THE DEATH SHIP MUST BE SLOW AT PLYING.
I stood a moment or two at the door watching the clock whilst it
struck, and greatly admiring the workmanship of the skeleton that rose
and speared with his lance, keeping time to the sonorous chiming, which
sang with a solemn interval between each beat. The great age of this
time-keeper was beyond question, but the horn that protected the face
of it prevented me from perceiving if there was any maker's name or
date there.
As the skeleton sank, I could not but admire the aptness of the
mechanism to the condition of the ship and her crew, for what could
surpass the irony of this representation of Death perpetually foiled
in his efforts to slay Time, which was yet the case of Vanderdecken
and his men, whose mortality was constrained to an endless triumph
over that force which drives all men born of woman through Nature into
Eternity.
The parrot hanging near, I stayed yet to look at her and then spoke
to the creature in my rugged Dutch, but to no purpose; with the
slow motion of her kind she contorted herself until, with her beak
uppermost, she brought her larboard eye to bear full upon me; and so
fixed and unwinking was her stare that I greatly disliked it, nay, felt
that if I lingered I should fear it, and was going when she brought me
to a stand by a hollow "Ha! ha! ha!" just such a note as fancy would
give to the ghost of a Dutchman, who had been large, fat and guttural
when alive, could the spectre of such a one laugh in his coffin
or in a vault. The age which this bird had attained made her mere
appearance chilling to the blood, though I am aware these creatures
are long-lived and that no man with certainty could say they might not
flourish two hundred years and more. She was not bald. All her feathers
were sound and smooth. Yet, as I made my way to my cabin, it terrified
me into downright despondency to conceive of this parrot sharing in the
Curse that Vanderdecken had provoked. For if this soulless fowl could
be involved in the general fate merely because it happened to be in
the ship, why might not my lot prove the same? Oh, my heart! To think
of becoming one of the crew, partaking their horrid destiny, and in
due course dying to live again accurst and miraculously, my soul--as
theirs--existing in my body like one of those feeble lamps with which
the ancients illumined their tombs!
But I was young and was not without an Englishman's courage. I could
gaze backwards and perceive in my life no sin such as should fill me
with remorse and hopelessness in a time like this. I believed in my
Creator's goodness, and reaching my darksome cabin, I knelt down and
prayed, and after awhile recollected myself and felt the warmth of my
former spirit.
I was mighty pleased to recover my own clothes; they gave me back the
sense of my being my true self again, whereas the masquerading attire
Vanderdecken had lent me occasioned a wretched feeling as of belonging
to the ship. When I had shifted myself, I neatly folded the captain's
coat, breeches and the rest, and then sat down on my bed to think over
my conversation with Miss Dudley. What to credit, what to make of
her, I hardly knew. She was so beautiful where all was ugly, so fresh
where all was decayed, so young where all was withered, so radiant
where all was darksome that, on board such a ship as this, that had
been consigned to the most dreadful doom the imagination of man could
conceive of, how was I to know that she was not some part of the
scheme of retribution--a sweet and dazzling tantaliser, a mocker of the
home affections of the miserable ship's company, a lovely embodiment
of the spirit of life to serve some purpose of an inscrutable nature
in its influence upon such spiritual vitality as was permitted to the
corpse-like beings who navigated this Death Ship.
But this was a fleeting fancy only, and was rendered utterly ridiculous
by recurrence to her transporting figure, the golden warmth of her
hair and complexion, and above all to the fragility of her lineaments,
which stamped her mortal. No! her story was the truth itself; but this
I understood, if Vanderdecken were never to comprehend his doom, there
was stern assurance of his holding the girl to his ship until she died;
because, as she had pointed out, he had adopted her and desired to take
her home, and would never understand he was powerless to do so, even
should time represent the truth to him in her face, should she ever
grow old enough for wrinkles and grey hairs.
Had I been sent to deliver her? God knoweth, I thought. Yet, what was
my own case? Would they refuse to let me leave them? Well, that idea
did not frighten me, for he is a poor sailor who cannot find a means of
escape from a ship he dislikes, even though she should be commanded by
Old Nick himself. But suppose they compelled me to go, set me ashore
in their boat, or hailed some unsuspecting vessel that would receive
me. I should then be powerless to rescue Imogene from this frightful
situation, for as to subsequently helping to succour her, first of
all I doubted whether I should find a sailor in any part of the world
willing to ship for a cruise in search of Vanderdecken's craft, and
next, even if I should be able to range a line-of-battle ship alongside
this venerable frame, how should human artillery advantage us in such
a conflict? 'Twould be but another defiance of the Divine intention,
and what mariner was to be found who would embark on any adventure
against this dread Spectre of the Deep when, by so doing, he would feel
that he was fighting a Vengeance which would swiftly deal with him for
so great an act of impiety?
However, no good could come of meditations of this kind in that gloomy
cabin filled with the echoes of the groaning in the hold and the
washing and shocks of the seas without. I felt a seaman's curiosity
to have a good look at a ship of which there were a thousand stories
afloat in every forecastle throughout the world, and so I climbed
through the hatch on deck, dressed in the style in which I had made my
first appearance. The second mate, Antony Arents, conned the vessel,
standing near the helm with his arms folded in a sullen, moody posture,
even so as to resemble a man turned into stone. Vanderdecken was at
the weather-rail, erect and noble-looking, his legs parted in the
attitude of a stride that he might balance himself to the rolling
deck. He stared fixedly to the windward, his great beard, disparted,
blowing like smoke over either shoulder, and his brows lowered into a
contemptuous scowl upon his sharp, burning eyes. The ship was under
the same canvas I had before noticed on her. Her yards were as closely
pointed to the wind as the lee braces could bring them, but whereas in
our time a square-rigged vessel close-hauled can be brought to within
six points, that is to say, if the gale be north she can be made to
head east-north-east, yet this ship, as I easily gathered without
looking at the compass, lay no closer than eight-and-a-half or nine
points, the wind blowing west-north-west and we lying by as close as
the trim of the yards would suffer us, at about south-by-west.
In short, we were being driven at the rate of some three or four miles
an hour dead to leeward, broadside on. Now, as I am writing this in
the main that all mariners may have a just and clear conception of the
sort of ship Vanderdecken's vessel is, I particularly desire that this
matter of her not being able to sail within eight or nine points of the
wind be carefully noted; for, then you shall understand how fully with
her own tackling, and yards and canvas, she helps out and fulfils her
doom.
If ever you have read the account of my Lord Anson's voyage round the
world, you will recollect, in the second chapter of Book II., the
narrative, given at length, of the time occupied by the Gloucester in
fetching and casting anchor off Juan Fernandez. She could make no way
at all in beating or reaching. She was first sighted from the island
on the 21st of June; she was still striving against the head wind on
the 9th of July; then she was blown away, and reappeared on the 16th,
and it was not until the 23rd of that month that she was seen opening
the north-west point of the bay with a flowing sail, which means that
she had a fair wind, and which may also be said to signify that had
the wind not favoured her she might have gone on struggling for years
without making the island. Think, now, of a vessel very nearly fitted
as our ships are rigged, occupying thirty-two days--a whole month and a
day atop--in covering a distance which, when the Gloucester was first
sighted, was reckoned at four leagues!
Is it, then, surprising that a vessel constructed considerably more
than a century earlier than the ships of Anson's squadron, in an age
when the art of building was little understood, when a ship's hull was
as tall as a great castle, when all things aloft were ponderous, when
the immense beam, helped yet by the wide channels, gave such a spread
to the shrouds that they could make of the breeze no more than a beam
wind when braced up as sharp as the yards would come--is it surprising,
I say, that this Dutchman, so constructed, should never be able to
contend with a contrary wind? I am the more pleased to point this out
because I have heard it particularly affirmed that if Vanderdecken were
a good seaman he would laugh at a north-wester though there should be
no other wind in those seas; for he need do nothing but make a long
board to the south, to as far, say, as fifty degrees, in order, with
his starboard tacks aboard, to pass the Cape and enter the Atlantic,
where he would probably catch the south-east trade wind and so make
good his return. But this presupposes no Sentence, even if the ship
were capable of sailing close-hauled.
To resume. Neither the captain, nor the second mate, nor the seaman
at the tiller, taking the least notice of me, I determined to keep
myself to myself till it should please Vanderdecken to address me;
so I got under the lee of the house where I had conversed with the
captain before breakfast, and gazed about. It was as dirty a day as
ever I remember--the heavens of the colour of drenched granite, the
sea-line swallowed up in spray and haze, out of which there came
rolling to the ship endless processions of olive-coloured, prodigious
combers. The storming aloft was a perpetual thunder. Upon every rope
the gale split with a shriek, and there was a dreary clattering of
the cordage, and as the vessel swang her spars to windward, an edge
of peculiar and hurricane-like fierceness would be put into the wind,
as though it were driven outrageously mad by the stubborn swing of
the masts against its howling face. Nothing was in sight save over
against our weather-quarter a Cape hen, poised on such easy wings
that the appearance of the bird made a wonder of the weight of the
blast; its solitariness gave a heavy desolation to the aspect of the
pouring, warring scene of frothing summits and roaring hollows. The
reefed courses under which the vessel lay were dark with wet from
the showering of the sea, of which great, green, glittering masses
striking the weather-bow, raised such a smoke of crystals all about the
forecastle that the vessel looked to be on fire with the steam-like,
voluminous whiteness soaring there.
There were a few men on the decks that way, muffled up to their noses;
but I did not see them speak to one another nor go about any kind of
work. They had the same self-engrossed, nay, entranced air that was
visible in those, such as the two mates and Vanderdecken, whom I had
already observed. The ship offered an amazing picture as she soared
and sank upon the billows, half-hidden by storms of froth swept by the
wind betwixt the masts with wilder screamings than a hundred mad-houses
could make. The great barricaded tops, her spritsail topmast
standing up out of another top at the end of the bowsprit--she had no
jibboom--and the long yard, after the lateen-style, on her mizzen-mast,
gave her so true a look of the age in which she had been built that it
would be impossible for any sailor to see her and not know what ship
she was. None other resembling her has been afloat since the age of
William III., nor is it conceivable that the like of her will ever be
seen again.