HELGA NIELSEN.
For full twenty minutes the lad and I clung to the helm without
exchanging a word. The speed of the driven vessel rendered her motion
comparatively easy, after the intolerable lurching and rolling and
plunging of her as she lay at anchor or in the trough. She was swept
onwards with such velocity that I had little or no fear of her taking in
the seas over her stern, and she steered well, with but little wildness
in the swerving of her bows, as was to be seen by the comparative
regularity of the oscillation of the compass-card.
This running before the tempest, of course, diminished the volume and
power of it, so far, I mean, as our own sensations were concerned; but
the sight of the sea, as much of it at least as was visible, coupled
with the thunder of the wind up aloft in the sky, and the prodigious
crying and shrieking and shrilling of it in the rigging, was warrant
enough that were we to heave the barque to we should find the hurricane
harder now than it had been at any other time since it first came on to
blow. Yet our racing before it, as I have said, seemed somewhat to lull
it, and we could converse without having to cry out, though for twenty
minutes we stood mute as statues waiting and watching.
At last my companion said to me: 'Have we passed that point which you
spoke of, do you think?'
'Oh yes,' I answered. 'It would not be above two miles distant from the
point where we broke adrift. Our speed cannot have been less than eight
or nine knots. I should say Hurricane Point is a full mile away down on
the quarter there.'
'I fear that we shall find the sea,' said he, 'grow terribly heavy as we
advance.'
'Yes,' said I; 'but what is to be done? There is nothing for it but to
advance. Suppose such another shift of wind as has just happened--what
then? We should have a line of deadly shore right under our lee. No, we
must hold on as we are.'
'There are but two of us!' cried he: 'my father cannot count. What are
we to do? We cannot work this big ship!'
'The weather may break,' said I; 'it is surely too fierce to last. What
can we hope for but to be rescued or assisted by some passing vessel? Is
this ship stanch?'
'Yes; she is a strong ship,' he replied. 'She is about six years old. My
father is her owner. I wish I could go to him,' he added; 'he will be
dying to learn what has happened and what is being done, and it is past
the time for his medicine, and he will be wanting his supper!'
I tried to catch a view of him as he spoke these words, but the haze of
the binnacle-lamp did not reach to his face, and it was as black as the
face of the sky itself out of that sheen. What he had said had a girlish
note in it that I could not reconcile with his dress, with his seafaring
alertness, with his spirited behaviour, his nimble crawling out upon the
bowsprit, and his perception of what was to be done, under conditions
which might well have clouded the wits of the oldest and most audacious
sailor.
'Pray go and see your father,' said I. 'I believe I can keep this helm
amidships without help.' And, indeed, if I could not have steered the
barque alone, I do not know that such assistance as he could offer would
have suffered me to control her. He seemed but a slender lad--so far, at
least, as I had been able to judge from the view I got when the flare
was burning--very quick, but without such strength as I should have
looked for in a young seaman, as I could tell whenever the wheel had to
be put up or down.
He let go the spokes, and stood apart for a minute or two, as though to
judge whether I could manage without him; then said he, 'I will return
quickly,' and with that he took a step and vanished in the blackness
forward of the binnacle-stand.
My mind dwelt for a moment upon him, upon the clearness and purity of
his voice, upon a something in his speech which I could not define, and
which puzzled me; upon his words, which were as good English as one
could hope to hear at home, albeit there was a certain sharpness and
incisiveness--perhaps I might say a little of harshness--in his
accentuation that might suggest him a foreigner to an English ear,
though, as I then supposed, it was more likely than not this quality
arose from the excitement and dismay and distress which worked in him as
in me.
But he speedily ceased to engage my thoughts. What could I dwell upon
but the situation in which I found myself--the spectacle of the black
outline of barque painting herself upon the volumes of white water she
hove up around her as she rushed forward pitching bows under, her
rigging echoing with unearthly cries, as if the dark waving mass of spar
and gear aloft were crowded with tormented souls wailing and howling and
shrieking dismally? I recalled my mother's dream; I believed I was
acting in some dreadful nightmare of my own slumbers; all had happened
so suddenly--so much of emotion, of wild excitement, of agitation, and,
I may say, horror, had been packed into the slender space of time
between the capsizal of the lifeboat and this rushing out of the bay,
that, now I had a little leisure to bend my mind to contemplation of the
reality, I could not believe in it as an actual thing. I was dazed; my
hearing was stunned by the ceaseless roar of wind and seas. The _Janet_
stove and sunk! All my lion-hearted men drowned, perhaps! The poor
Danes, for whom they had forfeited their lives, long ago corpses! Would
not this break my mother's heart? Would there be a survivor to tell her
that when I was last seen I was aboard the barque? Once again I figured
the little parlour I had quitted but a few hours since--I pictured my
mother sitting by the fire, waiting and listening--the long night, the
bitter anguish of suspense!--it was lucky for me that the obligation of
having to watch and steer the vessel served as a constant intrusion upon
my mind at this time, for could I have been able to sit down and
surrender myself wholly to my mood, God best knows how it must have gone
with me.
The lad was about ten minutes absent. I found him alongside the wheel
without having witnessed his approach. He came out of the darkness as a
spirit might shape itself, and I did not know that he was near me until
he spoke.
'My father says that our safety lies in heading into the open sea, to
obtain what you call a wide offing,' said he.
'What does he advise?' I asked.
'"We must continue to run," he says,' answered the lad, meaning by _run_
that we should keep the barque before the wind. '"When the coast is far
astern we must endeavour to heave to." So he counsels. I told him we are
but two. He answered, "It may be done."'
'I wish he were able to leave his cabin and take charge,' said I. 'What
is his complaint?'
'He was seized, shortly after leaving Cuxhaven, with rheumatism in the
knees,' he answered; 'he cannot stand--cannot, indeed, stir either leg.'
'Why did he not get himself conveyed ashore for treatment?'
'He hoped to get better. We were to call at Swansea before proceeding to
Porto Allegre, and if he had found himself still ill when he arrived
there, it was his intention to procure another captain for the _Anine_,
and remain at Swansea with me until he was able to return home.'
'Who had charge of the barque when she brought up in the bay?' I
inquired, finding a sort of relief in asking these questions, and,
indeed, in having somebody to converse with, for even my ten minutes of
loneliness at the helm of that pitching and foaming vessel had depressed
me to the very core of my soul.
'The carpenter, who acted as second mate.'
'Yes, I recollect some of our boatmen brought the news. Your chief mate
broke his leg and was sent ashore. But did your father consent to the
_Anine_ dropping anchor in so perilous a bay as ours--perilous, I mean,
considering the weather at the time?'
'He was at the mercy of the man Damm--the carpenter, I mean,' he
answered. 'The crew had refused to keep the sea: they said a tempest was
coming, and that shelter must be sought before the wind came, and the
carpenter steered the barque for the first haven he fell in with, which
happened to be your bay. Our crew were not good men; they were grumbling
much, as your English word is, from the hour of our leaving Cuxhaven.'
'But surely,' said I, 'the poor fellows who sprang out of the
fore-rigging could not have formed the whole of the crew of a ship of
this burthen.'
'No,' he answered; 'the carpenter and five men got away in one of the
boats when they found that the barque was dragging her anchors. They
lowered one boat, which filled and was knocked to pieces, and the wreck
of it, I dare say, is still swinging at the tackles. They lowered the
other boat and went away in her.'
'Did they reach the shore?'
'I do not know,' said he.
'They must have been a bad lot,' said I--'those who escaped in the boat
and those who hung in the shrouds, to leave your helpless father to his
fate.'
'Oh! a bad lot, a wicked lot!' he cried. 'They were not Danes,' he
added. 'Danish sailors would not have acted as those men did.'
'Are you a Dane?' I asked.
'My father is,' he answered. 'I am as much English as Danish. My mother
was an Englishwoman.'
'I should have believed you wholly English,' said I. 'Are you a sailor?'
He answered, 'No.' I was about to speak, when he exclaimed: 'I am a
girl!'
Secretly for some time I had supposed this, and yet I was hardly less
astonished than had I been without previous suspicion.
'A _girl_!' I cried, sending my sight groping over her figure; but to no
purpose. She was absolutely indistinguishable saving her arms, which
were dimly touched by the haze of the binnacle-light as they lay upon
the spokes of the wheel.
'It is my whim to dress as a boy on board ship!' she exclaimed, with no
stammer of embarrassment that I could catch in her clear delivery, that
penetrated to my ear without loss of a syllable through the heavy
storming of the gale, flashing with the fury of a whirlwind off the
brows of the seas which rushed at us, as the barque's counter soared
into the whole weight and eye of the tempest.
So far had we conversed; but at this moment a great surge took the
barque and swung her up in so long, so dizzy, and sickening an upheaval,
followed by so wild a fall into the frothing hollow at its base, that
speech was silenced in me, and I could think of nothing else but the
mountainous billows now running. Indeed, as my companion had predicted,
the farther we drew out from the land the heavier we found the sea. The
play of the ocean, indeed, out here, was rendered fierce beyond words by
the dual character of the tempest; for the seas which had been set
racing out of the west had not yet been conquered by the violence of the
new gale and by the hurl of the liquid hills out of the east; and the
barque was now labouring in the same sort of pyramidal sea as had run in
the bay, saving that here the whole power of the great Atlantic was in
each billow, and the fight between the contending waters was as a combat
of mighty giants.
The decks were full of water; at frequent intervals the brow of the sea
rushing past us, swift as was our own speed upon its careering back,
would arch over the rail and tumble aboard in a heavy fall of water, and
the smoke of it would rise from the planks as though the barque were on
fire, and make the blackness forward of the mainmast hoary. I sought in
vain for the least break in the dark ceiling of the sky. Will the vessel
be able to keep afloat? I was now all the time asking myself. Is it
possible for any structure put together by human hands to outlive such
a night of fury as this? As I have said, I was no sailor, yet my
'longshore training gave me very readily to know that the best, if not
the only, chance for our lives was to get the barque hove-to, and leave
her to breast the seas and live the weather out as she could with her
helm lashed, and, perhaps some bit of tarpaulin in the weather-rigging,
to keep her head up. But this, that was to be easily wished, was
inexpressibly perilous to attempt or achieve, for, in bringing the
vessel to, it was as likely as not we should founder out of hand. A
single sea might be enough to do our business; and, failing that, there
was the almost certain prospect of the decks being swept, of every
erection from the taffrail to the bows being carried away, ourselves
included; of a score of leaks being started by a single blow, and, even
if the girl and I managed to hold on, of the barque foundering under our
feet.
Thus we rushed onward, very literally indeed scudding under bare poles,
as it is called; and for a long while we had neither of us a word to
exchange, so present was calamity, so near was death, so dreadful were
the thunderous sounds of the night, so engrossing our business of
keeping the flying fabric dead before the seas.
I pulled out my watch and held it hastily to the binnacle-lamp, and
found the hour exactly one. The girl asked me the time. This was the
first word that had passed between us for a long while. I replied, and
she said in a voice that indicated extraordinary spirit, but that
nevertheless sounded languishingly after her earlier utterance: 'Now
that it is past midnight, the gale may break; surely such fierce weather
cannot last for many hours!'
'I wish you would go,' said I, 'and get some refreshment for yourself,
and lie down for awhile. I believe I can manage single-handed to keep
the vessel before it.'
'If I lie down, it would not be to sleep,' she answered; 'but if you
think I can be spared from the wheel for a few minutes, I will obtain
some refreshment for us both, and I should also like to see how my
father does.'
I answered that if the helm was to prove too heavy for me, her help
might hardly save me from being obliged to let go.
'Do not believe this,' she exclaimed, 'because you now know that I am a
girl!'
'I have had no heart to express wonderment as yet,' said I, 'otherwise
my astonishment and admiration would reassure you, if you suppose I
doubt your strength and capacity now that I know you to be a girl. A
little refreshment will help us both,' and I was going to advise her to
seize the opportunity to attire herself in dry clothes, for I was in
oilskins, whereas, so far as I was able to gather, her dress was a
pea-jacket and a cloth cap; and I knew that again and again she had been
soaked to the skin, and that the wind pouring on her would be chilling
her to her very heart. But even amid such a time as this I was sensible
of a diffidence in naming what was in my mind, and held my peace.
She left the wheel, and I stood steering the barque single-handed, with
my eyes fixed upon the illuminated compass-card, while I noticed that
the course the vessel was taking, which always held her dead before the
gale, was now above a point, nay, perhaps two points, to the southward
of west, whence it was clear the hurricane was veering northwardly.
Whether it was because this small shift in the wind still found the
colliding seas travelling east and west, or that some heavy surge
sweeping its volume along the starboard bow caused the barque to 'yaw'
widely, as it is termed, and so brought a great weight of billow against
the rudder: be the cause what it will, while my eye was rooted upon the
card, the stern of the vessel was on a sudden run up with the velocity
of a balloon from whose car all the ballast has been thrown, the spokes
were wrenched from my hand as they revolved like the driving-wheel of a
locomotive in full career, and I was sent spinning against the bulwark,
from which I dropped upon my knees and so rolled over, stunned.
For all I could tell I might have lain five minutes or five hours
without my senses. I believe I was brought to by the washing over me of
the water that lay in that lee-part of the deck into which I had been
shot. I sat erect, but for a long while was unable to collect my mind,
so bewildered were my brains by the fall, and so confounded besides by
the uproar round about. I then made out the figure, as I took it, of the
girl standing at the wheel, and got on my legs, and after feeling over
myself, so to speak, to make sure that all my bones were sound, I
staggered, or rather clawed my way up to the wheel; for the barque
seemed now to me to be upon her beam-ends, and rolling with dreadful
wildness, and there were times when the foaming waters rushed inboards
over the rail which she submerged to leeward.
The girl cried out when she spied me. I had to draw close, indeed, to be
seen; it was as black down where I was thrown, as the inside of the
vessel's hold. She cried out, I say, uttering some Danish exclamation,
and then exclaimed:
'I feared you were lost; I feared that you had been thrown overboard; I
ought not to have left you alone at the wheel. Tell me if you are hurt?'
'No; I am uninjured,' I replied. 'But what has become of the ship? I am
only just recovered from my swoon.'
'Oh!' she cried, 'she has taken up the very situation you wished for.
She has hove herself to. She came broadside to the sea after you were
flung from the wheel. We are mercifully watched over. We dared not of
ourselves have brought her to the wind.'
All my senses were now active in me once more, and I could judge for
myself. It was as the girl had said. The barque had fallen into the
trough, and had taken up a position for herself, and was shouldering the
heavy western surge with her bow, coming to and falling off in rhythmic
sweep. Clouds of froth repeatedly broke over her forecastle; but she
seemed while I then watched her to rise buoyant to each black curl of
billow as it took her amidships.
'Will you help me to lash the helm?' cried the girl. 'It is all that the
_Anine_ will need, I am sure. She will be able to fight the storm alone
if we can secure the wheel.'
Between us, we drove the helm 'hard a-lee,' to use the sea term--for
which, indeed, it is impossible to find an equivalent, though I trust to
be as sparing in this language as the obligation of explanation will
permit--and then, by means of ropes wound round the spokes, so bound the
wheel as to cripple all play in it.
'Will she lie up to the wind, do you think,' said I, 'without some
square of canvas abaft here to keep her head to it?'
'I have been watching her. I believe she will do very well,' the girl
answered. 'I feared that that little head of sail we hoisted in the bay
would blow her bows round, and, by this not happening, I suppose that
sail is in rags. One would not have heard it split in such a thunder of
wind as this.'
'Have you seen your father?'
'Yes. I was talking to him when you were thrown from the wheel. I knew
what had happened by the behaviour of the vessel. I ran out, and feared
you were lost.'
'What does he counsel?'
'It is still his wish that we should go on putting plenty of sea betwixt
us and the land. But do you notice that the gale has gone somewhat into
the north? He will be glad to hear it, now that we are no longer
scudding. Our drift should put us well clear of the Land's End, and,
indeed, I dare say now we are being thrust away at several miles in the
hour from the coast. He is very anxious to know if the _Anine_ has taken
in water, and wishes me to sound the well. I fear I shall not be able to
do this alone.'
'Why should you?' cried I. 'You shall do nothing alone! I cannot credit
that you are a girl! Such spirit--such courage--such knowledge of a
calling the very last in the wide world that women are likely to
understand! Pray let me ask your name?'
'Helga Nielsen,' she answered. 'My father is Peter Nielsen--Captain
Peter Nielsen,' she repeated. 'And your name?'
'Hugh Tregarthen,' said I.
'It is sad that you should be here,' said she, 'brought away from your
home, suffering all this hardship and peril! You came to save our lives.
God will bless you, sir. I pray that the good God may protect and
restore you to those you love.'
Spite of the roar of the wind, and the ceaseless crashing and seething
sound of the smiting and colliding seas, I could catch the falter of
emotion in her voice as she pronounced these words; but then, as you
will suppose, we were close together, standing shoulder to shoulder
against the binnacle, while we exchanged these sentences.
'There is refreshment in the cabin,' said she, after a pause of a moment
or two. 'You need support. This has been a severe night of work for you,
sir, from the hour of your putting off to us in the lifeboat.'
I found myself smiling at the motherly tenderness conveyed in the tone
of her voice. I longed to have a clear view of her, for it was still
like talking in a pitch-dark room; the binnacle-lamp needed trimming,
its light was feeble, and the sky lay horribly black over the ocean,
that was raging, ghastly with pallid glances of sheets of foam under it.
'Let us first sound the well, if possible,' said I, 'for our lives' sake
we ought to find out what is happening below!'
By this time we had watched and waited long enough to satisfy ourselves
that the barque would do as well as we dared hope with her helm lashed;
and it also happened, very fortunately, that her yards were in the right
trim for the posture in which she lay, having been pointed to the
wind--the fore-yards on one tack, the main-yards on the other--when the
gale came on to blow in the bay, and the braces had not since been
touched. I walked with the girl to the entrance of the deck-house, the
door of which faced forwards. She entered the structure and, while I
waited outside, lighted a bull's-eye lamp, with which she rejoined me,
and together we went forward to another house built abaft of the galley.
This had been the place in which the crew slept. The carpenter's chest
was here, and also the sounding-rod. We then went to the pumps, and
while I held the lamp she dropped the rod down the sounding-pipe, drew
it up and brought it to the light and examined it, and named the depth
of water there was in the hold. I do not recollect the figure, but I
remember that, though it was significant, there was nothing greatly to
alarm us in it, seeing how heavily and how frequently the barque had
been flooded with the seas, and how much of the water might have made
its way from above.
I recount this little passage in a few lines, yet it forms one of the
most sharp-cut of the memories of my adventure. The picture is before me
as I write. I see the pair of us as we come to a dead stand, grasping
each other for support, while the vessel rolls madly over on the slope
of some huge hurtling sea. I see the bright glare from the bull's-eye
lamp in the girl's hand, dancing like a will-o'-the-wisp upon the black
flood betwixt the rails washing with the slant of the decks to our
knees; I see her dropping the rod down the tube, coolly examining it,
declaring its indication, while, to the flash of the lamplight, I catch
an instant's glimpse of her face, shining out white--large-eyed, as it
seemed to me--upon the blackness rushing in thunder athwart the deck.
She led the way into the deck-house. There was a small lantern wildly
swinging at a central beam--my companion had lighted it when she
procured the bull's-eye lamp--it diffused a good lustre, and I could see
very plainly. It was just a plain, ordinary, shipboard interior, with
three little windows of a side, a short table, lockers on either hand,
and a sleeping-berth, or cabin, designed for the captain's use, aft; the
companion-hatch, which led to the deck below, was betwixt the after-end
of the cabin and the bulkhead of the berth, but the rapid glance I threw
around speedily settled, as you may suppose, into a look--a long
look--full of curiosity, surprise, and admiration, at the girl.
She stood before me dressed as a sailor lad, in a suit of pilot cloth
and a red silk handkerchief round her throat; but her first act on
entering was to remove her cloth cap, that was streaming wet, and throw
it down upon the table; and thus she stood with her eyes fixed on me, as
mine were on her, each of us surveying the other. Her hair was cut
short, and was rough and plentiful, without remains of any sort of
fashion in the wearing of it--nay, indeed, it was unparted. It was very
fair hair, and as pale as amber in the lamplight. Her eyebrows were of a
darker colour, and very perfectly arched, as though pencilled. It was
impossible to guess the hue of her eyes by that light: they seemed of a
very dark blue, such as might prove violet in the sunshine, soft and
liquid, and of an expression, even in that hour of peril, of the horror
of tempest, of the prospect of death, indeed, that might make one
readily suppose her of a nature both sweet and merry. There was no sign
of exposure to the weather upon her face; she was white with the
paleness of fatigue and emotion. Her cheeks were plump, her mouth small,
the under-lip a little pouted, and her teeth pearl-like and very
regular. Even by the light in which I now surveyed her, I never for a
moment could have mistaken her for a lad. There was nothing in her garb
to neutralize for an instant the suggestions of her sex.
'I will take you to my father,' said she; 'but you must first eat and
drink.'
I could not have told how exhausted I was until I sank down upon a
locker and rested my arms upon the table. I was too wearied to ask the
questions that I should have put to her at another time, and could do no
more than watch her, with a sort of dull wonder at her nimbleness, and
the spirit and resolution of her movements as she lifted the lid of the
locker and produced a case-bottle of Hollands, some cold meat, and a tin
of white biscuits.
'We have no bread,' said she, smiling; 'we obtained some loaves off the
Isle of Wight, but the last was eaten yesterday.'
She took a tumbler from a rack and mixed a draught of the Hollands with
some water which she got from a filter fixed to a stanchion, and
extended the glass.
'Pray let me follow you!' said I. She shook her head. 'Yes!' I cried;
'God knows you should need some such tonic more than I!'
I induced her to drink, and then took the glass and emptied it. A second
dram warmed and heartened me. I was without appetite, but was willing to
eat for the sake of such strength as might come from a meal. The girl
made herself a sandwich of biscuit and meat, and we fell to. And so we
sat facing each other, eating, staring at each other; the pair of us all
the while hearkening with all our ears to the roaring noises outside, to
the straining sounds within the ship, and feeling--I speak of
myself--with every nerve tense as a fiddlestring, the desperate slants
and falls and uprisals of the deck or platform upon which our feet
rested.