SHE VIEWS THE ISLAND OF TRISTAN D’ACUNHA
I fell asleep quickly and my slumber was sweet, for it was one long
dream of Tom. Earnest and full of passion at times had been our talk
whilst we stood together at the wheel, and the imaginations of my
slumber were richly coloured. At four Will awoke me, and I rose with
the promptitude of a sailor, and had relieved Mr. Bates at the wheel
before Tom came out of his berth. It was very dark. My cousin, instead
of going immediately to his bed, went up the steps to the top of the
house; he stayed two or three minutes, then putting his head over that
we who stood below might hear him, for Tom had now arrived, he cried
out: ‘I guess I was right; now I’m sure of it. Captain Butler, there’s
a sail dead in our wake, and she seems to be overhauling us hand over
fist.’
Tom and the mate ran up; presently Will looked over and called down:
‘Marian, starboard--d’ye understand me?’ I answered by immediately
putting the helm over.
‘Steady!’ shouted Tom. I whirled the little wheel back and kept the
brig’s head straight at about two points off the course we had been
pursuing.
‘Take the wheel, Johnstone,’ Tom cried, ‘and keep your ears open, my
lad.’
I surrendered the spokes to my cousin and mounted the steps with
eagerness and expectation; I had caught a note of excitement in my
sweetheart’s voice. The shift of helm had brought the wind almost
directly over the stern of the brig; I looked along the white line
of her wake, thinking to see the ship at the extremity of it, but,
beholding nothing, I asked Mr. Bates where the sail was. He pointed
over the lee quarter, and there to be sure hung a big dim cloud of
canvas.
The moon was low and without power; the stars had grown wan since
midnight, as though to the approach of dawn or as if to a gathering of
windy thickness; the ship astern was visible by a kind of light of her
own in her canvas--she showed as an iceberg might by night, or a tall
snow-covered hill. I stood near Tom, the mate joined us, and we watched
the white shadow growing out of the gloom.
Our change, of course, so postured the stranger that in a manner of
speaking she was crossing our stern, so that she’d pass on our weather
quarter close to.
‘I believe it’s she--I believe it’s she!’ Tom muttered, speaking to
himself.
Nothing was said for some time. The foam broke from under our counter
in a trail of light like the glittering scar left by a meteor in the
sky. We were washing through it at seven knots, and the great dim cloud
of canvas astern at eleven or twelve. She had now shaped herself into a
clear outline against the thin stars, and I could see the white water
boiling at her forefoot.
‘Captain Butler,’ exclaimed the mate, in a voice of agitation, ‘that’s
the _Childe Harold_!’
‘Yes! She’s the convict ship,’ said Tom, catching me by the hand. ‘Do
you see that her main-royal lies furled? Whither away? Whither away?’
cried he, looking at the ship.
‘Fore and maintopmast stu’n’sails!’ exclaimed Mr. Bates. His voice
quivered, now he recognised the ship he was first officer of but a
little while gone.
She loomed up upon our quarter in a thunderous heap of pallid flying
shadow, and the low red western moon and the lean stars and the throb
of black waters, flashful with foam, ridging southwards, were the
fittest setting the night could have contrived for her; and that deep
spirit of desolation which in the dark hours of the ocean morning
spreads out of the gloomy distance was present and abounding. She
showed no light, but the foam which broke in masses from her bows and
fled along her sides swift as smoke touched the fabric of the noble
ship’s hull with its own radiance, and we viewed her as though by
moonlight.
She was about a quarter of a mile distant when she swept past us. All
that way off I heard the drum-like roll of the wind in the high white
spaces of her canvas, and the sullen, continuous roar of the water
she parted. And all the time she hung to windward, drawing ahead and
opening out the squares of her sails till their hollows, blackening
upon us, showed like a growing thunderstorm upon the sea-line, but with
never a wink of light from cabin window or binnacle-stand. Tom and the
mate commented upon her; my sweetheart in a rapid, fierce voice; Bates
sulkily.
Tom said: ‘The devil’s in command there, and he has stocked her
forecastle with a troop of devils.’
‘They’ll be no worse than their shipmates,’ said the mate.
‘How they’re driving her! Our escape has woke them up! There’s fear and
there’s meaning, too, in that press. Where are they bound to, and who’s
to carry them there? Are they lying drenched and drugged and damned
again as last night, thick as poisoned rats one atop of another? Oh,
the beasts!’
‘I guess what’s happened,’ said the mate, in a gloomy voice. ‘That chap
with a cast eye, who put the scheme of the Pacific Islands into their
heads, has taken charge of the ship. There’s a sailor’s hand in that
spread of cloths. Butler, they’ll know where they started, from what
you told them; that cast-eyed rogue’ll heave the log and plump foul of
what’s nearest and split. Lord, what a beautiful ship to run away with!
And they’ll lose her, they’ll lose her!’
‘They’re steering straight for Tristan d’Acunha,’ said I.
‘Aye, straight as a fly crawls up a pane of window!’ exclaimed Tom.
‘She’ll make no Tristan. They’ll head off for the Horn, and continue
their navigation with a chart they can’t read and a dirty forefinger.’
‘If Barney Abram but knew we were in this brig!’ I exclaimed.
Tom left the top of the deck-house and let go the maintopsail
halliards. The big sail bellied out from the yard on the cap, losing
its driving power, and in a few moments the brig’s pace sensibly
diminished.
‘Let her get out of sight,’ said he, returning. ‘There’s no horizon
wide enough to divide us. Why, Bates, think of daylight coming along
and a stark calm falling, and yonder ship of devils, with Nick at the
helm and Barney at the prow, lying stagnant within an easy boat-row!’
‘Here’s a wind to blow her clear of us, sir,’ said the mate.
They continued to talk; I, with my eyes fastened upon the fading
shadow, sank into deep thought. Was that ship out there the vessel Tom
and I and Will had boarded in the East India Docks? Was she the craft
into whose black-hole under the forecastle I had crept, when all was
silent in her prison ’tweendecks, while she lay at rest alongside the
_Warrior_ hulk? Was she the theatre of the tragedy of the convicts’
uprisal, of their nightmare carousals? Was it yonder shadow fast
blending with the gloom upon the waters, whose fabric had re-echoed
the obscene songs, the blasphemous jokes, the insane yells of the
self-freed felons?
No more for a time than a wonderful horrible dream did it all seem to
me as I stood looking--a frightful vision from which I must awaken and
find myself in my bed at home, starting up to grieve and yearn for Tom
as of old, and saying to myself: This dream came to me by thinking,
before I fell asleep, of what his life would be on board the convict
ship and how I was to make sure of joining him in the country he was
transported to.
The shadow vanished. It was the last we ever saw of the convict ship.
It was the fittest of all disappearances for her. The folds of the
morning darkness swallowed her up as though she had been thundered at
headlong speed into the blackness of death’s dominions, whose obscurity
was thickened yet by the vapours of the inextinguishable fires.
I started, sighed, and passed my arm through Tom’s.
At about eight o’clock this morning there was a lull in the wind; it
then shifted suddenly into the south-east, blowing small at first, but
freshening afterwards until it had settled into the steady pouring
of the trade gale. I held the wheel while the three braced the yards
forward, and soon the little brig was humming along on what sailors
call a taut bowline with her fore and main royals set, and as fair
a prospect of fine weather to windward as ever the noble commercial
breeze of the South Atlantic painted in clouds and dyes of clear pure
blue.
This same morning, after breakfast, I still steering the little ship,
Tom and the others overhauled the vessel afresh. They lifted the
main-hatch and took a look below. They entered the lazarette, searched
the fore-peak, closely again examined the crew’s sleeping-quarters.
They met with everything essential in the equipment of a small
brig--suits of sails, carpenter’s tools, boatswain’s stores in plenty.
Indeed, Tom said she was the best found craft of her sort he had ever
seen.
He found a brace of pistols and ammunition for them in the captain’s
cabin. There were no other small-arms on board.
When the brig had been trimmed for the trade-wind, they went to work to
chock and secure the _Childe Harold’s_ quarter-boat in the place where
the brig’s long-boat had stood; afterward, Will mixed a pot of paint
and painted out the name ‘_Childe Harold_, London,’ in the stern of
the boat. Mr. Bates then carefully gauged the stock of fresh water and
found a handsome supply, sweet and good.
And now, till we made the island of Tristan d’Acunha, there befell
nothing worthy to detain you. We found no difficulty in managing the
brig. Larger ships than the _Old Stormy_ had been handled and safely
worked across the wildest and widest breasts of ocean in the world
by crews at least as small as ours. My share consisted in cooking,
preparing the cabin table for meals, steering when my watch came round
and when Tom was weary of standing at the wheel or wished to get upon
the deck-house top to look about.
Both Will and Bates fell very quiet. They read Tom’s resolution in his
face and they heard it in his voice, and they came into his scheme of
touching at Tristan as though they themselves had been escaped convicts
eager to hide.
Many a long talk did I have with Tom over his project, and I know that
I never breathed a syllable in opposition to his wishes. Particularly
do I recall a conversation we held one night in the first watch; he
steered, and I, who was tired, sat on a chair close beside him. The
trade-wind sang shrill betwixt our leaning masts; regularly as the beat
of a clock the brig heeled to the slant of the windward surge and bowed
her lee side till the froth spat and snored along the very line of her
bulwark-rail.
‘No, Tom,’ said I, answering him; ‘don’t call it banishment. Banishment
for me must be where you are not.’
‘I’ve tried, for your sake,’ said he, ‘to think of another and a better
plan, but Tristan in my mind for ever stands steadily best and first.
Let Bates and Will believe we mean to settle there. Our imprisonment
shall be just as short or long as we choose.’
‘We can leave when we please?’
‘Whalers are constantly calling at the island; they fish in many seas,
and they’ll give us a wide choice of retreats.’
‘Yet I wish Corporal Glass didn’t know you.’
‘Why? By knowing me he’ll the more readily believe in my story. What
have I to dread? Suppose news reaches the island of the seizure of
the _Childe Harold_, would Glass and the few simple families of the
place imagine me a convict? Not surely in the face of the story I must
relate, Marian.’
‘When the news gets home they may send men-of-war to search for the
convict ship.’
‘My dear, I am a sailor first of all; put it thus: The _Childe Harold_
will be fallen in with; no need to search for her in that case. Or she
may founder. Never imagine that of so great a company every soul will
perish; she has boats, but a single survivor would suffice to acquaint
them at home with her fate. And how must the yarn run as regards
myself? The convict who took command got away in a boat. What became of
him? Let them find out.’
He cried out vehemently after he had said this, ‘Oh, my own, that I
should be forced to hide! But it has come to it. You are with me and of
me, Marian; but what sort of future lies before you?’
I arose and kissed him, and, with my arm about his neck, held my cheek
pressed to his. He calmed down quickly, and I got him to talk to me
about the island. He told me that when the British troops landed in
1816, the only person on Tristan was an Italian. He was in possession
of a large sum of money; but they never succeeded in finding out who he
was, how he came by the money, or what had become of his companions.
Tom said that the idea of seeking a refuge in that island had occurred
to him in the time when the convicts were planning the seizure of the
ship. His long chat with Corporal Glass on the occasion of his visit a
few years before occurred to him, and he remembered many things that
he had seen and heard, such as the little group of cottages situated
on the tabled tongue of land, the scanty stock of domestic furniture
and utensils, the abundance of English farm-produce, bread, bacon,
eggs, butter, milk, poultry, and the like. For groceries and clothes,
he said, the families depended on a passing emigrant ship or American
whaler. They used no money. Ships were glad to exchange what the
islanders wanted for potatoes and such fresh provisions as the island
yielded. This is what I can recollect of what Tom told me of that
island.
The days passed quickly; the work of the brig kept our hands full, and
when, of an evening, I looked back on the hours, I’d marvel at the
swiftness of their flight. The south-east trades failed us; we then
took a strong wind out of the west, which drove us along with the speed
of steam. There was small doubt now of our making the island within
the fortnight, computing from the day when we fell in with the brig.
At long intervals a sail hove into view, but we never sighted anything
within speaking distance, nor would Tom have had anything to say to a
ship, though she had come close enough to be within hail of the voice.
It was Sunday morning. I was aroused by Will, who beat upon my
cabin-door. He asked me if I was awake. I answered, ‘You may hear me.’
‘Then,’ said he, ‘step out and take a look at the island Butler’s to
make you queen of, for I’ll be hanged if the heap of cinder isn’t right
over the bows.’
I clothed myself in a breathless hurry, and, coming out, found Mr.
Bates at the wheel and Will on the bulwarks, looking ahead, and Tom
on the deck-house roof, pointing the brig’s telescope at the sea. The
morning was bright and silent. A light north-easterly wind held the
canvas hushed. Long lines of swell were flowing out of the south-east.
For leagues northward and eastward the sea was full of the light of the
sun.
I looked directly ahead, and instantly beheld a large, dim, violet
cloud upon the horizon.
‘Is that Tristan d’Acunha, Tom?’
‘Yes!’ he exclaimed, turning quickly. ‘That’s our island, Marian.’
‘A noble hiding-place!’ I cried.
Indeed, that point of shadowy land lying upon the mighty face of the
deep was such a revelation of loneliness that, when you viewed it and
thought of the measureless leagues of ocean stretching from it west
to the South Pacific, east to the Australian meridians, you thought
that here only in this prodigious liquid waste was earth’s deepest,
wildest, most awful secret of solitude to be learned and solved.
Tom’s eyes were upon me. He brought his face close and whispered,
‘They’ll never think of us as being there.’
‘It’s as lonely as a star.’
‘We’ll be getting a better view presently. I hope there’s nothing lying
off. If there is, I’ll push on and heave-to behind the horizon till I
think it’s gone.’
‘Is there a harbour, Tom?’
‘Oh, no,’ he replied, with a shake of his head and a faint smile.
‘No other harbour than a two-mile offing. That heap is about eight
thousand feet tall. You see but a little of it. The mass from midway’ll
be wrapped up in a cloud. The inshore wind strikes and rebounds in
offshore gales. I’ll not leave the brig. They’ll put off, and if
they’ll lend me two or three hands to work us, then, after I’ve
introduced Glass to you, if he’s well enough to board us--and spun my
yarn to him with you as the only listener’--and here he glanced at
Will, who still overhung the rail, looking ahead--‘we’ll proceed.’
I did not ask where to; we had talked the thing over and over again,
and the four of us were agreed that nothing could be settled till
we were off the island and saw how affairs stood there. It was just
possible that a missionary parson had settled in Tristan since Tom’s
visit; in that case we could be made man and wife out of hand and so
spared a new voyage in search of a church. Then, again, nothing could
be decided until we knew that the islanders would lend us two or three
of themselves to help work the brig.
The wind scanted as the day advanced, and we were further hindered by
a heavy, long-drawn swell off the port bow. There was no chance of
our reaching the island before dark within communicating distance. At
sunset the huge mass of towering rock was about two leagues away, and
even then a most wonderful sublime sight. Bodies of orange-coloured
mist clung to the mountain, whose snow-crowned peak, piercing the
sun-touched vapour, gleamed in a soft rose in the delicate evening
blue. We saw no vessel under the island or upon the sea-line. The
lofty land swiftly darkened into the liquid dusk when the sun sank, and
over it, where it stood invisible, hung the stars of the Southern Cross.
The cabin barometer promised fair weather; the brig flapped onward
through the darkness, bowing deeply to the swell; but somewhere between
eight and nine, Tom considering we should need the offing we then had,
the three backed the yards on the main, and the vessel was brought to
a stand. The lighter sails were clewed up and furled, and the mainsail
snugged by its gear.
Whilst Tom and the others were aloft and I was at the wheel, I heard
a strange hissing noise close to. It was like a locomotive blowing
off steam. The rolling of the brig depressed the bulwarks and gave me
a sight of the sea, and I spied, at the distance of a pistol-shot,
the great black body of a whale, with a jet of water, bright with
phosphorus, sparkling plume-shaped out of it. Tom from aloft called
down to me to look, but the monster sank almost immediately, and if it
reappeared I neither heard nor saw it.
This trifling incident somehow wonderfully accentuated the vastness and
solitude of the ocean to the mood that was then upon me. I strained my
eyes in the direction where I guessed the island to be and pictured
myself upon it, gazing upon the dark plain of the deep, sensible that,
saving two adjacent rocks, no land was to be come at for hundreds and
hundreds of leagues. The shadow of the mighty ocean mountain was upon
my spirits, not in a depressing or a despondent weight, but with an
influence that subdued and awed me. I thought of that part of London
in which I had dwelt, the streets filled with the noise of people
in motion, the lighted shops, the ceaseless rattle of wheels, the
docks complicated as a giant cobweb with rigging and masts pointing
in silence into the gloomy river sky, the flash of lanterns on the
water, the starry lines of lamps on either bankside, of my house at
Stepney; and I beheld my father and mother again with my mind’s eye,
and Mr. Stanford’s strange, sickly child; my unloved dead sister; I
thought of my aunt’s cheerful house near the Tower, the pleasant,
hospitable rooms above the offices, the piano at which I had sung, the
supper-table round which we had gathered; and then I searched the dark
distance for the shadow whereon I was to dwell, and said to myself,
if there should be a clergyman there, by this time to-morrow I may be
Tom’s wife.
I shivered and pressed my head. A sense of the unreality of my
existence came upon me; it was a sort of madness whilst it lasted.
Tom had descended the rigging and came to my side, and, unable to
control myself, I threw my arms round his neck and burst into tears.
He held me to him and called to Will, who had just sprung from the
bulwarks, to take the helm, and led me into the deck-house and seated
me.
‘What is it, Marian?’
He eyed me anxiously, his face almost stern with gloomy apprehension as
he asked the question.
‘We have gone through so much, Tom, and the end is at hand. Let me
cry;’ and I hid my face and wept again.
He held his peace till I looked at him, and then said, ‘Marian, it’s
not too late.’
‘What is not too late?’
‘Bates and Will will take care that you reach home safely.’
‘Oh, Tom, it’s not in your heart. You don’t mean it.’
‘Marian, my love for you makes me feel a villain for permitting you to
have your way. Why did you cry?’
‘Because I was afraid.’
‘Afraid! Oh, yes! Such a home even for a year, even for a month, might
terrify a stouter heart than yours into more than tears.’
‘I was afraid because I thought to myself, standing alone just now
and recalling the past and looking into the darkness where the island
lies, all this must be a dream--I shall awaken from it and find Tom a
prisoner and away from me, and my heart aching for him.’
He viewed me with impassioned earnestness; his face lighted up; he
smiled with one of those looks which brought him before me in the days
of his glowing, manly beauty, when I had first met him, when calamity
was still afar and all was well.
‘Dearest!’ he said, and coming to me he tenderly rested my head upon
his shoulder; and thus we sat with our hearts too full for speech.
The brig being hove to, the helm needed but little or no attention. The
wheel was secured, and the vessel lay in the hollow of the large, wide
swell, rolling as regularly as the breast rises and falls in sleep. It
was decided that the three should divide the watches, one keeping a
look-out at a time and the others lying near, handy to arouse. Tom told
me to rest throughout the night, and I obeyed him; but my rest was very
broken, and when I slumbered I dreamed strangely.