"'No, Westwood,' said I, 'it can't be the right one--nor any of these,
indeed!' And on looking at the chart, which was one not meant for
anything but navigation in open water, with the channels laid down
clearly enough, but evidently rather offhand as to the islands, Jones
himself seemed to get uncertain about the matter; partly owing to the
short glimpse he'd had of the other chart, and partly to its being, as
he thought, an old one made for a purpose, by a hand that knew the
islands well. After two or three days' sail, we were getting into the
thick of the Maldives, where the reefs and sandbanks stretching out on
every side, and beginning to lap in upon each other, made it more and
more dangerous work; but at any rate the islands we saw were either very
small, or else low and muddy-like, with a few scrubby-looking cocoas
upon them, like bulrushes growing out of a marsh. No runaway sailors
would ever think of taking up their quarters hereabouts, even if we
hadn't caught sight of a smoke now and then, and once of some native
craft with a couple of brown mat-sails, and an out-rigger, that showed
the clusters hereaway to have people about them. Besides, there was no
pretext any Indiaman could have for steering near enough to such a
jungle of mud and water, to give a boat the chance of making towards it
with any certainty.
"I saw at once that the spot in question must lie tolerably for the
course of a ship to Western India, otherwise they wouldn't have appeared
so sure of their mark as Jones said they did. All this, at the same
time, kept me the more bent on searching the matter out ere I did aught
else, seeing that in fact the Indiaman's attempt to get rid of the
schooner was the very thing likely to bring her on this track; fancying,
as she would, that we were either in chase of her toward Bombay, or off
on our own course again. Now, on the one hand, nothing could fit better
for the said runaway scheme of Harry Foster's; and on the other hand,
nothing would have pleased me more, and greatly eased my mind too, than
to catch him and his chums on their spree ashore. The worst of it was,
that I began to have my doubts of Jones again. He was the only man that
could put us on the right scent; yet he seemed either to have lost it,
or to have something creeping on his mind that made him unwilling to
carry it out.
"'Mr Jones,' said I, as the schooner was hove-to, and he stood musing
gloomily by the binnacle, with a glance now and then in at the compass,
and out at the chart again, 'if you're at a loss now, sir, just say--and
I shall try my own hand for want of a better!'
"'No, Lieutenant Collins!' answered he suddenly, in a husky voice--'no,
sir, that's not it, but--God help me! no, there's no use standing
against fate, I see. Whatever it costs me, Mr Collins,' he went on
firmly, 'I'm with you to the end of it; but--there _is_ something
horrible about all this!' 'How! what do you mean?' said I, startled by
the difference in his manner, and the quiver of his lip. 'Oh,' said he,
'as for the present matter, there may be nothing more in it than what I
heard on the ship's boom yonder. The truth is, I didn't know at first
but this cluster here might have been the one--though I see now there is
only _one_ island in the whole chain that can answer the description,
and that is not here.' With that he pointed to another piece of the
chart, showing no more than a few spots upon the paper, not to speak of
shades in it standing for reefs and shoals, towards the 'Head' of the
Maldives; one spot lying away from the rest, with the single name of
Minicoy for them all. I asked him hastily enough what it was called, and
all about it, for the whole affair made me more and more uneasy; but on
this point Jones seemed inclined to keep close, plainly not liking the
topic, except that I found it went by several names, one of which I had
heard before myself--White-water Island.
"About the time I was a boy in a merchantman's forecastle, 'twas a sort
of floating yarn amongst some seamen, this White-water Island, I
remembered; but I never met with a man that had seen it, every one
having had it from a shipmate last voyage, though a terrible place it
had been, by all accounts, without one's knowing exactly where it was.
One craft of some kind had gone to find out a treasure that was buried
in it, and she never was heard of more; a man took a fancy to live
ashore in it, like Robinson Crusoe, and he went mad, while the reason
there were no 'natives' was owing to the dreadful nature of it, though
at the same time it was as beautiful as a garden. The right name,
however, according to Jones, was Incoo. 'There's no good in blinding
one's self to it, Mr Collins,' he went on; 'that's the island the men
meant, only their chart set me wrong owing to the greater size of
it--you had better beat out of this at once, and keep up for the
eight-degrees channel there.'
"We were in open sea again, out of sight of land from the mast-head,
steering for somewhere about north-north-east, with a very light breeze
from nearly the monsoon quarter, and sometimes a flying squall,
sometimes no more than a black pour of rain, that left it hotter than
before. The clear, deep blue of the Indian Ocean got to a sickly heavy
sort of dead colour towards noon, like the bottoms of old bottles, and
still we were standing on without signs of land, when, almost all at
once, I noticed the water in the shadow of the schooner had a brown,
coffee-like tint I had never exactly seen hitherto; indeed, by the
afternoon, it was the same hue to the very horizon, with a clean
seaboard on all sides. I had the deep-sea lead-line hove at length, and
found no soundings with a hundred and fifty fathoms; there was neither
land nor river, I knew, for hundreds and hundreds of miles to the coast
of Arabia; as for current, no trial I could think of showed any; and
there were now and then patches of small glittering sea-jellies and
sea-lice to be seen amongst a stalk or two of weed on the soft heave of
the water, going the way of the breeze. A dozen or so of Portuguese
men-of-war, as they call them, held across our bows one time; little
pink blubbers, with their long, shining roots seen hanging down in the
clear of the surface, and their little blue gauze sails with the light
through them, ribbed like leaves of trees, as they kept before the wind.
Westwood and I both fancied we could feel a queer sulphury smell as we
leant over the side, when a surge came along the bends. Not a single
fish was to be seen about us, either, except the long big black-fish
that rose one after the other at a distance, as the wind got lighter.
One while you heard them groaning and gasping in the half-calm, as if it
were the breathing of the sea far and wide every time it swelled;
another, one saw them in a cluster of black points against the bright
sky-line, like so many different shaped rocks with the foam round them,
or a lot of long-boats floating bottom up, with their back-horns for
humps on the keel. As for Jones, he looked graver and graver, till all
of a sudden we saw him go below; but after a little he came up with an
almanack in his hand, and his finger fixed where the time of the next
new moon was given, as I found when I took it from him, for he seemed
not inclined to speak. 'Why, what has that to do with the thing?' I
said. 'We are heading fair for the Minicoy cluster, I think.' 'Yes,
sir,' said he; 'if one needed anything to prove that, he has only to
look at the sea; at this season, I _knew_ how it would turn out.' 'Well,
that's what I can't understand, Mr Jones,' said I; 'the water seems as
deep as St Paul's Cathedral thrice over!'
"'Do you not know then, sir, why that island is called--what it is?' was
the answer. 'But, wait--wait--till _night_!' And with that Jones turned
round to the bulwarks, leaning his arms on the rail. In the meantime
Jacobs and some of the men had drawn a bucket of water, which we noticed
them tasting. A pannikin full of it was handed along to the
quarter-deck, and the taste struck you at once, owing to the want of the
well-known briny twang of real blue water, and instead of that a smack
as it were of iron, though it was as clear as crystal. Everyone had a
trial of it but Jones himself; indeed, he never once looked round, till
it had occurred to me to pour the tin of water into a glass, and hold it
with my hand over it inside the shade of the binnacle, when I thought I
made out little specks and sparks shooting and twisting about in it, as
if the water had a motion of itself; then it seemed to sink to the
bottom, and all was quiet. Just then I looked up and caught Jones's
scared, restless sort of glance, as if he were uneasy. There was a
strange life in that man's brain, I felt, that none could see into; but
owing as it plainly was to something far away from the present matter, I
knew it was best to let him alone. In fact, his doing as he did showed
well enough he meant fair by ourselves. Nothing on earth ever gave me
more the notion of a wreck in a man than the kind of gaze out of Jones's
two eyes when he'd turn to the light and look at you, half-keen,
half-shrinking, like a man that both felt himself above you, and yet,
somehow or other, you'd got him under you.
"I'm blessed if I didn't trust him more because he had been too
desperate a character in his deeds beforehand to turn his mind to little
ones now, than for anything good in him; being one of those fellows that
work their way from one port to another in ships' forecastles, and get
drunk ashore, though, all the time, you'd say there wasn't one aboard
with them, from the skipper to the chaplain, knew as much or had flown
as high some time. Some day at sea the hands are piped round the
grating, hats off, and the prayer-book rigged--down goes 'Jack Jones'
with a plash and a bubble to his namesake, old 'Davy,' and you hear no
more of him!
"Well, just after sundown, as the dusk came on, Westwood and I left the
deck to go down to supper with the planter, the midshipman being in
charge. There was nothing in sight, sail or land; indeed, the queer
dark-brown tint of the horizon showed strongly against the sky, as if it
had been the mahogany of the capstan-head inside its brass rim; the
night was cloudy, with a light breeze, and though the stars came out, I
expected it to get pretty dark. As I went down the companion, I heard
nothing but the light wash of the water from her bows, and the look-out
stepping slowly about betwixt her knight-heads on the forecastle; while
it struck me the smooth face of the sea seemed to show wonderfully
distinct into the dusk, the completer it got, as if a sort of light rose
up from off it. Down below we felt her stealing pleasantly through all,
and Tom and I sat for I didn't know how long, trying to settle our
differences on the main point--about the _Seringapatam_, of course, and
which way she was likely to be gone. Tom plumed himself mightily on his
common-sense view of a thing, and having by this time got back a good
deal of his cheerfulness, he and Mr Rollock almost laughed me over to
his line of thinking.
"We then agreed that the ship must be at present edging up on one side
or other of the Maldives, but both of them thought the less we had to
say to her the better. 'I say, though,' exclaimed the planter, whose
face was turned the opposite way to ours, 'I'd no idea it was
moonlight!' 'Moonlight! there's no moon till morning,' I said. 'Look
into the stern-cabin there, then!' said Rollock; and I turned round,
seeing into the door of the after-cabin, where, to my no small surprise,
there was a bright white glare through the little square stern-light,
gleaming on the rim of the sill, and seemingly off both the air and the
water beyond. Quite confounded, as well as wondering what Snelling could
be about, I hurried up the companion, the planter and Westwood hard at
my heels.
"For so long as I had kept at sea, and a good many different latitudes I
had been into, yet I must say I never in my life before saw such a
strange sight as broke on us the instant we put our heads out of the
booby-hatch, fresh from the lamp-light in the cabin. Indeed, I can't but
own to my first feeling being fright; for what it was I couldn't
understand, unless we were got into a quarter of the world where things
weren't natural. There were a few stray clouds in the sky, scattered
away ahead, and clearing eastward to settle along before the breeze; all
aloft of us, high over the sharp dark edge of the sails and gaffs, the
air seemed to open away out, pale and glimmering like a reflection in
the ice; all round you caught a glimpse of the stars weakening and
weakening toward the horizon.
"But the water itself--that was the sight that bewildered one! On every
side the whole sea lay spread out smooth, and as white as snow--you
couldn't fancy how wide it might stretch away astern on our lee-beam,
for not a mark of horizon was to be seen, save on the north-west, where
you made it out, owing to the sky there being actually darker than the
sea--but all the time the wide face of it was of a dead ghastly
paleness, washing with a swell like milk to our black counter as we
forged ahead. It wasn't that it shone in the least like blue water at
night in the ordinary tropics--by Jove! that would have been a
comfort--but you'd have thought there was a winding-sheet laid over all,
or we were standing across a level country covered with snow--only when
I stood up, and watched the bows, there was a faint hissing sparkle to
be seen in the ripple's edge that first brought me to myself. The
Lascars had woke up where they lay about the caboose, and were cowering
together for sheer terror; the men standing, each one in his place, and
looking; while Jones, who had relieved the midshipman, leant by himself
with his head on the capstan, as if to keep out the sight of it all; the
schooner's whole dusky length, in fact, with every black figure on her
decks, and her shape up to the lightest stick or rope of her aloft,
appearing strange enough, in the midst of the broad white glare, to
daunt anyone that wasn't acquainted with the thing. 'Mr Jones,' said I
quickly, on going up to him, 'what the devil is this?' I'll be hanged if
I didn't begin to believe in witchcraft or something. 'Where are we
getting to?' 'Nothing, nothing, sir,' said he, lifting his head; ''tis
natural enough; only the milk-sea, as they call it--the white-water,
sir, that comes down twice a year hereabouts from God knows where--you
only see it so at--at _night_!'
"'Oh, then, according to that,' I said, 'we shan't be long of sighting
your island, I suppose?' 'No,' said he; 'if the breeze freshens at all,
keeping our present course, the mast-head ought to hail it in two or
three hours; but, God knows, Lieutenant Collins, natural though the
sight is, there's something a man can't get rid of, especially if----'
He stood up, walked to the side, and kept facing the whole breadth of
the awful-looking sea, as it were, till it seemed to blind him. 'I tell
you what, sir,' said he, slowly, 'if that water had any use, a priest
would say 'twas sent to wash that same island clean of what's been done
on it; but it couldn't, Mr Collins, it couldn't till the day of
judgment!' He leant over till his dark face and his shoulders, to my
notion, made the milk-white surge that stole up to the schooner's bends
take a whiter look. 'If that water could wash _me_ now,' muttered he,
'ay, if it could only take the soul out of me, but I'd go down, down
this moment to the bottom!' With that he gave a sudden move that made me
catch him by the arm. 'No, no, Mr Collins,' said he, turning round; 'the
truth is, I mean to go through with it; I'll let it carry me where I am
bound for! Wasn't I born without asking my leave, and I'll kick the
bucket the same way, if it was on a blasted dunghill!' 'Come, come, Mr
Jones,' said I, in a soothing sort of a way, 'go below for a little, and
sleep; when we hail the land I'll have you called.' 'I'd rather not,
sir,' said Jones, quietly; 'the truth is, it strikes me there's
something strange in my happening to be aboard here, at this particular
season, too; and see that same island, _now_, I must! It's fate,
Lieutenant Collins,' added he; 'and I must say, I think it's the more
likely something may turn out there. Either you'll see that ship, or the
men, or else _I'll_ be there myself, in some way or other!'
"Now there was something in all this that began at moments quite to
bewilder one, the more excited the state was it put you in. There was
nothing for it but to push on, and see what might come of it. Indeed,
the weather favoured us better on our present course than on any other;
and I felt, if I didn't keep active, I should go distracted. 'Twas
almost as if what Jones said had a truth in it, and a sort of a power
beyond one were drawing the schooner the way she steered; while at the
same time there was every little while somewhat new in the extraordinary
looks of things to hold you anxious. Even a flying touch of a squall we
had about midnight didn't the least do away with the whiteness of the
water all around; on the contrary, as the dark cloud crept down upon us,
widening on both sides like smoke, the face of the sea seemed to whiten
and whiten, casting up a ghastly gleam across the cloud, with its
ripples frothing and creaming; till, not knowing _how_ things might go
hereabouts, you almost expected the first rush of the wind to send it
all in a flame to our mast-heads.
"Then up she rose on a surge like a snowdrift, and off we drove heeling
over to it, gaffs lowered and canvas down, everything lost sight of,
save the white sea heaving up against the mist; while the clear-coloured
plash of it through our weather bulwarks showed it was water sure
enough. The squall went off to leeward, however, the rain hissing like
ink into the swell it left, and spotting it all over till the last drops
seemed to sink in millions of separate sparkles as far as you could see.
The schooner rose from one heave to another to an even keel on the
smooth length of it, hoisting her spanking gaffs, hauling aft the
sheets, and slipping ahead once more to a breeze fed by the rain. As the
sky cleared, the dead white glare the water sent up into it was such you
didn't know the one from the other toward the horizon; and in the midst
there was only the smooth faint service, brushing whiter with the
breeze, as if it was nothing else kept it from going out of sight; with
a few streaky clouds turning themselves out like wool in a confused rift
of the air aloft; the schooner walking in it without ever a glimpse of a
shadow on one side or another; while, as for seeing a sail on the
horizon, you might as well have looked for a shred of paper. It wasn't
light, neither nor was it haze; nothing but a dead colour off the very
sea's face--for the schooner rose and plunged without letting you see a
hair's-breath of her draught below the water-line. Every man rubbed his
eyes, as if it were all some kind of a dream, and none the less when
suddenly we were right upon a long patch of black stripes winding away
through the white, like so many sea-serpents come up to breathe, with
both ends of them lost in the faintness. Nobody stirred, or said,
'Look-out'; stripe after stripe she went slipping through them as if
they'd been ghosts, without a word or an extra turn of the wheel. I
daresay, if we had commenced to rise in the air, every man would have
held on like grim death, but he wouldn't have wondered much; 'twas
just, 'whatever might happen to please them as had the managing of it,'
which was Jacobs' observation when we talked of it after.
"Mr Snelling was the only one that ventured to pass a joke; when Jones,
who I thought was out of hearing, looked at the reefer with such a
fierce glance, and so scornful at the same time, that I couldn't help
connecting what happened the very next moment with it--for without the
slightest warning, both of us were flung to leeward, and Snelling
pitched into the scuppers, as a huge rolling ridge of the white water
came down upon our beam; while the schooner broached-to in the wind,
floundering on the swell with her sails aback. Had the breeze been
stronger, I think it would have fairly swamped us with the stern-way she
had; and heave after heave swelled, glaring and weltering out of the
pale blind sky, till our decks swam with light in the dusk under the
bulwarks, and about the dark mouths of the hatchways. Just as suddenly
the rollers seemed to sink in the smooth of the sea, and at last we
payed off with the breeze as before, at the cost of a good fright and a
famous ducking. Two or three times in the course of the middle watch did
this happen, except that we were taken less by surprise, and had the
hatches closed, with every rope ready to let go; the breeze
strengthening all the time, and the same sort of look continuing all
round and aloft.[29]
[29] The description of this peculiar phenomenon of the Indian
Ocean, as given by Captain Collins, surprised us as much as
the reality seems to have done him. However, on consulting a
seafaring old gentleman of much experience in all parts of the
world, we are informed that such an appearance is periodically
to be met with for some distance between the Laccadive and
Maldive Islands, as he had reason to know. The old Dutch Captain
Stavorinus also furnishes an account substantially similar,
having particularly attended to the cause of it in his voyage to
the East Indies. It reaches also to some of the south-eastern
islands at a great distance from India, near Java--or at all
events appears there. In the Atlantic, Humboldt says there is a
part of the sea always milky, although very deep, in about 57
degrees W. longitude, and the parallel of the island of Dominica.
Of the same nature, probably, are the immense olive-green spaces
and stripes seen in blue water by Captain Scoresby and others,
toward the ice of the north polar regions. The pale sea alluded
to is supposed either to move from the shores of Arabia Felix,
and the gulfs in that coast, or, by some to arise, from
sulphureous marine exhalations--appearing to rot the bottoms of
vessels, and to frighten the fish. Both at the Laccadives and
near Java it is seen twice a year, often with a heavy rolling of
the sea and bad weather. The first time, at the new moon in June,
it is called by the Dutch the "little white-water"; again, at the
new moon in August, the great "white-water"; by English seamen,
generally, the milk-sea, or the "blink."
"About four o'clock or so, the appearance of the sky near where the
horizon ought to be, right ahead, struck Westwood and me as stranger
than ever; owing to a long lump of shadow, as it were, lying northward
like the shape of a bow or the round back of a fish miles long, though
it softened off at one end into the hollow of the air, and the gleam of
the white water broke past the other like the streaks of the northern
lights on a frosty night toward the Pole, save for the thin, shadowy
tint of it, and the stars shining plainly through. I'd have fancied it
was high land; when suddenly the half-moon was seen to ooze like a
yellow spot out of the shapeless sort of steam to eastward, like a thing
nobody knew, shedding a faint brown glimmer far below where you hadn't
seen there was water at all.
"The bank of shadow softened away towards her, till in little more than
five minutes the dark rippling line of the sea was made out, drawn
across the dusk as if it had been the wide mouth of a frith in the polar
ice, opening far on our weather-bow. A soft blue shimmering tint stole
out on it by contrast, leaving the milk-white glare still spread
everywhere else, astern, ahead, and on our lee-beam, into the sightless
sky: 'twas the old blue water we caught sight of once more, with the
natural night and the stars hanging over it; and the look-out aloft
reported blue water stretching wide off to the nor'ard. There was one
full hurrah from the seamen in the bows, and they ran of themselves
naturally enough to the ropes, standing by to haul the schooner on a
wind--to head up for the old salt sea, no doubt.
"'Lieutenant Collins,' said Jones in a low voice, 'do you mean to steer
for that island, sir?' 'Yes,' I said, 'certainly, Mr Jones--I shall see
this matter out, whatever the upshot may be!' 'Then keep on, sir,' said
he firmly, 'keep in the white water--'tis your only plan to near it
safely, sir!' This I didn't well understand; but, by Jove! there was so
much out of the common way hereabouts, that I had made up my mind to
follow his advice. Another hail from aloft, at length--'Something black
on our lee-bows, sir--right in the eye of the white it is, sir!' We
were now running fast down in the direction where there was least
possibility of seeing ahead at all, although, in fact, the little
moonshine we had, evidently began to make this puzzling hue of the
surface less distinct--turning it of a queer ashy drab, more and more
like the brown we noticed by daytime; while the light seemed as it were
to scoop out the hollow of the sky aloft, when a dark spot or two could
be observed from the deck, dotting the milky space over one bow--you
couldn't say whether in the air or the water, as they hung blackening
and growing together before us through below the foot of the jib.
"Larger and larger it loomed as we stood before the breeze, till there
was no doubt we had the bulk of a small low island not far to windward
of us, a couple of points or thereabouts on our larboard bow when she
fell off a little--lying with the ragged outline of it rising to a top
near one end, its shape stretched black and distinct in the midst of the
pale sea; while the white water was to be seen taking close along the
edge of the island, showing every rock and point of it in the shadow
from the moon, till it seemed to turn away all of a sudden like a
current into the broad, dreamy glimmer that still lay south-eastward. On
the other side of the island you saw the dark sea-ripples flickering to
the faint moonlight, and some two or three more patches of flat land
just tipping the horizon, with the thin cocoa-nut trees on them like
reeds against the stars and the dusk; while the one nearest us was
sufficiently marked out to have saved me the trouble even of the look I
gave Jones, which he answered by another. 'You have seven or eight
fathoms water here, sir,' added he; 'and as soon as she rounds the point
yonder, we can shoal it by degrees to any anchorage you like, as long as
we keep in the white water--but we must hold to _it_!' It was
accordingly found so with the lead, and ere long, having kept past the
point, the same milky hue could be noticed as it were jagging off
through the darker water, and winding away hither and thither all round
the other side, till you lost it.
"However, here we brailed up and hauled down everything, letting go an
anchor little more than half-a-mile from a small sloping beach, where
the strange water actually surged up through the shadow of the land in
one glittering sheet, like new-fallen snow, while the back-wash seethed
down into it all along the edge in perfect fire. Nothing stirred on it,
apparently; not a sound came from it, save the low wash of the surf on
that lonely bare beach; and you only made out that part of the island
was covered with trees, with the ground rising to a flat-topped hummock
toward one end. So being pretty wearied by this time, impatient though I
was for a clearer view of matters, most of us turned in, leaving the
deck to a strong anchor-watch, in charge of Jones--especially as it was
towards morning, and the breeze blowing fresh over the island through
our ropes. But if ever a man walked the deck overhead in a fashion to
keep you awake, it was Jones that morning: faster and faster he went,
till you'd have thought he ran; then there was a stop, when you felt him
_thinking_, and off he posted again. No wonder, by George! I had ugly
dreams!