A SEA FUNERAL
The doctor sat on the starboard side of the table, and I caught him
eyeing me with a meaning expression that somewhat puzzled me. Once,
indeed, he winked, and fearing that he might be a little tipsy and
easily led into a demonstrativeness of manner sufficiently marked to
catch the skipper’s attention, I took some pains not to see him. Old
Keeling, at the head of the table, his face shining like a mahogany
figure-head under a fresh coat of varnish, was in the middle of the
story of his action with the corsair in the Bay of Bengal, when Mr.
Prance entered the cuddy and quietly took his seat. He fell to work
upon a piece of corned beef whilst he seemed to listen with a face of
respectful courtesy to Keeling’s long-winded yarn, with its running
commentary of ‘How brave!’ ‘What dreadful creatures!’ ‘How very
awful!’ and the like from the ladies.
The skipper came to an end, and Mr. Prance said to me: ‘A plucky fight,
sir.’
‘Very,’ said I, watching for that twinkle of eye which his voice
suggested.
‘The best of an engagement of that sort,’ he exclaimed, ‘is that you
may go on fighting it over and over again without loss of blood. By the
way, talking of pirates, the captain has yet to be informed that one of
them lies dead aboard his ship.’
I stared at him.
‘A fellow named Crabb,’ he began.
‘What!’ I interrupted; ‘is Crabb dead then?’
It was now his turn to stare. ‘Do you know the man, Mr. Dugdale?’
‘Why, yes,’ I answered, ‘as the ugliest creature (heaven rest his soul,
since he _is_ dead!) that ever encountered mortal gaze.’
‘But how did you learn that his name was Crabb, and that he was dying?
for _that_ you seem to have guessed also, judging from your question?’
‘Why, my dear sir,’ I answered, ‘you have a large company of sailors
on board, and the ship is full of deep-sea voices, and I carry ears in
my head, Mr. Prance.’
‘Humph!’ said he. ‘Well, as I’ve always said, news travels a deal too
fast aboard passenger craft. In fact, I’ve known passengers to pick up
things which had remained for weeks afterwards secrets to the captain
and mates.’ He emptied a glass of marsala and added: ‘You are right in
speaking of the man’s ugliness. I have been to see him as he lies in
his bunk.’ He made a dreadful grimace and upturned his eyes to the deck
above.
‘Was this Crabb a pirate?’ said I.
‘Ay,’ he answered; ‘but I had not heard of it down to half an hour
ago. The carpenter knew him, but held his tongue when he found him a
shipmate. Now that the fellow is dead, Chips has a yarn as long as the
sea-snake about him. He did business in West Indian waters; and the
carpenter says that if the stories he told against himself were to be
believed, no viler miscreant ever stepped between the rails of a ship.’
‘But did he brag of his evil doings in the forecastle before the men?’
I asked.
‘No; Chips had been shipmate with him two voyages ago in a small craft,
and he afterwards met him ashore in several of the low sailors’ haunts
down in the east end of London. When he had too much drink, he would
out with the most blood-curdling tales of atrocity. No, sir; he kept
his counsel aboard this ship. He knew what would have followed had his
career been suspected by us aft.’
‘When do you bury him?’ said I.
‘To-morrow morning, I suppose,’ he answered. ‘Captain Keeling is averse
to hasty funerals. I’ve heard him say that when he was chief mate, a
man died, and two hours later the body had been stitched up ready for
the last toss; but whilst the captain was looking for his Prayer-book,
the boatswain of the ship came rushing aft with his hair on end and his
eyes half out of his head to report that the hammock with its contents
had rolled off the grating on which it was placed, and was wriggling
about the deck. When it was cut open, the fellow inside was found to be
alive, bathed in perspiration and half-mad with fright.’
This conversation we had carried on in a low voice, easily managed,
as I sat on his right hand close against him. A few minutes later the
mate went on to the poop, and I stepped to the quarter-deck to smoke
a cheroot. Whilst I was preparing the weed to light it, Dr. Hemmeridge
came out of the cuddy.
‘You may be interested to know,’ said he, ‘that your ugly friend is
dead.’
‘And that is what you wished to convey to me by winking?’ said I.
He nodded with a smile that could scarcely be called sober. ‘You took
a particular interest in him,’ he exclaimed, ‘and so I thought I would
give you the news before I made my report to the captain.’
‘You are very good,’ I exclaimed with a sarcastic bow.
‘In fact, Mr. Dugdale,’ he continued, ‘I am going to pay another
visit to the forecastle, as there is something in the manner of this
fellow’s death that puzzles me. Indeed, it is as likely as not I may
make a post-mortem examination.’ Here he lifted his hand and eyed it an
instant. I noticed that it trembled. He immediately grew conscious of
his action, blushed slightly, and spoke with a note of confusion: ‘The
devil of it is, the Jacks object to this sort of inquisitions. Then,
again, the light forward is abominably bad, and there is too much risk
when there are ladies aboard in any attempt to smuggle the body aft.
Would you like to see the man? You admired him in life, you know.’
I hung in the wind a moment, then said: ‘Yes; I will go with you;’ and
we trudged forwards.
The sailors’ dwelling-place was what is called a topgallant forecastle;
a structure in the bows of the ship corresponding with the cuddy and
its poop-deck aft. There was a wing on either hand of it that came very
nearly to abreast of the foremast, for in those times a ship’s foremast
was stepped or erected nearer to the bows than it now stands. Each of
these two wings held a couple of cabins, respectively occupied by the
boatswain, the sailmaker, the carpenter, and the cook. You entered the
forecastle itself by doors just forward of the huge windlass, the great
fore-hatch lying between it and the long-boat that stood in chocks
full of live-stock. It should have been familiar ground to me; yet I
found something of real novelty, too, in the sight as I followed the
doctor through the port door and entered what resembled a vast gloomy
cave, resonant with the sound of seas smitten by the cutwater, with
a slush-lamp swinging amidships under a begrimed beam, and a line
of daylight falling a little beyond fair through the open scuttle or
deck-hatch, and resembling in its dusty shaft and defined margin a
sunbeam striking through a chink of the shutter of a darkened room.
There was at least a score of hammocks hung up under the ceiling or
upper deck, with here and there the faces of mariners showing over
them, or perhaps the half of a stockinged leg, and nothing else of
the man inside but _that_ to be seen. There was also a double tier
of bunks, which wound round from the after bulkhead into the gloom
forward, that seemed the darker, somehow, for the loom of the immense
heel of the bowsprit that came piercing through the knightheads. It
was a rough, wild scene to survey by that light; a blending into a
sort of muddle, as it were, of hammocks and sea-chests and stanchions
and dangling oil-skins and sea-boots and canvas bags, and divers other
odds and ends of the marine equipment. There were figures seated on the
boxes, stolidly smoking, or stitching at their clothes; grim, silent,
unshaven salts, stealing out upon the eye in that strange commingling
of dull light and dim shadow, in proportions so grotesque and even
startling that they hardly needed to vanish on a sudden to persuade one
they were creatures of another universe. Many creaking and straining
noises threaded the hush in this gloomy timber cavern. The motion of
the ship, too, was much more defined here than it was aft, and you felt
the deck rising and falling under your feet as though you were on a
see-saw with a frequent small thunder of cleft sea breaking in.
The doctor made his way to a bunk on the port side, almost abreast of
the scuttle, where the light came sifting through the gloom with power
enough to define shape, and even colour. In this bunk lay a motionless
figure under a blanket, and a small square of canvas over his head. The
bunks in the immediate neighbourhood were empty, and the fellows who
swung in hammocks a little distance away peered dumbly at us, with eyes
which gleamed like discs of polished steel amid the hair on their faces.
Dr. Hemmeridge pulled the bit of sail-cloth from the face of the body,
and there lay before me the most hideous mask that could enter the mind
of any man, saving the master who drew Caliban, to figure. Nothing
showed of the eyes through the contracted lids but the whites. There
was a drop in the under-jaw that had twisted the creature’s hare-lip
into the distortion of a shocking grin.
I took one look and recoiled, and, as I did so, a fellow who had been
watching us at the forecastle door approached and said respectfully:
‘There ain’t no doubt of his being stone-dead, sir, I suppose?’
Hemmeridge turned from the body. There was an odd look of loathing and
puzzlement in his face.
‘Oh yes, man, quite dead,’ he answered. ‘An amazing corpse, don’t you
think, Mr. Dugdale? Good enough to preserve in spirits as a show for
the museum of a hospital.’
‘I hope,’ exclaimed a deep voice from a hammock that swung near, ‘if so
be that that there Crabb’s dead and gone, he ain’t going to be let lie
to p’ison the parfumed hatmosphere of this here drawing-room.’
‘No, my man,’ answered the doctor, looking at the body; ‘we’ll have him
out of this in good time. But there’s nothing to hurt in his remaining
here a bit.’
‘What did he doy of?’ asked an old sailor, who had risen from his
chest, and stood surveying us as he leaned against a stanchion with the
inverted bowl of a sooty pipe betwixt his teeth.
‘Now, what would be the good,’ cried the doctor fretfully, ‘of giving
this forecastle a lecture on the causes of death? What did he die of? A
plague on’t, Mr. Dugdale! Do you know I’ve a great mind to take a peep
inside him, if only in the interests of the medical journals.’
‘I’m beginning to feel a little faint,’ said I, with a movement towards
the forecastle door.
‘Oh well, Mr. Willard,’ exclaimed Hemmeridge, addressing the man
who had approached us, and who proved to be the sailmaker, ‘have
him stitched up as soon as you please, and then get him on to the
fore-hatch with a tarpaulin over him, till other orders come forward.’
‘Are ye likely to hold an inquest, doctor?’ asked the sailmaker, whose
Roman nose and thin frill or streamlet of wool-white whisker running
under his chin from one ear to another gave him a queer sort of
yearning _raised_ haggard look in that light, as he inclined his head
forward to ask the question.
‘Oh, it wouldn’t be an inquest,’ responded the doctor with a short
laugh. ‘But it is death from natural causes, anyway,’ added he in
a careless voice; ‘and so we’ll go aft again, Mr. Dugdale; unless,
indeed, you would like to take another view of your friend?’
I shoved past him, and got out of the forecastle at once; and never
before did the sunshine seem more glorious, nor the ocean breeze
sweeter, nor the swelling heights of the Indiaman more airily beautiful
and majestic. In fact, I had felt half suffocated in that forecastle;
and as I made my way to the poop, I respired the gushing wind as it
hummed past me over the bulwarks as thirstily as ever shipwrecked
sailor lapped water.
That same evening, some time after dinner, after a long smoke and a
yarn with Colledge and young Fairthorne down on the quarter-deck, where
we patrolled the planks in a regular look-out swing from the cuddy
front to the gangway and back again, I went on to the poop, leaving
my two companions to continue a game of chess in the cuddy, where
they had been playing that afternoon. It was a fine clear moonless
night, with a pleasant breeze out of the north-east, before which the
ship was quietly running under all plain sail, saving the fore and
mizzen royals, with a foretopmast studdingsail boom still rigged out
and reeling gaunt athwart the stars to the quiet heave and plunge of
the ship, as though it were some giant fishing-rod in the hand of a
Colossus bobbing for whales.
There were a few passengers moving about the deck, but it was too dark
to make sure of them, though the delicate sheen in the air, falling in
a sort of silver showering from the velvet-dark heaven of brilliants on
high, enabled one to see forms and to follow the movements of things
clearly. There was a deal of phosphorus in the water this night, and I
stood looking over the lee quarter at the pale green or sun-coloured
flashings of it as it swept into the race of our wake in fiery coils,
in configurations as of writhing serpents, in fibrine interwreathings
that would enlarge and shape themselves into the proportions of
sea-monsters and leviathan fish.
‘Is it true, do you know, that one of the sailors died this
afternoon?’ exclaimed a low, clear, but most melodious voice by my side.
It was Miss Temple. She started as I quitted my leaning posture and
turned to her.
‘Oh, I beg your pardon,’ she exclaimed in a changed note.
It was very clear she had mistaken me--for Colledge, for all I can
tell. She was alone. Yet had she come from the cuddy, she must
certainly have seen the young sprig playing at the table with
Fairthorne at chess.
‘I should be glad to answer your question,’ said I coolly, ‘if you care
to stop and listen, Miss Temple.’
By the starlight I could see her fine imperious dark eyes bent on me.
‘It is curious,’ she exclaimed--and perhaps by daylight I should have
found some sign of a smile in her face; but her countenance showed like
marble in that shadow--‘that this should be the second time I have
asked you about what is happening in the ship. You have been a sailor,
I think, Mr. Dugdale?’
‘Mr. Colledge has doubtless told you so,’ said I.
‘Yes; it was he who told me. You share his cabin, I believe. Will you
tell me if it be true that one of the sailors has died?’
‘It is true,’ said I; ‘a sailor named Crabb died this morning.’
‘Has he been buried?’
‘No; that ceremony is to take place in the morning, I believe.’
‘Our ship, then, will sail all night long with a dead body on board?’
she exclaimed with a lift of her eyes to the stars and then a look
seawards. ‘Are not the superstitions of sailors opposed to such
burdens?’
‘Jack does not love dead bodies,’ said I, making as if to resume my
leaning posture at the rail, as one interrupted in a reverie; for
harmless as her questions were, I did not at all relish her haughty
commanding manner of putting them; besides, this was the first time I
had exchanged a sentence with her since that night of the collision
in the Channel; and the unconquerable delight I took in gazing at her
beauty, that _now_, to my ardent young eyes, was idealised by the
starlit dusk by which I surveyed her into graces beyond expression
fascinating, affected me also as a sort of injury to my own dignity,
thanks to the mood that had grown up in me through what I had said and
thought of her. ‘But,’ continued I carelessly, ‘what is regarded as a
superstition by the sailor is a stroke of nature common to us all. One
may travel far without meeting any person who will choose a dead body
for company.’
She walked to the rail a few feet away from where I stood, and looked
at the water for some while in silence, as though she had not heard me.
‘I would rather die anywhere than at sea,’ she exclaimed, as though
thinking aloud, with a sudden crossing of her hands upon her breast, as
if a chill had entered her from the dark ocean. ‘The horror of being
buried in that void there would keep me alive. Oh, if it be true,
as Shakespeare says, that dreams may visit us in our graves--in our
graves ashore, where there are daisies and green turf and the twinkling
shadows of leaves, and often the full moon and the high summer night
shedding a peace like that of God himself, passing all understanding,
upon the dead--_what_ should be the visions that enter into the sleep
of one floating deep down in that great mystery there?’
This was a passage of humour which I was quite young enough to have
coaxed, and have sought to improve in any other fine young woman after
her pattern; but my temper just then happened to be perverse and my
mood obnoxious to sentiment.
‘Why,’ said I, pretending to stare at the water, ‘what’s the difference
between being lowered in a coffin and being hove overboard in a canvas
sack with a lump of holystone at one’s feet, when one doesn’t know it?
If one could believe in the mermaid, in coral pavilions illuminated
with cressets brilliant with sea-fire, in those sweet songs which were
formerly sung by _fishy_ virgins, who swept their lyres of gold with
arms of ivory and fingers of pearl, I believe that when my time came
I should be very willing to take the plunge, in fact _choose_ it in
preference to----’
I brought my eyes away from the water, and saw her figure in the
companion-way down which she floated!
A minute later, Colonel Bannister came along. He approached me close,
staring hard, and said: ‘Oh, it’s you, Dugdale! I thought it was the
second-mate. Here’s a pretty go! There’s a man dead.’
‘He couldn’t help it, colonel,’ said I.
‘Ay, but what did he die of?’ he shouted. ‘I’ve asked Hemmeridge, and
he won’t give the disease a name. I don’t want it to go further, but
betwixt you and me and the bedpost, hang me’--here he subdued his
voice into an extraordinary croaking whisper--‘if I don’t believe
that Hemmeridge’--and he lifted his hand to his mouth in a posture of
drinking. ‘My contention is, they’ve got no right to keep the body.
What’s the good of it? Since Hemmeridge is mute, who’s going to say
that the seaman didn’t die of smallpox? That’s it, you see! Smallpox!
and a crowd of creatures forward who are infernally negligent in
cleanliness, as all sailors are, not to mention a mob of us aft who, if
a plague should break out, must perish. Mind, I say _perish_! Where’s
that second-mate?’
He impetuously crossed the deck and hurried forward on the weather side
of the poop.
‘Beg pardon, sir,’ said the fellow at the wheel, speaking in a deep,
bass, salt voice; ‘’tain’t for the likes of me to say nothen, leastways
here;’ he made a step to leeward, holding a spoke at arm’s-length,
to expectorate over the rail, and then returned: ‘but I’ve heerd
the bo’sun say as that you’ve been a sailor-man in your day, and I
know that the gent that’s just left ’ee is a sojer. And I should ha’
taken it very koind if, when he told ye that we was an oncleanly lot
forrards, you’d ha’ called him a bloomin’ liar.’
‘So he is, my man,’ said I, ‘whether I tell him so or not.’
‘I’ve been a-sailing in troopships ower and ower again,’ exclaimed
the fellow, half-stifling himself, to subdue his angry voice, ‘and I
could tell that there gent this--that spite of all his pipeclay and the
ship-shape looks of him outside, there ain’t an oncleanlier man than
the _guffy_. You let him know that, sir; and if he dorn’t believe it,
and the capt’n’ll gi’ me leave, smite me! if I won’t ondertake to argue
it out wi’ him to the satisfaction of every party as chooses for to
listen, either aft’--striking the wheel a blow with his immense fist;
‘or forrads’--another blow; ‘or down in the hold’--a third blow; ‘or
up in that there maintop;’ and here he fetched his thigh a whack that
sounded like the report of a firearm.
‘Wheel there! where are you driving the ship to?’ shouted the
second-mate from the forward part of the poop; but merely as an
excuse, I think, to break away from the colonel, who had now tailed on
to him.
As he came rumbling aft, I went forward.
It was the most delicate gentle weather imaginable next morning when I
went on deck an hour before breakfast-time to get a cold bath in the
ship’s head, which to my mind is the very noblest luxury the sea has to
yield: nothing to be done but to strip, drop over the side on to the
grating betwixt the headboards, well out of sight of the poop, where
the spout of the head-pump, as it is called, commands you, and so be
played on for half-an-hour at a spell by some ordinary seaman, who will
be glad to oblige you for the value of a glass of grog. Oh, the delight
past language of the sensation sinking through and through one to the
very marrow that comes with the gushing of the sparkling green brine
pouring away from one in foam back into the flashing heart of the deep
out of which it is sucked!
As I passed the fore-hatch on my way aft, I observed a heap of
something lying under a tarpaulin; at the same moment the boatswain
stepped out of his berth.
‘Have ye heard what time the funeral’s to take place, sir?’
‘Bless me!’ cried I with a start, ‘I had forgotten all about it. Small
wonder that we and our troubles should be compared to sparks that fly
upwards, for we are extinguished in a breath and clean forgotten.’
I glanced at the tarpaulin on the hatchway with an ugly shuddering
recollection coming upon me of the face of the man as I had last viewed
him dead in his bunk. ‘No,’ said I; ‘I am unable to tell you when they
mean to bury him. The sooner the better, I should say.’
‘True for you, sir,’ he answered; ‘here are some of our chaps swearing
that they had bad dreams last night, all a-owing to this here dead man
a-lying here. The fact is Crabb wasn’t no favourite, and since he’s
made his hexit, as the saying is, the men want him gone for true.’
As he said this, the third-mate, Mr. Playford, came forward singing out
for the boatswain.
‘Here, sir,’ answered Smallridge in a voice like the low of a calf.
The officer crossed the hatch, taking care to give the heap under the
tarpaulin a wide berth.
‘Funeral’s to take place at four bells, bo’sun,’ said he.--‘Good
morning, Mr. Dugdale. All hands to be cleaned up and attend. Pity
there’s no more wind, Mr. Dugdale. The trades are consumedly slow of
coming. Four bells, bo’sun, d’ye hear? All hands--the big ensign--four
pall-bearers,’ he added with a grin--‘everything to be ship-shape and
in Bristol fashion--to please the ladies,’ he added, looking at me with
one eye shut.
‘Well, now you know all about it, Mr. Smallridge,’ said I, and walked
aft with Mr. Playford; and the breakfast-bell then sounding, I entered
the cuddy and took my place.
I had thought to catch a glance, perhaps _one_ glance, during the meal
from Miss Temple, who might probably recollect her few words with me
on the preceding evening, and her cool trick of sliding off to let
me talk aloud to myself. But she never turned her eyes my way. She
sometimes spoke across the table to Mr. Colledge, once inclined her
fine figure towards Captain Keeling to respond to some remark of his,
and occasionally exchanged a sentence with her aunt. But the rest of us
might have been as much hidden as the body of Crabb was forward, for
all the attention she honoured us with.
‘I am glad that this funeral is going to take place,’ Mr. Johnson said
to me. ‘I have promised a friend of mine who owns a newspaper in London
a series of articles on this voyage, and down to this time I haven’t
quite seen my way. For what has happened proper to tell? Dash my wig!
saving that collision, of which I couldn’t make head nor tail, and dare
not therefore attempt, what ghost of an incident good for what I may
call word-painting has occurred?’
‘This burial should give you the chance you want,’ said I.
‘Yes,’ he exclaimed; ‘I shall be able to do it justice, I believe. I
am a little uncertain in the matter of nautical terms; and when I’ve
finished the account of it, I should be glad if you’d listen to it,
Mr. Dugdale, and correct any trifling technical errors I may happen
to make. Even now, I’ll be shot if I can tell the difference between
starboard and larboard--never can remember, somehow. The words are so
confoundedly alike, you know.’
‘If I were you,’ said I, ‘I should not suffer ignorance of the sea-life
to hinder me from writing fully about it. Few sailors read; nobody else
understands the calling. Say what you like, and you need only dash your
absurdities into your canvas with a cocksure brush to be accepted as an
authority.’
‘Still,’ he exclaimed, ‘in an account of a funeral at sea I should
like to have the rigging right; nor in a description which,’ added
he complacently, ‘is not likely to be wanting in some of the choicer
qualities of poetry, would it be desirable, insignificant as the error
might be in the eyes of landsmen, to mistake the mainmast for, let me
say, the spanker boom.’
I assured him that I should be glad to hear his account when he had
written it; and soon afterwards we left the table and went on deck.
The ship was this morning a very grand show of canvas. Her yards were
braced just a little forward; the weather clew of the mainsail was up;
all studdingsails to port were on her, and aloft she had something of
the look of a line-of-battle ship with her immensely square yards
rising to the truck, the great hoist of main topsail, with its four
bands of reef-points, enormously thick shrouds and big tops, and all
the heavens over the bow and far to port hidden by space upon space of
cloth, effulgent in the sunshine, and flinging a light of their own
upon the blue air in a sort of liquid gushing of radiance off their
edges, trembling into an exquisite delicacy of outline like a thinness
of ice against the sky. At the peak flew the red ensign half-mast high,
languidly floating in rich brand-new folds of sunny crimson to the
quiet breathing of the wind over the quarter. It was a hint of what
was to come, and you noticed the influence of it upon the passengers,
who talked in subdued voices, and walked thoughtfully, as though it
were the Sabbath and Divine service was shortly to be held. There
was nothing in sight the wide and gleaming circle round, saving the
shoulders of a group of huge cream-coloured clouds down in the west,
looking like the mountainous loom of a snow-whitened country.
Shortly before ten o’clock, Smallridge, taking his stand upon the
forecastle head, applied his silver whistle to his lips, and sent the
shrill metallic summons ringing throughout the length of the ship,
following it with a deep-chested hurricane roar of ‘All hands ’tend
funeral.’ The Jacks had been off work since breakfast time, and to
the boatswain’s melodious invitation they came tumbling out of the
forecastle all in the spruce warm-weather attire of those days--flowing
white trousers, coloured shirts, round jackets, collars lying open to
half way down their breasts, half a fathom of silk handkerchief worked
up into the sailor’s knot, and, for the most part, round hats of straw,
shaped like a tall hat of to-day, but the crown considerably lower.
They came soberly rolling along in bunches of three and four, and
massed themselves forward of the gangway and round about the hatchway,
and the huge pillar of mast shooting up abaft it. In the foreground
stood Smallridge, with three rows of cloth buttons to his jacket, his
storm-beaten face luminous with recent rinsing, and his cheeks framed
by a pair of upright collars such as the negro minstrel of our time
loves to embellish his blackened countenance with. Next him was the
sailmaker, his small blood-stained eyes restlessly rolling themselves
aft upon the people on the poop from either side his high Roman nose.
By his side was the cook, a fat, bilious-looking man; and close to
him the carpenter, a withered old Scotchman, with a face of leather,
puckered into a thousand wrinkles by time, weather, and trials of
temper.
The first, third, and fourth mates took their place a little abaft
the gangway, leaving the second officer on the poop to look after the
ship. A young reefer clad in bright buttons stood at the bell, which
he struck in funereal time, constantly glancing around him to find
some one to exchange a grin with. When all were assembled the skipper
stalked solemnly out of the cuddy, Prayer-book in hand. He was dressed
as the officers were, in a long blue coat with black velvet lapels,
cuffs, and collar, and white jean pantaloons. The only feature that
distinguished his costume from that of the mates was the undecorated
coat-cuffs; whereas the chief-mate had one button on his wrist, the
third-mate three, and the fourth-mate four. Keeling was a man of strong
piety, and his manner of addressing himself to this solemn business
was full of an old-fashioned awe and reverence, which one might look
a long way round among modern sea captains to find the like of, in
such a performance, at all events, as that of burying the remains of a
forecastle hand. Most of the passengers were grouped along the break of
the poop to witness the ceremony. I see that large and stirring picture
very freshly even now: the mass of whiskered faces, one showing past
another, nearly every jaw moving to the gnawing of a quid; Keeling
and his officers in full fig; the many-coloured dresses of the ladies
fluttering along the line of the poop rail; I recall the deep hush that
settled down upon the fine ship, no sound to break it but the tolling
of the bell and a noise of water lazily washing alongside. High above
us the great squares of canvas rose in brilliant clouds, one swelling
to another with a soft swaying of the whole majestic fabric, as though
the vessel were something sentient, and was keeping time with her
mastheads to the mournful chimes on the quarter-deck.
The bell ceased; the midshipman struck ten o’clock upon it; the Jacks
on the quarter-deck made a lane, and down it from forward came four
hearty seamen, bearing upon their shoulders a hatch grating, on which
was the hammock containing the body, covered with England’s commercial
ensign. One end of this grating was rested upon the lee rail; then the
captain began to read the sea funeral service. Mr. Johnson, who stood
near me, stared thirstily at the scene; and methought Mr. Emmett, who
was perched on the rail to windward, rolled his eye over the mass of
colour that softened and brightened as the movement of the ship shifted
the shadows, as though some fancies of a startling canvas to be wrought
out of the spectacle were stirring in his mind. The captain paused in
his delivery; the ensign was whipped off, the grating tilted, and the
white hammock flashed overboard. I was at the lee rail, and glanced
down into the sea alongside as the hammock sped from the bulwark.
But the ocean coffin, instead of sinking, went floating astern like
a lifebuoy, bobbing bravely upon the summer tumble, and lifting and
sinking upon the swell as duck-like as a waterborne lifeboat.
I believe no man saw this but myself, everybody listening reverentially
to the closing words of the skipper’s recital from the Prayer-book. I
walked hastily aft to observe the hammock as it veered into our wake,
and beckoned to Mr. Cocker, who at once crossed the deck.
‘See there!’ cried I, pointing to the thing that was frisking in the
eddies upturned by our keel, and crawling into the distance to the slow
progress of the ship. ‘Friend Crabb seems in no hurry to knock at Davy
Jones’s door.’
‘I expect the fool of a sailmaker forgot to weight the body,’ said he.
‘Unless,’ he added, with a little change in his voice, as if he meant
what he said, whilst he did not wish me to suppose him in earnest, ‘the
chap was too great a rascal when alive to sink now that he’s nothing
but a body.’
‘I thought,’ I exclaimed, ‘that wicked sailors, like Falstaff, had an
alacrity in sinking.’
‘I’ll tell you a fact, then, Mr. Dugdale,’ said he. ‘I was aboard a
ship where we buried a man that had murdered a negro in Jamaica. He was
a ruffian down to the heels of his yellow feet, sir, with a deal worse
on his conscience, in our opinion, than even the blood of a darkey. It
was a dead calm when we dropped him over the side with a twelve-pound
shot at the clews of his hammock. Down he went; but up he came again,
and lay wobbling under the main chains. The captain, not liking such
a neighbour, ordered a boat over with a fresh weight for the corpse.
It was another twelve-pound shot, and down it took him, as all hands
expected. But scarce was the boat hoisted when the chief mate, who
was looking over the rail, sings out quietly: “Here’s Joey again.”
And _there_ lay the hammock just under the mizzen chains. ’Twas lucky
a breath of wind came along just then and sneaked the barque away,
for had the calm lasted, the men would have sworn that the body had
got hold of the ship and wouldn’t let her move. But as to our being
ever able to sink it’--he shook his head, and pointing to the hammock
that was now showing like a fleck of foam in the tail of our wake, he
exclaimed: ‘It’s the same with Crabb. He’s of the sort that Old Davy
will have nothing to do with.’
The boatswain’s pipe shrilled out again; the ceremony was over.
The sailors stalked gravely towards the forecastle, the passengers
distributed themselves about the poop.
‘Quite worth seeing, don’t you think?’ said Mr. Johnson, coming up to
me in the manner of a man fresh from a stage performance that has
pleased him. ‘Only let me be sure of my nautical details, and I believe
I can see my way to a very pretty article, Mr. Dugdale.’