I don’t know what it is about travelling that palls on one so much if
one is travelling alone, maybe it’s the fact that the perfectly
friendly people one meets are dead strangers to one, for all their
conversation and close propinquity; a sea and land journey round the
world is, in this respect, nothing more than a magnified bus ride,
passengers getting in and out, talking together and so forth, but dead
to one another once the destination is reached.
It was at Rangoon that this great fact hit me, and incidentally laid
the keel of the yarn I promised to tell you. I was suddenly fed up
with boats, trains, hotels and strangers, homesick down to the heels
of my boots, and wanting some place of my own to hide in; anything,
even a shack in the jungle. It was the queerest feeling, and one day
when it was gripping me hard, I fell in talk in the hotel bar with an
old saltwater chap by name of Boston, who owned boats on the Irawadi
and a couple of deep-sea schooners. I told him what was in my mind and
he understood. He took me by the arm and led me off down to the river,
and pointing out a schooner tied up to the wharf:
“There you are,” said he, “that’s what you want; she’s in ballast and
ready for sea. She’s mine. Buy her, or rent her. She’s a hundred and
ten tons and nothing can break her, best sea boat in these waters;
she’ll take you to Europe safer than the mails, and I’ll get you a
skipper and crew inside the week.”
An hour after I had closed, and the _Itang_—that was her name—was
mine. I’d found a home. A week later I was off, slipping down the
Irawadi with the land breeze into the Gulf of Martaban, bound for
Europe?—oh Lord, no! I was homesick no longer; Europe might have gone
off the map as far as I was concerned, for the Pacific was calling me.
We sailed south down by the Andamans and through the Straits of
Malacca, past Java and Flores, into the Banda Sea, tinkered about
amongst the islands and then came through Torres Straits; it was May
and the south-east monsoon was blowing—you can’t get through that
place when the north-west is on, because of the fogs—then steering
north by the Louisiades, we passed the Solomons, touched at several of
the Carolines and pushed on till we were about half-way between the
Ladrones and Wake Island just under 20° North.
That’s where the happening took place.
One blazing hot morning just as I was turning out of my bunk
Mallinson, the skipper, came down to report a boat sighted drifting
and derelict away ahead on the port bow.
I came up in my pyjamas, and there she was, sure enough, a ship’s
boat, with no sign of life and evidently no dead bodies in her, for
she was riding high and dancing to the sea like a walnut-shell, but
stuck up in the bow of her there was something like a bit of white
board fixed to a spar of some sort.
Through the glass Mallinson made out something on the board that he
said was writing. I couldn’t; it looked like black lines to me, but he
was right.
We closed up with her, dropped a boat, and I put off with Hogg the
mate, the _Itang_ keeping to windward on the off-chance of infection.
Mallinson had it in his head that the notice on the board might be a
warning of smallpox or plague, or something like that, and he’d once
been had badly by picking up a plague boat off the Maldives. But it
wasn’t.
The notice had nothing to do with disease or infection, and I’ll give
you a hundred guesses as to what some old ship master, maybe dying and
half crazy with the loss of his ship, and a secret on his conscience
had written up for some passing ship to read.
This was it:
“The heir of William Abbott will be found
at 11 Churles Street, Shanghai.”
I don’t mind saying that no sailor man has ever struck anything at
sea stranger than that. You must remember where we were: a thousand
miles of blue ocean all around and that piece of writing staring us in
the face; the affairs of William Abbott and his heir, whoever they
might be, contrasted with God’s immensities—an advertisement, almost,
you might say, written on that desolation.
It struck me clean between the eyes, it was like meeting a man in a
top hat in the middle of the Sahara desert. We closed up with the
boat; she was clean swept of everything down to the bailer, no ship’s
name on her, and worth maybe a hundred dollars; so we towed her to the
_Itang_ and got her on board, notice and all.
It was lashed to a boat-hook, which was lashed to the forward thwart,
and we cut it loose and brought it down to the cabin, where we hung it
up as a trophy.
After the word “Shanghai” there was the indication of a letter that
looked like “L,” faint as if the paint had run out or the fellow who
was writing had given up the job, dying maybe, before he could finish
it; the board itself was an old piece of white enamelled stuff, torn
evidently from some part of a ship’s make-up, the whole thing was
roughly done, but the chap, whoever he was, had some education, for
there was a punctuation mark after the word “Street.”
We stuck it up on the after bulkhead, and there it hung, giving us
food for talk every meal time, and on and off for days. Mallinson said
it was the work of some chap who had died and left no will, he was a
bit of a sea lawyer and he held that if William Abbott was a sailor
and it could be proved he was lost at sea and if some relation of his
was to be found at 11 Churles Street, Shanghai, the Law, under the
circumstance, would regard the thing as a will.
This seemed to me rubbish, but it gave us something to argue about,
and so it went on till the thing dropped from our talk as we raised
our latitude, looking in at Los Jardines and then steering for
Formosa.
I’d determined to have a look at Japan, so we left Formosa, steering
north, and then one day, it was off the Riu Kiu islands, the helm went
over and we steered for Shanghai.
The fact of the matter was that beastly board had obsessed me. Though
we had ceased talking of it, I hadn’t ceased thinking of it. You know
the way a problem gets hold of me. Lying in my bunk at night, I worked
that riddle backwards and forwards, and up and down. If William Abbott
had written it, what had become of him? Why wasn’t his corpse in the
boat? What was the use of writing it? As a legal document, it was
useless. The whole thing was a tangle, but one fact stood out, it was
a message. Well, to whom? Not to the seagulls or the world at large,
but to the first person who should pick it up, and the message was:
“The heir of William Abbott lives at such and such an address.” That
was quite plain. Also it was evident that the writer meant that the
finder of the message should make use of it by bringing it to or
sending it to 11 Churles Street.
Whether some man at the address given could benefit by the message or
not was another matter—evidently it was in the mind of the writer
that he could.
You see how reasoning had brought me to a point where conscience was
awakened. I began to say to myself: “It’s your duty to take that
message; here you are a well-to-do idler bound for no port in
particular, but just following your own pleasure, you are going to
Japan for no earthly reason, just for a whim, Shanghai lies almost on
your way and your duty is to stop there,” but I didn’t want to go to
Shanghai, I had nothing against the place or the Chinese—I just
didn’t want to go; however, that didn’t matter, conscience had taken
the wheel and I went.