We were nearly a month on Hatteras grounds, with good weather, on
the whole. We spoke several merchant vessels, one of which was a big
five-masted schooner bound into Charleston from Batavia. None of the
men had seen such a big schooner-rigged vessel before, and they all
gazed at her with their mouths hanging open as long as she was in
sight. There was nothing beautiful about her with her stubby-looking
masts and big sails. She would have made five of us easily, and the
Clearchus was fairly big for a whaler. There was a smashing southwest
breeze that day, and the schooner roared by us, close-hauled, with
all lowers set and trimmed flat, carrying a big bone in her teeth,
and spray flying over her, forward, with every sea.
We were working well toward the southern edge of the grounds. Whales
were scarce and shy. One wise old bull succeeded in inducing Mr.
Baker and Mr. Tilton to keep after him for eight hours, gradually
making to windward in a heavy sea, until he finally left them, giving
a snort of derision as he went. I suppose he thought that, as it was
about bedtime, he would call it a day. The men came back utterly beat
out and disgusted.
When no whales had even been raised for a week the ship’s head was
again turned to the north for a last look before making to the
eastward. We had taken but one whale. The morning after the change
of course I heard Mr. Baker, who had that watch, come into the
cabin and knock on the captain’s door. In response to the captain’s
roar, he asked him to come on deck and see what we had with us. I
heard Captain Nelson getting up—he was never very quiet about it,
especially when he was in a {104} hurry—and I bolted out, and up
the stairs at Mr. Baker’s heels, expecting to see something quite
unusual, a whale of enormous size, perhaps, or a large shark at
least, or perhaps an enormous squid. I think I was inclined to the
squid, for I had always heard of it, but I had never come across
anybody who had seen one, and I was anxious to see a great squid with
my own eyes—and at a safe distance.
As soon as I reached the deck I looked all around and saw nothing
unusual—no squid, at any rate. The sun was not yet up, and the waters
were heaving in slow swells, although the surface was calm and there
was hardly enough wind for steerage way. Deep silence was upon the
sea, so that I heard it breathing—or it was as real as that. The
watch stood about, or paced to and fro without a sound. The whole
aspect was inexpressibly melancholy and desolate, and the silence
seemed filled with evil. All the while the breathing of the sea went
on, as each great roller caught up with us, and raised the ship to
the top of its gentle slope, passed on from under us, dropping her
into the valley. I sighed, in spite of myself, and I looked about
even more carefully. There was nothing to be seen on the water except
a topsail schooner quite near, and drifting along with us.
I looked up at Mr. Baker, forgetting, for the moment, the pressing
matter that had brought me on deck. I could think of nothing but that
gentle breathing, like the sigh of some huge, invisible monster.
“Can you hear it, Mr. Baker?” I asked.
Mr. Baker was an abrupt and rough-spoken man, though good-hearted and
kind at bottom. He looked at me with a lively interest.
“Hear it!” he said. “Hear what?”
“Can you hear the sea breathing? I can sir.”
He burst into a great roar of laughter, and I got as red as
whale-meat. Mr. Baker had no imagination and I {105} ought to have
known better than to ask him. I did, but I forgot.
His laughter stopped as abruptly as it had begun. “No, boy,” he said.
“Can’t say as I do. What does it sound like?”
“I thought that it might be something, sir, that you called the
captain to see—a big whale or a squid.”
“The great squid, eh?” he asked, smiling. “And breathing, too. How
big a squid did you hope to see? Big as a house?”
“Something like that, sir.”
“Big as a ship, with arms a hundred feet long, eh?” He burst into
another roar of laughter. “Been reading Melville? You have n’t, eh?
Well, there may be such squid, but I ’ve never seen any of ’em, and
I ’ve never seen anybody who had. All the squid I ’ve seen were
little fellows, a foot or two long, with arms not over nine or ten
feet, although Banks fishermen have got ’em up to thirty foot, they
say. No, I did n’t call the captain for anything of the sort. You see
that schooner over there, with yards at fore and main?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, that ’s it. She ’s the Annie Battles, and a very fast and able
boat she is. Hails from Nantucket, Coffin, master. Maybe you ’ll have
a chance to see her again before we get through, but just look at her
lines, and then look at the lines of the Clearchus.”
So I looked carefully at the lines of the Annie Battles. She was
long, almost as long as the Clearchus, I judged, but she gave the
impression of being quite a little smaller, because of her very
different model. She had an easy entrance, easy, swelling lines, a
full quarter and counter, but not too full. I could not see her beam,
of course, from where we were, but it was evidently of that generous
character which gives a vessel stability while not interfering with
her speed. Altogether, the Annie Battles would {106} have been
called at once powerful and able. That was the term that sprang at
once to a sailor’s lips—an able boat, a very able boat. I heard it
from many, and it was the first thing they said. I cannot think of
any form of praise that I would rather have had if I had been her
designer; it means so much, speed, seaworthiness, ability to carry
sail with safety. It must have given Coffin, master, a great deal
of sheer pleasure merely to contemplate his vessel, there was that
beauty in her.
She was rigged as a topsail schooner, with a topsail yard on each
mast, a rig that I have not happened to see in any other instance.
In fact, the Dobbin, a revenue cutter stationed at New Bedford a
few years later, and the Eva are the only other topsail schooners I
remember, and they had a topsail yard only on the foremast, according
to my recollection. It was a very pretty rig, but was never much in
fashion, and has gone out long ago.
I was still looking at the Battles when I heard Captain Nelson’s
step behind me. Mr. Baker and I were standing under the gallows just
forward of the mizzenmast. There is no whaleboat there, as a boat
would interfere with the use of the gangway. I was at the rail, but
Mr. Baker stood behind me, well in the shadow and the captain stopped
beside him.
“Well, I ’m damned!” he said in tones of utter disgust. Then he began
to laugh. “I am damned!” he said again. “How long’s he been there,
Mr. Baker?”
Mr. Baker shook his head. “He was there with the first streaks of
daylight. I did n’t see him come.”
Captain Nelson seemed to have got through with the Annie Battles.
He stood gazing absently at the great, smooth swells rolling up on
our starboard quarter, looked off at the horizon, as if he could see
beyond it, and sniffed the air like a dog. At last he turned to Mr.
Baker.
“I don’t like the look of these seas,” he said. “The glass has n’t
begun to fall yet, but it will. Make the course southeast, Mr. Baker.
We ’ll get out of this.” {107}
“As to these seas, Tim, here, says they breathe. He hears ’em.”
Captain Nelson glanced at me with a smile. “Does he? Well, so they
do, Tim. Could n’t Mr. Baker hear it?”
“I don’t know, sir. He did n’t seem to, and I was n’t very sure of
it, but it seemed as if I did.”
“Be sure of what you see and hear, Tim,” said the captain kindly.
“You ’re as likely to be right as another, as far as the evidence of
your senses goes. It ’s only in accounting for facts that a man of
knowledge and experience has the better of you.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Mr. Baker was giving orders that would bring the ship on her new
course, and she soon began to wear slowly, for the gentle breath of
air was from the southwest. We passed astern of the Annie Battles,
which had got pretty far ahead by that time, but I could see
that the men on her deck were surprised at our change of course.
Captain Nelson was watching her, and presently a man came up her
companionway, and stood on her deck looking at us. He was a large
man, much larger than Captain Nelson. I could see nothing more than
that and that he was active enough to be a young man. He raised his
hand, but I could not tell whether he was shaking his fist or merely
waving his hand in salutation. Captain Nelson chuckled and waved his
hand.
The Battles was jibing, and she was coming after us. Captain Nelson
did not wait, but after giving another long look around, he went
below. I followed, and pestered him, for I wanted to know what it was
that he expected, and why he expected it. Of course I had no business
to bother him about such matters at all, and he would have been
quite right to tell me shortly to shut up, and many masters would.
Captain Nelson never did that if he believed that I was thirsting for
information which it was quite proper for me to have. This occasion
was no {108} exception, and he went to considerable pains to explain
what he could, and what I could digest, about tropical hurricanes,
which are most common about that season, especially just about the
place where we were. It was all intensely interesting to me, and I
listened in complete absorption, managing to remember most of what he
told me.
At that time there was a less general understanding of the
fundamental principles of weather, even among good seamen, than
there is now. For my own part, it has always been difficult for me
to remember instructions when they had to be memorized; but when I
once have mastered principles my troubles are over. I do not have to
search the stores of memory for a formula which fits the occasion,
like a formula in chemistry, and I rarely go astray.
Captain Nelson had not got far into the subject when he interrupted
himself.
“Well, Tim,” he said, “that ’s enough for this time. Better be off
about your business, and we ’ll have another lesson before long. I
want you to learn to navigate a vessel.”
This was good news to me. I knew nothing whatever about navigation,
or perhaps I should not have been so pleased. When Captain Nelson had
given me some instruction, and I plunged into Bowditch by myself, I
found that I had plunged into deep water without knowing how to swim.
I was not satisfied to do things in a superficial way, according to
formula, without knowing what I was doing, or why, and at first I had
a heartbreaking struggle with mathematics beyond my preparation for
it. But I happened to discover, quite by accident, in the third mate,
Mr. Brown, a man who knew all that mysterious country—or those seas.
Mr. Brown piloted me through those strange seas with considerable
skill and great patience, so that I could attack my navigation with
some satisfaction. But I am getting ahead of my story. {109}
Flocks of petrels, or Mother Carey’s chickens, were about the ship
by noon, with their curious habit of flight, as if walking on the
water. By the middle of the afternoon the wind had come in from
the eastward, and by dark it was blowing fresh, the wind heavy and
wet and increasing. Sail was reduced to reefed topsails, and the
Clearchus was put as close to the wind as she would go, making a
course a little south of southeast. Sailing on a taut bowline was
not one of the strong points of the Clearchus. She labored a great
deal, the seas slapped up against her bluff bows, she made much fuss
and comparatively little headway, but considerable leeway. There was
nothing to do, however, but to make everything snug, and to trust
in Providence and the ship; and I turned in with no misgivings, and
slept soundly.
The weather got worse as the night wore on, and I suddenly found
myself sprawling on the floor. The ship was cutting up curious
antics. I crawled on my hands and knees back to my bunk, but I could
not go to sleep again, although I was sleepy. My bunk was on the
weather side, and first I would be standing nearly on my feet, then
nearly on my head, then perhaps she would quiver and go slowly over
almost on her beam ends, so that I barely escaped being rolled on to
the floor again. I heard the bell striking wildly—the tongue must
have got loose—until somebody went and tied it up again, lashed it
tight. It must have been two or three o’clock in the morning. She
seemed to ease a little, sliding down the side of each sea until I
thought she must be bound for the bottom of the ocean; then rising
slowly, and struggling up the side of the next, until at last she
reached the top. There she paused for what seemed to me, down there
in my bunk, as much as an hour, and rolled to leeward, and I held on
with all my might.
I must have dropped off to sleep again, for the next thing I knew
daylight was filtering in. The ship was {110} keeping up her wild
coasting down and slow struggles upward, and my muscles were sore and
lame with holding on through my sleep.
Captain Nelson was on deck when I got there. He must have been there
most of the night. Never in my life, before or since, have I seen
such seas. They were veritable mountains, with rugged sides, long
and high. When we were in a valley we on the deck were sheltered
from the worst of the wind, and the oncoming sea towered so above us
that I wondered whether the ship would ever be able to climb that
steep slope. She did somehow. The seas were so long that she rode
them easily enough; with unnatural ease, it seemed to me. At last
I discovered the explanation. They had put out oil bags during the
night, bags of canvas stuffed with oakum and filled with oil. Two
of these bags were fast, by lines long enough to let them trail in
the water, to the ends of the spritsail yard, or spreader on the
bowsprit, and one to each cathead. As they trailed in the water at
the ends of their lines, the oil oozed slowly from them and formed
a thin film over the water which prevented its breaking, so that
the ship sailed in a little calm area of her own. This eased her
wonderfully.
The best course she could make was too much to the south to please
Captain Nelson, and she was hardly doing more than lie to. Soon after
I came up the foretopsail, close-reefed as it was, split from top to
bottom, and in a very few minutes it was nothing but ribbons. The men
had great trouble in getting in the remnants of the sail, but at last
it was secured after a fashion, the strips wound about the yard like
a bandage, and lashed.
One storm is much like another, except in degree. This one reached
its height just before noon, and wore off considerably toward night,
although it still blew with gale force. The sea went down during the
next day, the wind drawing to the westward. It was a dry, puffy wind,
and {111} the men got out their wet clothes and hung them on lines
all about the ship, so that we must have looked like a laundry. We
had got more sail on the ship, and with a fair wind she made pretty
good speed for her. A pretty sight she must have been, rolling
along under courses and maintopsail with garments of all hues and
descriptions festooned about her.
I went in search of Peter, and found him gazing toward the
southeastern horizon. He paid me no attention until I spoke.
“Is it you, lad?” he said, giving me a smile. “I thought I saw
something heaving atop of a sea. Then the sea went on, and let it
down, and I lost it. There it is again, just atop of that big sea. It
has the look of a cask or a barrel. Better run aft, Tim, and see what
they make of it.”
I found Captain Nelson with his glass at his eye.
“A barrel,” he said to Mr. Baker, “and an oil barrel, and half full
of oil, I should guess. And there ’s other wreckage. Better run down
that way.”
We changed our course to southeast, and in ten minutes or so we
were running through all sorts of wreckage scattered over a mile or
more of ocean: barrels, many of them full, and fragments of boats,
and pieces of a deckhouse, and broken oars, and splinters of some
vessel’s rail, and other like evidence of destruction. They seemed
worth further investigation, and we backed our main, while a boat was
lowered. The boat came back without having been able to identify the
vessel. There was no name on any of the fragments, and nothing which
gave a clue; and although there were several barrels in sight, they
seemed to be full of oil, and they floated awash, so that the name,
if it was there, could not be seen without getting them out of the
water. Mr. Baker suggested that, and made the further suggestion that
they were full of oil anyway, and we would be killing two birds with
one stone. He hated to see that good oil bound for Davy Jones. {112}
Captain Nelson shook his head. It was near sunset, and the yards
were braced around, and we filled off on our course again. We sailed
through more scattered wreckage for half an hour, some fragment of
the good ship here and there, broken out of her light upper works. It
made us all silent, each man busy with his own thoughts. They might
have been, with a few minutes’ streak of bad luck, the fragments of
the Clearchus which were scattered over those miles of ocean. I was
thinking of this, and looking out ahead, when I saw what seemed to
be a spar with a broken end rise on a sea, then vanish again. It
glistened in the light of the setting sun, but I thought that I had
made out the broken end clearly.
I spoke of it, but the captain was already examining it through his
glass.
“I ’ve got it, Tim,” he said. He put the glass down. “Two spars
lashed together, and a man lashed to them. No sign of life in him,
but we ’ll pick him up and see.”
We ran down to him, pretty close. It was a crazy apology for a raft,
merely two spars lashed together loosely. The man had been sitting on
them with his legs, from the knees down, in the water. Now his body
had fallen backward, and his head rested on the spars. In his hand he
gripped a hatchet. What could he have wanted with a hatchet? I asked
the captain.
Captain Nelson was looking at the man, but he turned to me for an
instant. “Sharks, I ’m afraid, Tim,” he said.
Just then our boat got to him, and somebody cut the lashings, and
they lifted him into the boat. His legs were terribly bitten by
sharks, and one foot was gone. I turned away, sick and faint.
It was dusk when they brought him aboard, still gripping his hatchet.
He was breathing, but the life was almost out of him. He was carried
below, and they did what they could for him, and he was still alive
when I turned in after writing what I considered a very solemn
{113} and arresting passage in my journal. I do not reproduce that
passage. It seems like betraying the confidence of a well-meaning
boy who seldom felt deeply on such matters, and still more seldom
gave utterance to thoughts of the kind when he had them. To me it
would seem much on the same order as publishing love-letters—to be
ridiculed. But the passage in my journal is funny, while it brings
tears to my eyes as I remember my feelings as I wrote it.
When I got on deck in the morning I saw the four Kanakas gathered
about the sailmaker, who was just finishing the job of sewing up a
long bundle done up in a piece of old canvas. It was the body of
the man we had rescued the evening before. He had died in the night
without regaining consciousness. He was a Kanaka, but beyond that one
evident fact we never knew who he was, or what ship he came from, for
by the time we got back to New Bedford so many things had happened
that the incident had slipped from our minds. Many things slip from
the minds of sailors in that way, and are recalled only in the course
of recounting some yarn, as I am doing.
The four Kanakas were chanting an improvised song, the Admiral
singing each verse, which he seemed to be making up as he went
along, and the other three joining in the chorus. The singing was
soft and seemed weird to me, for I had never before heard Kanaka
singing. There were a great many verses, and the singing continued
long after the sailmaker had got through and gone. Then the captain
and other officers came, and the crew was mustered, and we all stood
with uncovered heads while the captain read a very short service—or
prayer, I don’t know which—from a prayer book. The service took about
a minute, and then they tipped up the plank and shot the body into
the sea just as the sun was coming up out of it. I was at the rail,
and I caught the red gleam of sunlight on the canvas as the bundle
fell, making a crimson streak {114} through the air; it struck the
water, throwing the spray high, and disappeared from our sight,
and it was as if that man had never been. The ceremony over, and
the body, shrouded in canvas, plunging downward through the depths
of ocean, the crew put on their hats or caps and went about their
business, promptly forgetting the whole matter. But I have reason
to believe that the sharks did not forget, and I doubt whether that
bundle ever reached bottom.
That afternoon we sighted a sail rising to the southeast. It had
the look of a ship or a brig, for all we could see at first was the
dim outline of square topsails; but presently the upper parts of
her lower sails had risen from the sea, and they were fore-and-aft
sails unmistakably. There could be but one vessel which answered that
description, and that was the Annie Battles. Captain Nelson showed
a curious mixture of relief and disappointment. He smiled and swore
softly, and I was tempted to run and find Peter Bottom, but I did
not. It was exactly what he had expected.
I remember there was a flock of petrels near the ship at the time,
and my attention was divided between watching them and watching the
Battles. She was running close-hauled, at which she was very good;
and she got abeam of us, and very near, before I noticed that she had
a brand-new foretopmast. Mr. Baker and the captain, of course, had
seen it long before. Mr. Baker now turned to the captain.
“We got out of it,” he said, “better than she did.”
Captain Nelson nodded. There was a big young fellow standing near the
wheel of the Battles, and looking hard at us. Mr. Baker said it was
Captain Coffin. I was surprised, for, except for his size, he looked
too young to be captain of anything. He was as big as my father, and
seemed much like him, pleasant and easy-going and competent. He waved
his hand to Captain Nelson. {115}
“Just wanted to make sure you were all right,” he shouted.
Captain Nelson grinned. “Much obliged,” he answered. “All shipshape.
Did n’t even lose a to’gallan’mast.”
Coffin laughed at that. “Nor a sail either, I suppose,” he retorted,
pointing at our topsail yard. Some of the crew were on it at that
moment, bending a new foretopsail.
Captain Nelson grinned again. “It was so old,” he said, “that I
thought I ’d better bend a new one.”
The Battles was shaking in the wind, and fell off on the other tack,
and rounded under our stern. She shaved our stern so close that I
could almost have reached out and grabbed the leach of her mainsail.
She kept off with us on our course, but she was sailing nearly two
feet to our one, and she drew ahead rapidly.
Before she had sailed our length Captain Coffin hailed again.
“Where ’you bound now?”
Captain Nelson waved his hand vaguely. “Oh, to the east’ard,” he
said, “to the east’ard.”
“Western grounds, I suppose. We ’ll be waiting for you.”
{116}