MY SHIPMATE LOUISE
VOL. I.
NEW NOVELS AT ALL LIBRARIES.
A FELLOW OF TRINITY. By ALAN ST. AUBYN and WALT WHEELER. 3 vols.
THE WORD AND THE WILL. By JAMES PAYN. 3 vols.
AUNT ABIGAIL DYKES. By GEORGE RANDOLPH. 1 vol.
A WARD OF THE GOLDEN GATE. By BRET HARTE. 1 vol.
RUFFINO. By OUIDA. 1 vol.
London: CHATTO & WINDUS, Piccadilly, W.
MY SHIPMATE LOUISE
The Romance of a Wreck
BY
W. CLARK RUSSELL
[Illustration]
IN THREE VOLUMES
VOL. I.
London
CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY
1890
PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
LONDON
TO
LEOPOLD HUDSON, ESQ.
_Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England
Warden of Middlesex Hospital College_
IN GRATITUDE
CONTENTS
OF
THE FIRST VOLUME
CHAPTER PAGE
I. DOWN CHANNEL 1
II. THE FRENCH LUGGER 20
III. MY FELLOW PASSENGERS 43
IV. LOUISE TEMPLE 60
V. A MYSTERIOUS VOICE 84
VI. WE LOSE A MAN 108
VII. A SEA FUNERAL 130
VIII. A STRANGE CARGO 161
IX. A SECRET BLOW 182
X. THE HUMOURS OF AN INDIAMAN 203
XI. A STRANGE SAIL 223
XII. A STORM OF WIND 246
XIII. FIRE! 270
XIV. CRABB 292
MY SHIPMATE LOUISE
CHAPTER I
DOWN CHANNEL
We had left Gravesend at four o’clock in the morning, and now, at
half-past eight o’clock in the evening, we were off the South Foreland,
the ship on a taut bowline heading on a due down Channel course.
It was a September night, with an edge of winter in the gusts and
blasts which swept squall-like into the airy darkling hollows of the
canvas. There was a full moon, small as a silver cannon-ball, with
a tropical greenish tinge in its icy sparkling, and the scud came
sweeping up over it in shreds and curls and feathers of vapour, sailing
up dark from where the land of France was, and whitening out into
a gossamer delicacy of tint as it soared into and fled through the
central silver splendour. The weight of the whole range of Channel was
in the run of the surge that flashed into masses of white water from
the ponderous bow of the Indiaman as she stormed and crushed her way
along, the tacks of her courses groaning to every windward roll, as
though the clew of each sail were the hand of a giant seeking to uproot
the massive iron bolt that confined the corner of the groaning cloths
to the deck.
The towering foreland showed in a pale and windy heap on the starboard
quarter. The land ran in a sort of elusive faintness along our beam,
with the Dover lights hanging in the pallid shadow like a galaxy of
fireflies: beyond them a sort of trembling nebulous sheen, marking
Folkestone; and on high in the clear dusk over the quarter you saw the
Foreland light like some wild and yellow star staring down upon the sea
clear of the flight of the wing-like scud.
The ship was the _Countess Ida_, a well-known Indiaman of her day--now
so long ago that it makes me feel as though I were two centuries old
to be able to relate that I was a hearty young fellow in those times.
She was bound to Bombay. Most of the passengers had come aboard at
Gravesend, I amongst them; and here we were now thrashing our way into
the widening waters of the Channel, mighty thankful--those of us who
were not sea-sick, I mean--that there had come a shift of wind when the
southern limb of the Goodwin Sands was still abreast, to enable us to
keep our anchors at the cathead and save us a heart-wearying spell of
detention in the Downs.
The vessel looked noble by moonlight; she was showing a maintopgallant
sail to the freshening wind, and the canvas soared to high aloft
in shadowy spaces, which came and went in a kind of winking as the
luminary leapt from the edge of the hurrying clouds into some little
lagoon of soft indigo, flashing down a very rain of silver fires,
till the long sparkling beam travelling over the foaming heads of the
seas, like a spoke of a revolving wheel, was extinguished in a breath
by the sweep of a body of vapour over the lovely planet. I stood at
the rail that ran athwart the break of the poop, surveying this grand
night-picture of the outward-bound Indiaman. From time to time there
would be a roaring of water off her weather-bow, that glanced in the
moonshine in a huge fountain of prismatic crystals. The figures of a
couple of seamen keeping a look-out trudged the weather-side of the
forecastle, their shadows at their feet starting out upon the white
plank to some quick and brilliant hurl of moonlight, clear as a sketch
in ink, upon white paper. Amidships, forward, loomed up the big galley,
with a huge long-boat stowed before it roofed with spare booms; on
either hand rose the high bulwarks with three carronades of a side
stealing out of the dusk between the tall defences of the ship like
the shapes of beasts crouching to obtain a view of the sea through the
port-holes. A red ray of light came aslant from the galley and touched
with its rusty radiance a few links of the huge chain cable that was
ranged along the decks, a coil of rope hanging upon a belaying pin,
and a fragment of bulwarks stanchion. Now and again a seaman would
pass through this light, the figure of him coming out red against the
greenish silver in the atmosphere. A knot of passengers hung together
close under the weather poop ladder, with a broad white space of the
quarter-deck sloping from their feet to the lee waterways, whence at
intervals there would come a sound of choking and gasping as the heave
of the ship brought the dark Channel surge brimming to the scupper
holes. The growling hum of the voices of the men blended in a strange
effect upon the ear with the shrill singing of the wind in the rigging
and the ceaseless washing noises over the side and the long-drawn
creaking sounds which arise from all parts of a ship struggling against
a head sea under a press of canvas.
Aft on the poop where I was standing the vessel had something of a
deserted look. The pilot had been dropped off Deal; the officer of the
watch (the chief mate) was stumping the weather-side of the deck from
the ladder to abreast of the foremost skylight; the dark figure of the
captain swung in a sort of pendulum-tramping from the mizzen rigging to
the grating abaft the wheel. Dim as a distant firebrand over the port
quarter, windily flickering upon the stretch of throbbing waters, shone
the lantern of the lightship off the South Sand Head; and it was odd to
mark how it rose and fell upon the speeding night sky to the swift yet
stately pitching of our ship, with the figure of the man at the helm
somehow showing the vaguer for it, spite of the shining of the binnacle
lamp flinging a little golden haze round about the compass stand, abaft
which the shape of the fellow showed vague as the outline of a ghost.
Ha! thought I, _this_ is being at sea now indeed! Why, though we were
in narrow waters yet, there was such a note of ocean yearning in
the thunderous wash of the weather billows sweeping along the bends
that, but for the pale glimmer of the line of land trending away to
starboard, I might easily have imagined the whole waters of the great
Atlantic to be under our bow.
It was a bit chilly, and I caught myself hugging my peacoat to me with
a half-formed resolution to make for my cabin, where there were yet
some traps of mine remaining to be stowed away. But I lingered--lover
of all sea-effects, as I then was and still am--to watch a fine brig
blowing past us along to the Downs, the strong wind gushing fair over
her quarter, and her canvas rising in marble-like curves to the tiny
royals; every cloth glancing in pearl to the dance of the moon amongst
the clouds, every rope upon her glistening out into silver wire, with
the foam, white as sifted snow, lifting to her hawse-pipes to the
clipper shearing of her keen stem, and not a light aboard of her but
what was kindled by the luminary in the glass and brass about her decks
as she went rolling past us delicate as a vision, pale as steam, yet of
an exquisite grace as determinable as a piece of painting on ivory.
I walked aft to the companion hatch and entered the cuddy, or, as it is
now called, the saloon. The apartment was the width of the ship, and
was indeed a very splendid and spacious state-cabin, with a bulkhead
at the extremity under the wheel, where the captain’s bedroom was, and
a berth alongside of it, where the skipper worked out his navigation
along with the officers, and where the midshipmen went to school. There
were also two berths right forward close against the entrance to the
cuddy by way of the quarter-deck, occupied by the first and second
mates; otherwise, the interior was as clear as a ballroom, and it was
like entering a brilliantly illuminated pavilion ashore, to pass out
of the windy dusk of the night and the flying moonshine of it into the
soft brightness of oil-flames burning in handsome lamps of white and
gleaming metal, duplicated by mirrors, with hand-paintings between and
polished panels in which the radiance cloudily rippled. A long table
went down the centre of this cuddy, and over it were the domes of the
skylights, in which were many plants and flowers of beauty swinging
in pots, and globes of fish and silver swinging trays. Right through
the heart of the interior came the shaft of the mizzen mast, rich with
chiselled configurations, and of a delicate hue; a handsome piano
stood lashed to the deck abaft the trunk of giant spar. The planks
were finely carpeted, and sofas and arm-chairs ran the length of this
glittering saloon on either side of it.
There were a few people assembled at the fore-end of the table as I
made my way to the hatch whose wide steps led to the sleeping berths
below. It was not hard to perceive that one of them was an East Indian
military gentleman whose liver was on fire through years of curry. His
white whiskers of the wire-like inflexibility of a cat’s, stood out on
either side his lemon-coloured cheeks; his little blood-shot eyes of
indigo sparkled under overhanging brows where the hair lay thick like
rolls of cotton-wool. This gentleman I knew to be Colonel Bannister,
and as I cautiously made my way along--for the movements of the decks
were staggering enough to oblige me to tread warily--I gathered that
he was ridiculing the medical profession to Dr. Hemmeridge, the ship’s
surgeon, for its inability to prescribe for sea-sickness.
‘It iss der nerves,’ I heard a fat Dutch gentleman say--afterwards
known to me as Peter Hemskirk, manager of a firm in Bombay.
‘Nerves!’ sneered the colonel, with a glance at the Dutchman’s
waistcoat. ‘Don’t you know the difference between the nerves and the
stomach, sir?’
‘Same thing,’ exclaimed Dr. Hemmeridge soothingly; ‘sea-sickness means
the head, any way; and pray, colonel, what are the brains but’----
‘Ha! ha!’ roared the colonel, interrupting him; ‘_there_ I have you. If
it be the brains only which are affected, why, then, ha! ha! no wonder
Mynheer here doesn’t suffer, though it’s his first voyage, he says.’
But my descent of the steps carried me out of earshot of this
interesting talk. My cabin was well aft. There was a fairly wide
corridor, and the berths were ranged on either hand of it. From some of
them, as I made my way along, came in muffled sounds various notes of
lamentation and suffering. A black woman, with a ring through her nose
and her head draped in white, sat on the deck in front of the closed
door of a berth, moaning in a sea-sick way over a baby that she rocked
in her arms, and that was crying at the top of its pipes. The door of
a cabin immediately opposite opened, and a young fellow with a ghastly
face putting his head out exclaimed in accents strongly suggestive of
nausea: ‘I thay, confound it! thtop that noithe, will you? The rolling
ith bad enough without _that_ thindy. Thteward!’ The ship gave a lurch,
and he swung out, but instantly darted back again, being indeed but
half clothed: ‘I thay, are _you_ the thteward?’
‘No,’ said I. ‘Keep on singing out. Somebody’ll come to you.’
‘Won’t they thmother that woman?’ he shouted, and he would have said
more, but a sudden kickup of the ship slammed his cabin door for him,
and the next moment my ear caught a sound that indicated too surely
his rashness in leaving his bunk.
I entered my berth, and found the lamp alight in it, and the young
gentleman who was to share the cabin with me sitting in his bedstead,
that was above mine, dangling his legs over the edge of it, and gazing
with a disordered countenance upon the deck. I had chatted with him
during the afternoon and had learnt who he was. Indeed, his name was
in big letters upon his portmanteau--‘The Hon. Stephen Colledge;’ and
incidentally he had told me that he was a son of Lord Sandown, and
that he was bound to India on a shooting tour. He was a good-looking
young man, with fair whiskers, white teeth, a genial smile, yet with
something of affectation in his way of speaking.
‘It’s doocid rough, isn’t it, Mr. Dugdale?’ said he; ‘and isn’t it
raining?’
‘No,’ said I.
‘Oh, but look at the glass here,’ he exclaimed, indicating the scuttle
or porthole, the thick glass of which showed gleaming, but black as
coal against the night outside.
‘Why,’ said I, ‘the wet there is the sea; it is spray; nothing but
spray.’
‘Hang all waves!’ he said in a low voice. ‘Why the dickens can’t the
ocean always be calm? If I’d have known that this ship pitched so, I’d
have waited for a steadier vessel. Will you do me the kindness to lift
the lid of that portmanteau? You’ll find a flask of brandy in it. Hang
me if I like to move. Sorry now I didn’t bring a cot, though they’re
doocid awkward things to get in and out of.’
I found the flask, and gave it to him, and he took a pull at it. I
declined his offer of a dram, and went to work to stow away some odds
and ends which were in my trunk.
‘Don’t you feel ill?’ said he.
‘No,’ said I.
‘Oh, ah, I remember now!’ he exclaimed; ‘you were a sailor once,
weren’t you?’
‘Yes; I had a couple of years of it.’
‘Wish _I’d_ been a sailor, I know,’ said he. ‘I mean, after I’d given
it up. As to _being_ a sailor--merciful goodness! think of four,
perhaps five months of _this_.’
‘Oh, you’ll be as good a sailor as ever a seaman amongst us in a day or
two,’ said I encouragingly.
‘Don’t feel like it now, though,’ he exclaimed. ‘Let’s see: I think
you said you were going out to do some painting?--Oh no! I beg pardon:
it was a chap named Emmett who told me that. You--you----’ He looked
at me with a slightly inebriated cock of the head, from which I might
infer that the ‘pull’ he had taken at his flask was by no means his
first ‘drain’ within the hour.
‘No,’ said I, with a laugh; ‘I am going out to see an old relative up
country. And not more for that than for the fun of a voyage.’
‘The _fun_ of the voyage!’ he echoed with a stupid face; then with a
sudden brightening up of his manner, though his gloomy countenance
quickly returned to him, he exclaimed, ‘I say, Dugdale--beg pardon, you
know; no good in _mistering_ a chap that you’re going to sleep with for
four or five months--call me Colledge, old fellow--but I say, though,
seen anything more of that ripping girl since dinner? By George! what
eyes, eh?’
He drew his legs up, and with a slight groan composed himself in a
posture for sleep, manifestly heedless of any answer I might make to
his question.
I lingered awhile in the berth, and then, filling a pipe, mounted to
the saloon, and made my way to the quarter-deck to smoke in the shelter
of the recess in the cuddy front. Colonel Bannister lay sprawling upon
a sofa, holding a tumbler of brandy grog. There were other passengers
in the cuddy, scattered, and all of them grimly silent, staring hard
at the lamps, yet with something of vacancy in their regard, as though
their thoughts were elsewhere. As I stepped on to the quarter-deck,
the cries and chorusing of men aloft, came sounding through the strong
and hissing pouring of the wind between the masts and through the
harsh seething of the seas, which the bows of the ship were smiting
into snowstorms as she went sullenly ploughing through the water with
the weather-leech of the maintopgallant-sail trembling in the green
glancings of the moonlight like the fly of a flag in a breeze of wind.
They were taking a reef in the fore and mizzen topsails. The chief
mate, Mr. Prance, from time to time, would sing out an order over my
head that was answered by a hoarse ‘Ay, ay, sir,’ echoing out of the
gloom in which the fore-part of the ship was plunged. I lighted my
pipe and sat myself down on the coamings of the booby hatch to enjoy
a smoke. I was alone, and this moon-touched flying Channel night-scene
carried my memory back to the times when I was a sailor, when I had
paced the deck of such another vessel as this, as a midshipman of her.
It seemed a long time ago, yet it was no more than six years either.
The old professional instinct was quickened in me by the voices of the
fellows aloft, till I felt as though it were my watch on deck, that I
was skulking under the break of the poop here, and that I ought to be
aloft jockeying a lee yard-arm or dangling to windward on the flemish
horse.
Presently all was quiet on high, and by the windy sheen in the
atmosphere, caused by the commingling of white waters and the frequent
glance of the moon through some rent in the ragged scud, I could make
out the figures of the fellows on the fore descending the shrouds. A
little while afterwards a deep sea voice broke out into a strange wild
song, that was caught up and re-echoed in a hurricane chorus by the
tail of men hauling upon the halliards to masthead the yard. It was
a proper sort of note to fit such a night as that. A minute after, a
chorus of a like gruffness but of a different melody resounded on the
poop, where they were mastheading the topsail yard after reefing it.
The combined notes flung a true oceanic character into the picture of
the darkling Indiaman swelling and rolling and pitching in floating
launches through it, with her wide pinions rising in spaces of
faintness to the scud, and the black lines of her royal yards sheering
to and fro against the moon that, when she showed, seemed to reel
amidst the rushing wings of vapour to the wild dance of our mastheads.
The songs of the sailors, the clear shrill whistling of a boatswain’s
mate forward, the orders uttered quickly by the chief officer, the
washing noises of the creaming surges, the sullen shouting of the wind
in the rigging resembling the sulky breaker-like roar of a wood of tall
trees swept by a gale--all this made one feel that one was at sea in
earnest.
I knocked the ashes out of my pipe and went on to the poop. The land
still showed very dimly to starboard, with here and there little
oozings of dim radiance that might mark a village or a town. You could
see to the horizon, where the water showed in a sort of greenish
blackness with some speck of flame of a French lighthouse over the
port quarter, and the September clouds soaring up off the edge of the
sea like puffs and coils of smoke from a thousand factory chimneys down
there, and now and again a bright star glancing out from amongst them
as they came swiftly floating up to the moon, turning of a silvery
white as they neared the glorious planet.
There were windows in the cuddy front, and as I glanced through one
of them I saw the captain come down the companion steps into the
brightly lighted saloon and seat himself at the table, where in a
moment he was joined by the fiery-eyed little colonel. Decanters and
glasses were placed by one of the stewards on a swing-tray, and the
scene then had something of a homely look spite of the cuddy’s aspect
of comparative desertion. Captain Keeling, I think, was about the
most sailorly-looking man I ever remember meeting. I had heard of him
ashore, and learnt that he had used the sea for upwards of forty-five
years. He had served in every kind of craft, and had obtained great
reputation amongst owners and underwriters for his defence and
preservation of an Indiaman he was in command of that was attacked in
the Bay of Bengal by a heavily armed French picaroon full of men. Cups
and swords and services of plate and purses of money were heaped upon
him for his conduct in that affair; and indeed in his way he was a sort
of small Commodore Dance.
I looked at him with some interest as he sat beside the colonel with
the full light of the lamp over against him shining upon his face and
figure. There had been little enough to see of him during the day,
and it was not until we dropped the pilot that he showed himself.
His countenance was crimsoned with long spells of tropic weather,
and hardened into ruggedness like the face of a rock by the years of
gales he had gone through. He was about sixty years of age; and his
short-cropped hair was as white as silver, with a thin line of whisker
of a like fleecy sort slanting from his ear to the middle of his cheek.
His nose was shaped like the bowl of a clay-pipe, and was of a darker
red than the rest of his face. His small sea-blue eyes were sunk deep,
as though from the effect of long staring to windward; and almost
hidden as they were by the heavy ridge of silver eyebrow, they seemed
to be no more than gimlet holes in his head for the admission of light.
He had thrown open his peacoat, and discovered a sort of uniform under
it: a buff-coloured waistcoat with gilt buttons, an open frock-coat
of blue cloth with velvet lapels. Around his neck was a satin stock,
in which were three pins, connected by small chains. His shirt collar
was divided behind, and rose in two sharp points under his chin, which
obliged him to keep his head erect in a quite military posture. Such
was Captain Keeling, commander of the famous old Indiaman _Countess
Ida_.
I guessed he would not remain long below, otherwise I should have been
tempted to join him in a glass of grog, spite of the company of Colonel
Bannister, who was hardly the sort of man to make one feel happy on
such an occasion as the first night out at sea with memory bitterly
recent of leave-taking, of kisses, of the hand-shakes of folks one
might never see again.