BUNKERED
It seems it must have been somewhere about the year 4000 B. C. that we
lost sight of the tall peaks of the architectural topography of
Manhattan Island, and yet the log of the _Black Prince_ makes it no
more than twenty days. Not that our day-to-day time has been dragging,
for it has done nothing of the sort.
All my life long I have dreamed of indulging in the joy of a really
long voyage, and now at last I've got it. New York to Cape Town, South
Africa, 6,900 miles, thirty days' straight-away run, and thence another
twenty-four days' sail to Mombasa, on a 7,000-ton cargo boat,
deliberate and stately rather than fast of pace, but otherwise as trim,
well groomed, and well found as a liner, with an official mess that
numbers as fine a set of fellows as ever trod a bridge. The Captain,
when not busy hunting up a stray planet to check his latitude, puts in
his spare time hunting kindly things to do for his two passengers--for
there are only two of us, the Doctor and myself. The Doctor signed on
the ship's articles as surgeon, I as purser.
Fancy it! Thirty days' clear respite from the daily papers, the
telephone, the subway crowds, and the constant wear and tear on one's
muscular system reaching for change, large and small! Thirty days free
of the daily struggle either for place on the ladder of ambition or for
the privilege to stay on earth and stand about and watch the others
mount, that saps metropolitan nerves and squeezes the humanities out of
metropolitan life until its hearts are arid and barren and cruel as
those of the cavemen! Thirty days' repose, practically alone amid one
of nature's greatest solitudes, awed by her silences, uplifted by the
majesty of her mighty forces, with naught to do but humble oneself
before the consciousness of his own littleness and unfitness, and study
how to right the wrongs he has done.
Indeed a voyage like this makes it certain one will come actually to
know one's own self so intimately that, unless well convinced that he
will esteem and enjoy the acquaintance, he had best stay at home. Of
my personal experience in this particular I beg to be excused from
writing.
Lonesome out here? Far from it. Behind, to be sure, are those so near
and dear, one would gladly give all the remaining years allotted him
for one blessed half-hour with them. Otherwise, time literally flies
aboard the _Black Prince_; the days slip by at puzzling speed. Roughly
speaking, I should say the meals consume about half one's waking hours,
for we are fed five times a day, and fed so well one cannot get his own
consent to dodge any of them.
Indeed I've only one complaint to make of this ship; she is a
"water-wagon" in a double sense, which makes it awkward for a man who
never could drink comfortably alone. With every man of the mess a
teetotaler, one is now and then possessed with a consuming desire for
communion with some dear soul of thirsty memory who can be trusted to
take his "straight." Of course I don't mean to imply that this mess
cannot be trusted, for you can rely on it implicitly every time--to
take tea; you can trust it with any mortal or material thing, except
your pet brew of tea, if you have one, which, luckily, I haven't.
Indeed, for the thirsty man Nature herself in these latitudes is
discouraging, for the Big Dipper stays persistently upside down,
dry!--perhaps out of sympathy with the teetotal principles of this
ship. And most of the way down here there has been such a high sea
running that the only dry places I have noticed have been the upper
bridge and my throat. The fact is, about everything aboard this ship
is distressingly suggestive to a faithful knight of the tankard: he is
surrounded with "ports" that won't flow and giant "funnels" that might
easily carry spirits enough to wet the whistles of an army division
(but don't), until he is tempted in sheer desperation to take a pull at
the "main brace."
All of which, assisted by the advent of a covey of flying fishes and a
(Sunday) "school" of porpoises, is responsible for the following, which
is adventured with profuse apologies to Mr. Kipling:
ON THE ROAD TO MOMBASA
Take me north of the Equator
Where'er gleams the polar star,
Where "The Dipper" ne'er is empty
And Orion is not far,
Where the eagle at them gazes
And up toward them thrusts the pine--
_Anywhere_ strong men drink spirits
On the right side of "the line."
On the road to Mombas-a,
Drawing nearer toward Cathay,
Where the north star now is under,
'Neath the Southern Cross's ray.
Take me off this water wagon
Where the Captain's ribbon's blue,
Where the Doctor, yclept Barthwaite,
And each man-jack of the crew
Never get a drop of poteen,
Never know the cheer of beer--
_Anywhere_ a thirsty man may
Wet his whistle without fear.
On the road to Mombas-a,
With the _Black Prince_, day by day
Rolling her tall taffrail under,
'Neath a sky o'ercast and gray.
Take me back to good old Proctor's
Where a man may quench his thirst,
Where a purser with a shilling
Needn't feel he is accursed
By an ironclad owners' ship rule
That her officers shouldn't drink--
_Anywhere_ the ringing glasses
Merrily clink! clink!
On the road to Mombas-a,
Where the only drink is "tay,"
Where a thirst that is a wonder
Burns the throat from day to day.
Take me somewhere close to Rector's
Where a man can get a crab,
Where the blondined waves are tossing
And every eye-glance is a stab,
Where there's _froufrou_ of the _jupon_
And there's popping of the cork
_Anywhere_ the men and women
Snap their fingers at the stork.
On the road to Mombas-a,
Where e'en mermaids never play,
Where to come would be a blunder
Hunting hot birds and Roger.
But lonesome out here? Never--with the sympathetic North Atlantic
winds ever ready to roar you a grim dirge in your moments of melancholy
contemplation of the inverted Dipper, with the gentle tropical breezes
softly singing through the rigging notes of soothing cadence, with the
lethal ocean billows ever leaping up the sides of the ship, foaming
with the joy of what they would do to you if they once got you in their
embrace!
Lonesome? With the coming and the going of each day's sun gilding
cloud-crests, silvering waves, setting you matchless scenes in color
effect, some ravishing in their gorgeous splendor, some soft and tender
of tone as the light in the eyes of the woman you worship, scenes
beside which the most brilliant stage settings which metropolitans
flock like sheep to see are pathetically paltry counterfeits.
Lonesome? With a mighty, joyously bounding charger like the _Black
Prince_ beneath your feet if not between your knees, gayly taking the
tallest billows in his stride, whose ever steady pulse-beat bespeaks a
soundness of wind and limb you can trust to land you well at the finish!
Lonesome? Where privileged to descend into the very vitals of your
charger and sit throughout the midnight watch, an awed listener to the
throbs of the mighty heart that vitalizes his every function, while
each vigorously thrusting piston, each smug, palm-rubbing eccentric,
each somnolently nodding lever, drives deeper into your lay brain an
overwhelming sense of pride in such of your kind as have had the genius
to conceive, and such others as have had the skill and patience to
perfect, the conversion of inert masses of crude metal into the
magnificently powerful and obviously sentient entity that is bearing
you!
Lonesome? Skirting the coastline of Africa, a country whose
potentates, from the Ptolemies to Tom Ryan, have never failed to make
world history worth thinking about!
Lonesome? Bearing up toward that sea-made manacle of fallen majesty,
St. Helena, absorbed in memories of Bonaparte's magnificent dreams of
world-wide dominion, and of his pathetic end on one of its smallest and
most isolated patches!
Lonesome? With a chum at your elbow so close a student of the manly
game of war that he can glibly reel off for you every important
manoeuvre of all the great battles of history, from those of Alexander
the Great down to Tommy Burns's latest!
And now and then the elements themselves sit in and take a hand in our
game, sometimes a hand we could very well do without--as twice lately.
The first instance happened early last week. Tuesday tropical weather
hit us and drove us into pajamas--a cloudless sky, blazing sun, high
humidity, while we ploughed our way across long, slow-rolling,
unrippled swells that looked so much like a vast, gently heaving sea of
petroleum that, had John D. Standardoil been with us he would have
suffered a probably fatal attack of heart disease if prevented from
stopping right there and planning a pipe line.
Throughout the day close about the ship clouds of flying fish skimmed
the sea, and great schools of porpoises leaped from it and raced us, as
if, even to them, their native element had become hateful, or as if
they sensed something ominous and fearsome abroad from which they
sought shelter in our company. One slender little opal-hued
diaphanous-winged bird-fish came aboard, and before he was picked up
had the happy life grilled out of him on our scorching iron deck, hot
almost as boiler plates. Poor little chap! he found with us anything
but sanctuary; but perhaps he lived long enough to signal the fact to
his mates, for no others boarded us. And yet for one other opal-hued
winged wanderer we have been sanctuary; for when we were about one
hundred and fifty miles out of New York a highly bred carrier pigeon,
bearing on his leg a metal tag marked "32," hovered about us for a
time, finally alighted on our rail, and then fluttered to the deck when
offered a pan of water--and drank and drank until it seemed best to
stop him. By kindness and ingenuity of Chief Engineer Tucker he now
occupies a tin house with a wonderful mansard roof, from which he
issues every afternoon for an aerial constitutional, giving us a fright
occasionally with a flight over far a-sea, but always returning safely
enough to his new diggings.
That Tuesday morning the sun rose fiery red out of the steaming Guinea
jungles to the east of us, across its lower half two narrow black bars
sinister. It looked as if it had blood in its eye, while the still,
heavy, brooding air felt to be ominous of evil, harboring devilment of
some sort. All the mess were cross-grained, silent, or irritable,
raw-edged for the first time, for a better lot of fellows one could not
ask to ship with. Nor throughout the day did weather conditions or
tempers improve. All day long the sky was heavily overcast with dense,
low-hanging, dark gray clouds, which, while wholly obscuring the sun,
seemed to focus its rays upon us like a vast burning-glass; wherefore
it was expedient for the two pajama-clad passengers to keep well within
the shelter of the bridge-deck awning. Toward sunset, a dense black
wall of cloud settled upon the western horizon, aft of us. But
suddenly, just at the moment the sun must have been descending below
the horizon to the south of it, the black wall of cloud slowly parted,
and the opening so made widened until it became an enormous oval,
reaching from horizon half-way to zenith, framing a scene of astounding
beauty and grandeur. Range after range of cloud crests that looked
like mountain folds rose one above another, with the appearance of vast
intervening space between, some of the ranges a most delicate blue or
pink, some opalescent, some gloriously gilded, while behind the
farthest and tallest range, at what seemed an inconceivably remote
distance, but in a perspective entirely harmonious with the foreground,
appeared the sky itself, a soft luminous straw-yellow in color, flecked
thickly over with tiny snow-white cloudlets. It was like a glimpse
into another and more beautiful world than ours--the actual celestial
world.
But, whether or not ominous of our future, we were permitted no more
than a brief glimpse of it, for presently the pall of black cloud fell
like a vast drop curtain and shut it from our sight. Then night came
down upon us, black, starless, forbidding, although in the absence of
any fall of the barometer nothing more than a downpour of rain was
expected.
But shortly after I had gone to sleep, at two o'clock suddenly
something in the nature of a tropical tornado flew up and struck us
hard. I was awakened by a tremendous crash on the bridge-deck above my
cabin, a heeling over of the ship that nearly dumped me out of my
berth, and what seemed like a solid spout of water pouring in through
my open weather porthole, with the wind howling a devil's death-song
through the rigging and an uninterrupted smash--bang! above my head.
Throwing on a rain coat over my pajamas, I went outside and up the
ladder leading to the bridge-deck; and as head and shoulders rose above
the deck level, a wall of hot, wind-borne rain struck me--rain so hot
it felt almost scalding--that almost swept me off the ladder. If it
had I should probably have become food for the fishes. I got to the
upper deck just in time to see Captain Thomas get a crack on the head
from a fragment of flying spar of the wreckage from the upper
bridge--luckily a glancing blow that did no more damage than leave him
groggy for a moment.
For the next fifteen minutes I was busy hugging a bridge stanchion,
dodging flying wreckage and trying to breathe; for, driven by the
violence of the wind, the rain came horizontally in such suffocatingly
hot dense masses as nearly to stifle one.
It was the watch of Second Mate Isitt. Afterwards he told me that a
few minutes before the storm broke he saw a particularly dense black
cloud coming up upon us out of the southeast, where it had apparently
been lying in ambush for us behind the northernmost headland of the
Gulf of Guinea, an ambush so successful that even the barometer failed
to detect it, for when Mate Isitt ran to the chart-room he found that
the instrument showed no fall. But scarcely was he back on the bridge
before the approaching cloud flashed into a solid mass of sheet
lightning that covered the ship like a fiery canopy; and instantly
thereafter, a wall of wind and rain hit the ship, heeled her over to
the rail, swung her head at right angles to her course, ripped the
heavy canvas awning of the upper bridge to tatters, bent and tore loose
from their sockets the thick iron stanchions supporting it, made
kindling wood of its heavy spars, and strewed the bridge and forward
deck with a pounding tangle of wreckage. How the mate and helmsman,
who were directly beneath it, escaped injury, is a mystery. In twenty
minutes the riot of wind and water had swept past us out to sea in
search of easier game, leaving behind it a dead calm above but
mountainous seas beneath, that played ball with us the rest of the
night. Heaven help any wind-jammer it may have struck, for if caught
as completely unwarned as were we, with all sails set, she and all her
crew are likely to be still slowly settling through the dense darksome
depths of the twenty-five hundred fathoms the chart showed thereabouts,
and weeping wives and anxious underwriters will long be scanning the
news columns that report all sea goings and comings--except arrivals in
the port of sunken ships.
The second fall the elements have essayed to take out of us remains yet
undecided. The fact is, I am now writing over a young volcano we are
all hoping will not grow much older.
Two nights ago I was awakened half suffocated, to find my cabin full of
strong sulphurous fumes; but fancying them brought in through my open
portholes from the smoke-stack by a shift aft of the wind, I paid no
further attention to them. But when the next morning I as usual turned
out on deck to see the sun rise, a commotion aft of me attracted my
attention, Looking, I saw the first mate, chief engineer, and a party
of sailors, all so begrimed with sweat and coal dust one could scarcely
pick officers from seamen, rapidly ripping off the cover of one of the
midship hatches, while others were flying about connecting up the deck
fire hose. This didn't look a bit good to me, and when, an instant
later, off came the hatch and out poured thick volumes of smoke, I
failed to observe that it looked any better.
When the hatch was removed, the men thrust the hose through it, and
began deluging the burning bunker with water; for, luckily, it is only
a bunker fire,--in a lower and comparatively small bunker.
The fire had been discovered early the day previous, and for nearly
twenty-four hours officers and seamen had been fighting it from below,
without any mention to their two passengers of its existence, fighting
by tireless shovelling to reach his seat. And now they were on deck,
attacking it from above, only because the heat and fumes below had
become so overpowering they could no longer work there. But after an
hour's ventilation through the hatch and a continuous downpour of
water, the first mate again led his men below.
And so, the usual watches being divided into two-hour relays, the fight
has gone on wearily but persistently, until now, the evening of the
fourth day, the men are wan and haggard from the killing heat and foul
air. In the engine-room in these latitudes the thermometer ranges from
rarely under 108 degrees up to 130, and one has to stay down there only
an hour, as I often have, until he is streaming with sweat as if he
were in the unholiest heat of a Turkish bath. And as the burning
bunker immediately adjoins the other end of the boiler room, to the
heat of its own smouldering mass is added that of the fire boxes, until
the temperature is probably close to 140 degrees.
While the fire is confined to the bunker where it started, we are in no
particular danger; but if it reaches the bunker immediately above, it
will have a free run to the after hold, where several thousand packages
of case oil are stored. In the open waist above the oil are a score or
more big tanks of gasoline, and, on the poop immediately aft of that, a
quantity of dynamite and several thousand detonating caps. Thus if the
fire ever gets aft, things are apt to happen a trifle quicker than they
can be dodged.
To denizens of _terra firma_, the mere thought of being aboard a ship
on fire in mid-sea--we are now five hundred miles from the little
British island of Ascension and one thousand and eighty off the Congo
(mainland) Coast--is nothing short of appalling. But here with us, in
actual experience, it is taken by the officers of the ship as such a
simple matter of course, in so far as they show or will admit, that we
are even denied the privilege of a mild thrill of excitement.
In the meantime there is nothing for the Doctor and myself to do but
sit about and guess whether it is to be a boost from the explosives, a
simple grill, a descent to Davy Jones, an adventure while athirst and
hungering in an open boat on the tossing South Atlantic, a successful
run of the ship to the nearest land--or victory over the fire. I
wonder which it will be!
If the worst comes to the worst, I intend to do for these pages what no
one these last three weeks has done for me--commit them to a bottle, if
I can find one aboard this ship, which is by no means certain. Indeed
it is so uncertain I think I had best start hunting one right now.
After nearly a twenty-four hours' search I've got it--a craft to bear
these sheets, wide of hatch, generously broad and deep of hull, but
destitute of aught of the stimulating aroma I had hoped might cheer
them on their voyage--more than I have been cheered on mine. For the
best I am able to procure for them is--a jam bottle!
While the Doctor and I are not novices at golf, this is one "bunker" we
are making so little headway getting out of, that both now seem likely
to quit "down" to it.
I wonder when the little derelict, tiny and inconspicuous as a
Portuguese man-of-war, may be picked up; I wonder when the sheets it
bears may reach my publisher to whom it is consigned. Perhaps not for
years--a score, two score; perhaps not until he himself, whom a few
weeks ago I left in the lusty vigor of early manhood, is gathered to
his fathers; perhaps not, therefore, until the writer has no publisher
left and is himself no longer remembered.
The burning bunker is now a glowing furnace, the men worked down to
mere shadows. Plainly the fire is getting the best of them and, what
is even more discouraging, there is little more fight left in them.
First Mate Watson, who, almost without rest, has led the fight below
since it started, says that another half-hour will--