decks, with
two cabins on either hand, in the doorway of the fore one, on the
starboard side, stood the man Prins, holding a small lantern.
"This, sir," said Vanderdecken, pointing to the cabin, "must serve you
for a sleeping room; it has not the comfort of an inn, but 'tis easy to
see you are a sailor, and, therefore, one to whom a plank will often be
a soft couch. In any case, here is accommodation warmer than the bottom
of the ocean."
With a cold and condescending salute he withdrew. Prins hung the
lantern on to a rail beside the door, and said he would return for it
shortly. I wanted to ask the man some questions about the ship and
her commander, but there was something about him so scaring and odd
that I could not summon up heart to address him. He appeared as one
in whom all qualities of the soul are dead, acting, in sooth, like a
sleep-walker, giving me not the least heed whatever, and going about
his business as mechanically as the skeleton in the cabin clock rose
and darted his lance to the chimes of the bell.
The compartment in which I was to sleep was empty of all furniture
saving a locker that served as a seat as well as a box, and a wooden
sleeping-place, formed of planks, secured to the side, in which, in
lieu of a mattress, were a couple of stout blankets, tolerably new, and
a sailor's bag, filled with straw, for a pillow. I was wearied to the
bone, yet not sleepy, and lay me down in my strange clothes without so
much as removing my boots, and in a few minutes Prins arrived and took
away the light, and there I was in pitch darkness.
And yet I should not say this, for, though to be sure no sensible
reflection penetrated the blackness, yet when the lamp was removed and
my eyes had lost the glare of it, I beheld certain faint crawlings
and swarmings of phosphoric light upon the beams and bulkheads, such
as were noticeable upon the outside of the ship, only not so strong.
I likewise observed a cold and ancient smell, such as I recollect
once catching the breath of in the hold of a ship that had been built
in 1702 and which people in the year 1791 or thereabouts viewed as a
curiosity. Otherwise there was nothing else remarkable. Whatever this
vessel might be, her motion on the seas was as natural as that of the
Saracen, only that her wallowing was more ponderous and ungainly. Yet,
merciful Heaven! how did every bulkhead groan, how did every timber
complain, how did every treenail cry aloud! The noise of the labouring
was truly appalling; the creaking, straining, jarring, as though the
whole fabric were being dashed to pieces. I had not immediately noticed
this when I followed Captain Vanderdecken below, but it grew upon my
ears as I lay in the blackness. Yet they were natural sounds, and as
such they afforded a sort of relief to my strained brain and nervous,
yea, and affrighted imagination. The stillness of a dead calm would
have maddened me, I truly believe. Phantasms and other horrors of
my fancy, rendered delirious by the situation into which I had been
plunged, would have played their parts upon that stage of blackness,
hideous with the vault-like stirring of the glow of rotted timber, to
the destruction of my intellect, but for the homely thunder of the sea
without and the crazy echoes within.
I asked myself what ship was this? That she had a supernatural life,
that he who styled himself Vanderdecken--which tradition reported was
the name of the master of the Phantom Ship, though it has been averred
that his real name was Bernard Fokke--I say that he and the others I
had seen, more particularly the man Prins, had something goblin-like
about them, something that carried them far out of the range of our
common humanity, spite of the majestic port, the noble presence, the
thrilling tones, like the music of distant summer thunder, of the
commander, I could no more question than the beating of my own heart
as I lay a-thinking. I knew by what I had heard and viewed already,
even in the brief hours packed full of consternation, during which I
had been on her, that I was aboard of the Flying Dutchman, the Phantom
Ship, the Death Ship, the Sea Spectre, as she has variously been termed.
Yet there was so much to puzzle me that I was fit to lapse into
idiotcy. If Vanderdecken had sailed from Batavia in 1653, why did he
speak of it as last year? If the Death Ship was a ghostly object,
impalpable, an essence only as is a spirit, why was this vessel so
substantial that, heavily as she resounded with the crazy echoes of
her material state, no first-rate could hold a stouter conflict with
the seas? If she had been battling off the Agulhas for one hundred and
forty-three years, how came she to have oil and waste for her lanterns,
clothes such as I wore, such as the men I had seen were habited in,
brandy, blankets almost new like those I lay on, and other stores; for
I might be sure, from the jar of brandy the captain had produced, that
the crew ate and drank as all men do and must!
These and other points I could not reconcile to my conviction that the
ship I was aboard of was the craft dreaded by all men because of the
great God's ban upon her and the misfortunes she brought to others
with the very winds which filled her canvas. I would have given all
I owned--though, alack! that would have been small enough if I lost
what belonged to me in the Saracen--for leave to keep the deck, but I
did not venture for fear of incurring the displeasure of Vanderdecken.
So for several hours did I lay broad awake in my black dungeon of a
cabin, watching the loathsome, ghostly phosphoric glow all about me,
and listening to the bellowing of the wind that had grown into a storm,
and marking the furious rolling of the ship, whose wild inner creakings
put a note of frenzy into the thunder of the gale; but never once
hearing the sound of a human call nor the echo of a man's tread, I then
fell asleep, but not before the dawn had broken, as I might tell by the
radiance, which was little better than an ashen twilight, that streamed
down the hatch and showed in an open space above the cabin door.